Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis this week announced a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) task force in the Sunshine State which he said will reduce “bureaucratic bloat.”
DeSantis touted the initiatives Florida has taken to reduce waste at the state level, asserting that Florida was DOGE “before DOGE was cool.” He gave some examples, comparing Florida to New York as they are competitors in terms of population and pointed out some of the key differences in the state budget.
“Now we have millions of more people than New York State does. Yet New York State’s budget is over twice the size of the state of Florida’s budget. But when people come down here, they tell me, you [Florida] have better services, roads, schools, all this other stuff. And so something is happening with that money. I know they’re taxing a lot of people for it, but we do things a little bit different,” he said, explaining that he has been part of this fight for a while.
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“I was very pleased to see the emphasis by the Trump administration on this Department of Government Efficiency, this DOGE, with Elon Musk leading the charge. Now, Washington is a much different beast than Florida, is because this has not been attended to for really many decades, and this bureaucracy has grown to massive proportions,” he said, praising the Trump administration’s efforts thus far in exposing slush funds like USAID and rooting out diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
“They even discovered that tens of millions of dollars in FEMA funds were used by the Biden administration to put illegal aliens in nice hotels in New York City,” he said, noting that a lot of people in the Tampa Bay area would have liked that help from FEMA in the aftermath of hurricanes.
All that being said, DeSantis said Florida is taking DOGE a step further and launching what he described as a “comprehensive initiative to continue to streamline our government and to continue to eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy and to continue to ensure tax dollars are used in the most efficient way possible.”
“We are creating a state DOGE task force that will implement a multi-prong approach to eliminating bureaucratic bloat and modernizing our State Government to best serve the people of Florida in the years ahead,” he said, explaining that it will last a limited amount of time — a one year term which will sunset “following the completion of the mission.”
He said they have already examined things they can do to this end, earmarking over 70 state boards and commission “for abolishment and to sunset them.”
WATCH the full presser below:
“This will restore power and accountability to Floridians,” DeSantis said, citing support from the legislature to “eliminate some of these redundant entities.”
“And we have been working on reviewing every single board. And there’s hundreds of these things. A lot of people have never heard of any of these things, but they’re there. And we’ve examined the budgets, we’ve examined appointments, vacancies, the mission, trying to assess whether the mission still relevant, whether it overlaps with other boards or authorities, whether it has been become obsolete over time,” he continued, noting their effort to “streamline government to a total of 900 positions.”
“This is in addition to the ones I said will be eliminated. That will be good for the state of Florida. So that’s one thing that we’ve already found, that we’ve already proposed. We do need the legislature to ratify that and to enact those reductions, but I think that we’ve gotten good feedback,” he added.
