Florida has its own DOGE

The outcome is a claim of government inefficiency which will then be used as the reason to eliminate property taxes

Unfortunately the Florida DOGE team is already skewing numbers but we all expect that

However, Scott noted that DOGE overcalculated the county’s property tax revenues by $76 million and general fund expenditures by $81 million. The letter also states that roughly 60 of 80 specific requests, including those related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), do not receive support from either source.

“I hope this is an honest, collaborative effort to try and find ways we can deliver services more effectively, more efficiently and at the lowest possible cost to our taxpayers,” Scott told the Catalyst. “If they’re coming in with a predetermined political outcome in mind, then we might not get there.”

Pinellas refutes DOGE claims in rebuttal letter

 

I can't think of any other reason especially when Desantis' appointees have wasted millions of dollars. I updated my previous post with an article on DOGE's errors

 

I don’t know if Florida’s DOGE will achieve this purpose ….. but it would be nice to have an entity to perform independent reviews of local governments with the objective of highlighting fraud, waste, and opportunities for efficiencies.

Of course, that process would itself be costly so there is a gamble that these independent reviews would cost more than any potential savings.

 

Accountability is such a dirty word to the Leftists. Lol...

 

What did you say about accountability?

DeSantis defends $10 million donation linked to his wife

 

There is actually waste at the local county level? Who knew?

Maybe now when I drive by a county project, I will no longer see just a small group actually working and a bunch of others just standing around.

 

Yeah a few heavy staffed roadside crews should really upset people.

Meanwhile people voted this dirtbag governor of Florida and then to senate after defrauding the state of Florida of billions. Claimed one time that he should be held accountable despite pleading the 5th 75 times and now changed the story to claim he's persecuted.

People dont care about accountability when it involves their own team members.

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article288431251.html

 

She's worth it. Get over it.

 

Every govt expenditure, every contract award, should be searchable public record.

Outside of classified military programs, which is a non-issue at state or local levels, there’s basically no excuse to have secretive spending. Local govts have no excuse but to have their books 100% open.

 

Unfortunately the details of contracts tied to Desantis have been blocked from public release

 

Do you feel the same about the $50 million sent to Desantis' buddy for Project Dynamo?

 

State contracts are generally pretty easy to find.

DFS FACTS will get you there for the vast majority of them.

Local contracts, on the other hand, are almost uniformly impossible to get your hands on without either: 1) already knowing the contract exists and how to describe it, and making a public records request specifically asking for it, or 2) happening to be able to figure out what local government meeting it got approved at (if it was one requiring commission approval) and hoping their posted meeting materials are still available and happened to have a copy of the contract in them.

 

You're assuming they care about the law. The removal of contracts from the website you shared for Alligator Alcatraz tells us they don't. The Desantis admin keeps getting sued for public information due to their lack of transparency and failure to respond to public records requests. The Legislature has also passed laws to block public access to some of his spending.

Spokesperson Stephanie Hartman said the contracts were removed because they included “proprietary information that shouldn’t have been uploaded.”

Florida signs $245 million in contracts for ‘Alligator Alcatraz.’ Here’s a look by the numbers

 

Never heard of it... Do tell.

 

If the vendor claimed that some aspect of the contract contained trade secrets (what usually leads to a state agency telling you the document is proprietary), not making them publicly available at least until there’s a court ruling on whether it’s actually a trade secret or not is following the law: Chapter 119 Section 0715 - 2021 Florida Statutes - The Florida Senate (for purposes of public records exemptions, to use layman’s terms, “exempt” means doesn’t have to be released, “confidential and exempt” means can’t be released).

 

That provision in the law is a bit of an absurdity, is it not?

Any firm could basically argue how much they bill for their services is a proprietary “trade secret”, and of course when dealing with the private sector that is mostly true - as “deals” usually are between parties and held close (unless it’s material to a publicly traded company or is a transaction between two traded companies). But govt can’t operate that way or politicians will use it to redirect and steal taxpayer money… $10 million at a time.

 

So that provision actually went in to clarify what was previously a sort of roundabout exemption housed in the Florida criminal code authorizing agencies to withhold trade secrets because misappropriation of trade secrets is a crime and they didn’t want agency employees to accidentally commit a crime by releasing records.

There’s some judicial clarification that will need to shake out there, but the way a lot of jurisdictions look at it is that top line overall pricing of a government contract can’t be a trade secret, more broken out unit pricing for example sometimes can.

Edit: and whether you want to let it apply to parts of contracts themselves or not, there pretty much has to be some trade secret exemption or else people can’t describe in detail in proposals how they’re going to do the work without competitors then getting to see it, provide financial statements that the government asks for as either part of a bidding process or when regulating certain businesses, etc.