Florida DOGE report has local officials asking: Where's the waste?

Rafael Olmeda and Abigail Hasebroock, South Florida Sun Sentinel on Feb 3, 2026

By clicking submit, I authorize Arcamax and its affiliates to: (1) use, sell, and share my information for marketing purposes, including cross-context behavioral advertising, as described in our Privacy Policy , (2) add to information that I provide with other information like interests inferred from web page views, or data lawfully obtained from data brokers, such as past purchase or location data, or publicly available data, (3) contact me or enable others to contact me by email or other means with offers for different types of goods and services, and (4) retain my information while I am engaging with marketing messages that I receive and for a reasonable amount of time thereafter. I understand I can opt out at any time through an email that I receive, or by clicking here

Florida auditors who crossed the state looking to expose fraud and waste in government spending recently issued a report on their findings. But local government officials say that they failed to identify any examples of egregious waste.

The state’s Department of Governmental Efficiency started scrutinizing various county and city governments last year. And Florida’s chief financial officer, Blaise Ingoglia, subsequently kicked off a “fiscal accountability tour,” in which he accused local governments of increased spending at a pace that cannot be justified by inflation or the increase in population.

A section of the DOGE report dedicated to Palm Beach County — a little more than three pages in a nearly 100-page report — left county officials dissatisfied. The reaction was similar in Broward County, where specifics took up just as much space.

Broward officials were faulted for using “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” standards in deciding how to distribute $2.8 million in annual cultural grant spending and $890,000 spent directly on DEI trainings since 2018.

DEI spending also was criticized in Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties.

In Palm, officials spent $151,000 on “DEI training across various county departments.” The county allocated over $1.1 million to the Office of Resilience for fiscal year 2024-25, ranking “Social Equity” first in its list of values.

The new Palm Beach County administrator has reorganized functions to eliminate the Office of Resilience, the DOGE team noted.

In both Broward and Palm Beach, the rate of spending growth was cited as de facto evidence of overspending. DOGE estimated $190 million in excessive spending in Broward, for example, but questioned the spending priorities for less than $40 million.

The Palm Beach County general fund budget nearly doubled from 2019 to 2025, according to the DOGE findings. In Broward, spending went from $1.2 billion to $1.9 billion in the same time period.

“I was expecting not a 98-page report on all the areas of the state with only about a page and a quarter in written recommendations for Palm Beach County, or compliments, but a full 100-plus page report just on Palm Beach County,” County Administrator Joseph Abruzzo said at a meeting on Tuesday.

“That is not what we received,” he said.

For months leading up to the report’s release, Ingoglia declined to answer questions about specific wasteful spending examples, saying those would be revealed in subsequent reports.

Palm Beach County’s “excessive spending examples” in the recent report were:

— A $12.8 million increase to fund health services.

— An $88 million increase in spending on paratransit services.

— A more than $70 million increase in salary and overtime expenses for county employees.

— $16 million in homeless spending.

The list for Broward was similar:

— $9.2 million for cultural grants.

— $3.6 million for consulting work on the newly opened convention center hotel.

— A near doubling of the budget for the County Attorney’s Office to $19.1 million.

— $17 million over five years for the Broward Film Commission, including to make movies set in Miami.

During Tuesday’s meeting, Sherry Brown, Palm Beach County’s office of financial management and budget director, explained how some of the funding contributing to the “increases” DOGE identified as “excessive spending” comes from grants and unspent dollars from prior years, not all from tax dollars as DOGE implied.

“It’s been lumped together and portrayed in a way that this is property tax dollars where a large bulk of that increase was not,” Abruzzo said.

In response to the claim that the county overspent on salaries and overtime pay, Abruzzo also pointed out how the average county employee salary in 2025 (excluding firefighters) was $72,214, which is nearly $40,000 less than the county’s median income of $111,800.

The report “would not hold muster without question under any accounting authority,” Abruzzo said.

Prior to the DOGE report’s release, Abruzzo had requested records from the state’s Department of Financial Services Public Records Unit seeking information about how Ingoglia calculated the $344 million overspending figure unveiled at a news conference in West Palm Beach in December.

Abruzzo has yet to get any records back.

The county commissioners were disappointed in the report, calling it disingenuous.

“I’m looking for accuracy, and that’s what I was hoping for in the DOGE report when it came,” Vice Mayor Marci Woodward said.

Spending increases do not signify waste, said Broward County Mayor Mark Bogen.

“I think we came out looking pretty good,” Bogen said. “We have been prudent with our budget. … If you add up all the spending they criticized, it’s less than two percent of our budget and while it may reflect different spending priorities, I don’t think the DOGE report demonstrates we did anything wrong, fraudulent or wasteful.”

________