(The Center Square) – Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis issued an executive order on Monday that creates the state’s likeness of the federal Department of Government Efficiency.
The executive order mandates the creation of an efficiency department at the governor’s Office of Policy and Budget. The role will be to use publicly available information to identify and report unnecessary spending in county and municipal governments, the state’s K-12 and higher education systems, and recommend in a report legislative reforms to deal with waste in both state and local governments.
The report will be due by Sept. 30.
Each agency will also be required to have its own DOGE team that will utilize technological tools such as artificial intelligence to not only find efficiencies, but will also find any federal grants “that are inconsistent with the policies of this state” and return those funds to the federal government.
DeSantis made the remarks at a news conference in Tampa, where he spoke about how the state has eliminated regulations, reduced spending and paid down long-term debt.
“We in the state of Florida take pride in how we run things,” DeSantis said “I say we were DOGE before DOGE was cool because if you look at the way we manage things and compare us to a state like New York, which is our closest competitor in terms of population although it used to be that they had more people than us and now we have millions more people than New York does yet the state of New York’s budget is over twice the size of the state of Florida’s.
“When we people come down here, they tell me you have better services, roads, schools, all this other stuff. So something is happening with that money because I know they’re taxing a lot of people for it, but we do things differently down here.”
DeSantis said the state has been one of the nation’s leaders when it comes to efficient government, but could do more.
The second-term Republican governor did line-item veto $949.6 million worth of projects in last year’s budget. He says his administration found $3.8 billion in savings in last year’s outlay and has eliminated dozens of unnecessary boards and lifted needless regulations.
Florida also has top-level marks from the credit rating agencies such as Standard and Poors and Moody’s.
He praised Elon Musk’s work with DOGE and said that examining the role and scope of the federal government is a task that had not been tended to for many decades.
“This bureaucracy has grown to massive proportions, the money is gets done in there is basically on autopilot as Congress does things like continuing resolutions and ominibus bills and nobody reads this stuff,” DeSantis said. “This needed to be reined in.”