Doge-ish comes to Florida: a DeSantis loyalist is going after ‘waste’ in Democratic cities

The words of Blaise Ingoglia, the Ron DeSantis loyalist handpicked to lead the Republican Florida governor’s Doge-style assault on local government spending, could not have been more prophetic.

“Expect a knock on the door from us,” Ingoglia warned on 1 October as he announced upcoming audits for Democratic-run cities and counties whose “excessively wasteful” pecuniary habits displeased the DeSantis administration.

The knock came soon enough, but in an unexpected place. Two armed police officers in bulletproof vests, sent by the criminal investigations division of Ingoglia’s Florida department of financial services, turned up at the home of a retired couple in Largo, demanding to know whether they had sent him a handwritten postcard that contained only three words: “You lack values.”

“It was designed to intimidate us,” said James O’Gara, a military veteran who said the non-threatening card was one of dozens he has sent to various local, state and national politicians as part of a campaign of peaceful protest.

“I presume that most of them aren’t even read, they just get thrown in the garbage. But I wrote one to Blaise Ingoglia about his Doge activities, and two law enforcement officers are standing at my doorstep telling my wife they need to speak to me.

“They’re all in black, ‘police’ in giant reflective lettering across their vests, weapons at their side and all the other stuff on their belts. It was very intimidating for not even a threatening statement. I mean, the whole financial responsibility issue … they used very little judgment, or very little good judgment.”

Sydney Booker, Ingoglia’s communications director, insisted he had not seen the postcard, and that the decision to conduct a threat assessment on the O’Garas was made “solely by law enforcement personnel”.

In a statement to the Guardian, she said: “While it is unfortunate that this incident occurred, the chief financial officer trusts that law enforcement officials are taking necessary steps to protect public safety and the safety of elected officials while also preserving the first amendment rights of Floridians, especially in light of recent events.

“As a conservative who believes in free speech, the CFO has never shied away from candid conversations and vigorous debate throughout his career in public service, and he does not plan to start.”

Booker did not address a question about whether the visit was a justifiable use of resources given Ingoglia’s pledge to eliminate wasteful spending of taxpayers’ money. But O’Gara rejected the assertion that it was necessary for public safety, and said it was a sinister move designed to quash dissent.

“It flatly doesn’t protect the politicians and it doesn’t protect the rights of citizens,” he said.

“They were making small talk about my being in the infantry, about being in the army. Somebody had to do some research beyond just looking up my voter registration and getting my address.”

The episode has parallels to previous incidents in which Florida state officials dispatched law enforcement to private homes. A Fort Myers man said he was visited in September last year by a detective carrying his personal information and challenging his signature on a petition for an abortion rights ballot amendment DeSantis was trying to defeat.

A year earlier, officers from DeSantis’s newly formed election fraud police unit arrested at gunpoint two men accused of voting illegally. The cases were later dismissed.

Ingoglia’s scrutiny of city and county budgets, meanwhile, is facing headwinds.

Officials in Broward county, the most heavily Democratic county in the state, are pushing back on his claim of $189m in “excessive, wasteful spending”. They say it is a faulty calculation of its general revenue fund based on “inaccurate, factually incorrect numbers” of new residents and inflation, rather than any specific examples of waste or fraud.

Ingoglia’s figure, they say, also overlooks new mandates from the state that the county is now required to fund.

“We wrote to him, we said: ‘Please show us where you got your starting point from, your population growth number and your inflation numbers, because they don’t match any of the generally accepted numbers.’ He has not enlightened us,” said Steven Geller, a Broward county commissioner and former mayor.

“If you use his formula with the generally accepted number, numbers plural, we are under the number he says we should be.”

Geller also pointed to new demands on county coffers for items that previously came from state funds, including the operation of driver’s license offices, some tax collection and the enforcement of a “draconian” state law that makes homelessness a crime.

“The CFO might have a point if the legislature would stop giving us unfunded mandates. However, even ignoring that, the CFO used an inflation factor which is not the generally accepted inflation number, and in fact, we can’t find any number that matches the number he used,” he said.

Geller said DeSantis “blasted Broward for overspending” the same day he revealed his Doge initiative, without having examined any of the county’s figures.

“We’re the largest Democratic county in Florida. We have 2 million people and nine county commissioners, all of us Democrat. So is it a coincidence we’re the first county they Doge’d, or that he announced the results before they had any data?” he said.

In addition to Broward, Ingoglia has appeared in recent days in several other Democratic-run municipalities, making broad allegations of fraud and excessive spending. But analysts say there is little evidence, other than a few individual examples of comparatively small amounts going towards LGBTQ+ events or diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

Officials in the cities of St Petersburg and Orlando, and Hillsborough, Orange, Pinellas and Seminole counties, all have rejected Ingoglia’s claims.

Robert Jarvis, professor at Nova Southeastern University’s Shepard Broad college of law, said the motivation of DeSantis, who will be termed out of office in 2027, for the Doge purge was purely political. It is tied, he said, to the governor’s efforts to abolish or reform property taxes and secure more power for the state.

“There’s no evidence that local governments in Florida are wasting money. And so there’s no reason for what DeSantis is doing from a financial standpoint,” he said.

“Even Ingoglia admits he hasn’t found any wasteful spending, but they’re going after the things they like to go after, like Pride parades, DEI initiatives, things the DeSantis base is against.

“And going after his enemies allows him to ignore how he has wasted money on things like Alligator Alcatraz, a tax holiday for assault weapons, going after Disney in lawsuits that he keeps losing.”

Jarvis said Ingoglia, who was appointed chief financial officer by DeSantis and is running for election to the role next year, appeared a useful ally of the governor at the right time.

“Next year, DeSantis wants to have that referendum to cut local property taxes and be able to say, after he goes out of office, that he saved all this money at the state level, and got property taxes rolled back,” he said.

“If that comes to be, it will hurt local governments, but DeSantis does not care about local governments, just like the Florida legislature has been at war with local governments for years.

“Local governments tend not to do what Republicans want them to do. They tend to be more focused on actually delivering services to their residents.”