Property tax relief at center of Florida’s affordability debate, CFO says

Assailing whom he deemed as “big government apologists,” Florida Chief Financial Officer (CFO) Blaise Ingoglia brought his statewide tour spotlighting what he alleges is excessive local spending to Broward County on Tuesday.

Speaking from Pembroke Pines, the CFO said his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team of auditors had scrubbed spending by the (Democratic-controlled) Broward County Commission from the fiscal years of 2019-20 to 2024-25 and determined that they have expended more than $189 million in wasteful, excessive spending.

He added that Broward County’s budget had increased by $617 million in that time, a 48% increase.

As has been the case in his similar visits to Hillsborough, Alachua, and Orange counties as well as the city of Jacksonville, Ingoglia offered no specific instances of alleged wasteful spending. That information, he said, will be included in follow-up DOGE reports due in the coming weeks. But he added that it wasn’t really his responsibility to detail examples.

“The government expansion itself is waste, fraud, and abuse,” he said. “The government expanding is the excessive spending itself.”

Neither is it his job to go in and cut a local government’s budget, he continued. That’s the job of city managers and county administrators who he made sure to note get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to do so (in the case of Broward County Administrator Monica Cepero, it’s $461,232, according to OpenPayrolls).

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