Radical plans by Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, to overhaul the state’s financial machinery have hit turbulent waters, with party leaders pushing back on his Doge-style efficiency taskforce, and economists dismissing a proposal to abolish property taxes as essentially unworkable.
DeSantis touted his handling of the economy in his “state of the state” speech at the opening of Florida’s spring legislative session on Tuesday, during which he insisted: “We must continue to be a friend to the taxpayer.”
It came a week after he formally announced the creation of a state department of government efficiency (Doge) to replicate the controversial federal operation helmed by Elon Musk.
Reporting to the governor, its purported mission is to eliminate wasteful spending by rooting through various state boards and commissions, and auditing local government and university budgets.
Despite Florida having cash reserves of $14.6bn, and the lowest number of government employees per capita of any state, by DeSantis’s own concession, he said he still wanted to cut 740 full-time jobs. DeSantis also said he wanted to, potentially, get up to 900 more associated positions “off the books” by scrapping 70 “redundant” entities such as advisory bodies.
Democrats were quick to point out that Florida already has a voter-approved government efficiency taskforce, which was set up in 2006 with an almost identical mandate. DeSantis’s new efficiency team, they asserted, was itself an example of unnecessary spending, and a performative exercise of jumping on the Doge bandwagon to align himself with Donald Trump’s slash-and-burn approach to various taxpayer-funded federal agencies.
“Republicans have been in total control of Florida’s government for nearly 30 years, and he wants to talk about government waste?” Nikki Fried, chair of the Florida Democratic party, said in a statement.
“Ron has consistently passed the largest state budgets in Florida’s history, illegally spent millions of taxpayer dollars to run political campaigns, and just allocated $250m to fund his political stunt on immigration. Don’t lecture us on wasting taxpayer dollars.”
Another level of perceived resistance came on Tuesday from an unexpected source: the leaders of both of Florida’s Republican-dominated legislative chambers.
“Let’s focus on what matters. Let’s pass actual reforms rather than symbolic gestures,” Daniel Perez, the Florida house speaker, told members following DeSantis’s address.
“Let’s repeal government programs instead of reshuffling them. Let’s swing for the fences and not just try to get on base.”
Perez has previously noted that DeSantis, a self-styled fiscal conservative, benefited from a 70% budget increase for the executive office of the governor over his six years in office.
He and the senate president, Ben Albritton, clashed with DeSantis in January over the governor’s demand for a special legislative session to advance his immigration agenda. The parties came together to eventually pass a mutually acceptable hardline bill, but observers say tensions remain.
In remarks to the senate, Albritton, a member of the existing efficiency taskforce, said he was proud that Florida already “has a great framework for accountability”, and that he and other lawmakers had made a substantive number of recommendations “to improve flexibility [and] simplify processes”.
“The fact is we are a state and nation of laws that should be created by elected officials accountable to the people who elected them, not appointed professional staff,” he said.
Some observers noted that, after forcefully pushing both his Doge measure, and the related but unprecedented pitch to replace Florida’s $40bn-a-year property tax structure with an as yet unspecified alternative, DeSantis was relatively quiet about them during his Tallahassee address on Tuesday.
He said “taxpayers need relief” from high property taxes, which he said made owners in effect tenants of the government, and that lawmakers were working on a proposal for “constitutional protections for Florida property owners” to place before voters in the 2026 election.
“DeSantis’s latest scheme to eliminate property taxes threatens the very services that keep our communities safe and functioning. These taxes fund schools, fire departments, police, trash pickup, and safety on our roads and in our water, among other essential services,” said Jared Nordlund, Florida director of the civil rights and advocacy group UnidosUS.
“Eliminating them will drive local governments into financial ruin, allowing the state to seize more control, a blatant attack on home rule and local democracy.
“By the way, where was the update on his much-hyped Doge initiative? Just weeks ago, DeSantis promised a major push on this program, yet there was not a single mention. Was it just another empty headline grab? Floridians deserve answers, not political theater.”
DeSantis’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
On Thursday, the Floridian reported that Republican state representative Ryan Chamberlin was working on legislation to eliminate property taxes.
The non-partisan Tax Foundation, meanwhile, questioned the advantage to Florida, which has no state income tax, of abolishing the traditional system by which state and local governments raise money.
“The property tax is a relatively economically efficient tax. It corresponds better than most taxes to the benefits that people receive by paying it,” said Jared Walczak, the group’s vice-president of state projects.
“The value of your home is not a perfect proxy for the value of local services you receive, but it is a far better approximation than you would get with, say, an income tax where sometimes you’re getting an inverse relationship between payment and benefits.
“Most economists say property tax is a fairly good tax and therefore efforts to eliminate it are misguided. If Florida really had the revenue to eliminate the property tax, there are so many better things the state could do. If they don’t have that capacity, they would have to raise another tax or potentially dramatically reduce spending, and that could just be a very bad trade off.”
