Florida’s DOGE Is Delivering

On July 14, the State Leadership Initiative was honored to host the Florida DOGE team and their tech partners, Vulcan, Echelon, and DigiBuild, for the Florida DOGE Showcase in Washington, D.C. Spearheaded by Governor Ron DeSantis, the state has become the leader for providing accountable and efficient governance to its citizens.

Since its creation in 2025, the Florida DOGE team has identified nearly $1 billion in waste and abuse at the local government level and sent over $878 million back to the federal government. But the team’s work extends beyond fiscal savings and budgetary cuts—it also includes auditing university curriculum and state union programs and reining in rogue municipalities that had adopted woke-left policies.

Take Florida’s SB 1134, which banned counties and municipalities from using government funds for discriminatory DEI programs and activities. Florida DOGE found that local governments were forcing employees to undergo “Transgender Humility” training, which included the use of a “wheel of power/privilege” that singled out certain ethnic groups as being worse than others. In some extreme cases, the team found that local governments were directing taxpayer dollars to immigration lawyers who represented criminal illegal aliens. All of this was identified by Florida DOGE and prohibited by law.

This ideological audit was most prevalent in universities, where the team examined over 74,000 syllabi and 100,000 research articles for left-wing ideological content. Funding for these DEI-related activities was effectively halted through SB 266 and SB 7044. While the federal DOGE program failed to codify reform through legislation, Florida DOGE succeeded.