As Palm Beach County officials prepare to approve a multibillion-dollar budget for the upcoming fiscal year, a lingering concern is the information not yet provided by Florida DOGE.
After teams from the state Department of Government Efficiency examined records at Palm Beach County government offices on Aug. 18 and 19, Florida Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia told reporters that some of what had been found was “a little eye-popping.”
Ingoglia’s remarks, scrutinizing government spending, has drawn Palm Beach County commissioners’ attention. Some of them question if the county’s soon-to-be approved budget will need to face significant changes when DOGE eventually reveals its findings.
“I, for one, am very uncomfortable knowing that we have to vote on the budget in two weeks and there are potential ‘eye-popping’ findings, and how do we as a board address that?” Commissioner Marci Woodward asked at a commission meeting on Aug. 26.
During an in-person visit two weeks ago, Ingoglia also said DOGE had “identified some things, some area of opportunities” in the county that voters would not deem as the best use of tax dollars.
Florida Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia speaks to the press about local government audits outside the Palm Beach County Governmental Center in West Palm Beach on Tuesday, Aug. 19, 2025. (Carline Jean/South Florida Sun Sentinel)
Scrutiny across the state
DOGE teams have been traversing through city and county offices across the state in an effort to find spending deemed wasteful and unnecessary, an initiative championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis that resembles the Trump administration’s model of scrutinizing federal spending.
But state officials aren’t letting on about what exactly is being found. Instead, Ingoglia made limited remarks about how DOGE is uncovering misspending, such as when he said during a news conference in Tampa that teams were finding “pretty egregious examples of waste, fraud and abuse.”
Specific information will, apparently, be available in reports coming out about 60 days after visits to municipal offices are complete.
Former Interim County Administrator Todd Bonlarron told the commissioners during the meeting that based on the questions DOGE asked county officials during the in-person visits, he believes DOGE’s findings may address efficiency issues already being analyzed by new County Administrator Joseph Abruzzo.
“A few of those things are things that we’re really working on, you know, internally ourselves. But I don’t think that there’s going to be some big, long thing that says, ‘Well, you have to do this, you have to do that,’” Bonlarron said. “But again, I don’t know, and nobody from any other jurisdiction that we know has that information yet either.”
Sherry Brown, the director of the county’s Office of Financial Management and Budget, said she too does not know what Ingoglia was referring to when he mentioned “eye-popping.”
“I can’t tell you to make changes when I have no idea what the report is going to be,” she told commissioners.
In July, Abruzzo said the commission will conduct performance evaluations of all county employees, the goals of which are to save taxpayer dollars, streamline and even cut costs.
During the Aug. 26 meeting, Abruzzo recalled his experience in performing audits as the former county Clerk of the Circuit Court and Comptroller. So it seemed out of the norm for DOGE to discuss its early findings before completing reports.
“Generally, an auditor doesn’t make comments like that,” Abruzzo said. “They wait until the findings occur. It’s not standard practice. Normally we don’t comment until the audit is complete.”
County Mayor Maria Marino, who is, like Woodward, a Republican, called the audit process “very disappointing.”
“We have two days of audits, they’re going to take 60 days, but we have to vote on a budget,” she said during the August meeting.
One chief goal of the DOGE process is to reduce property taxes, which could pose a precarious financial bind for the county as it divvies spending.
“We, as a county, and as a large county of close to 2,400 square miles, have a very big demand on our infrastructure. So we, as a county, need to lay the groundwork for just exactly how much of our budget actually goes to delivering the services that everyone in our county comes here and expects to get,” she said. “And if we don’t collect property taxes, we cannot give any of those services unless somehow the state government figures out another way.”
Historically, county officials have conducted mid-year adjustments to the budget, Marino said, and Abruzzo confirmed the county would be able to amend the budget if needed.
“There would be some leeway,” he said.
Still, frustration among commissioners was evident after Ingoglia didn’t elaborate about the “eye-popping” findings. County Commissioner Bobby Powell said Ingoglia’s action is not uncommon for people in the Legislature to do — that is, throwing out a term and not explaining it.
“Most people do not get involved in local government or county government to be wasteful. Most people are not here to make huge salaries and sacrificing their families to waste taxpayer dollars,” Powell said. “We have a job to do. We have to represent the individuals of Palm Beach County, all of us, whether we’re Democrat or Republican, we have a responsibility to our citizens, to our taxpayers, and to those who we serve.”
