Ron DeSantis starts turning the screws on voters who rejected him

Florida in Five: Five stories to read from the past week in Florida politics.

Jul 27, 2025

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Welcome to another installment of Florida in Five: Five* stories you need to read from the past week in Florida politics.

With his new hand-picked chief financial officer standing obediently by his side, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced last week that he will begin sending auditors into city and county halls around the state to scrutinize local government spending.

DeSantis is branding the effort as a state-level “DOGE,” an attempt to tap into some of the media attention that once surrounded the often-chaotic cost-cutting at the federal level imposed by the Trump administration and teams of Elon Musk-led consultants. And the governor is using a suite of new powers granted to him by the Florida Legislature at the last minute of this year’s legislative session — powers that enable DeSantis to demand access to local government employees, buildings and data systems.

DeSantis announced the impending audits during a pair of Tuesday morning stops in the first two communities on his hit list: Broward County, the sprawling south Florida county that includes the city of Fort Lauderdale, and Gainesville, the north Florida college town home to the University of Florida.

Broward County and Gainesville just happen to be two of the most liberal communities in Florida — communities where voters have overwhelmingly rejected Ron DeSantis and his ceaseless culture-war crusades and instead elected Democrats to local leadership positions. During the Republican governor’s 2022 re-election campaign, for instance, DeSantis won just 42 percent of the vote in both Broward and Alachua County, which includes Gainesville.

DeSantis and his allies insist they aren’t using the governor’s new powers to selectively target communities. And to prove it, DeSantis traveled to Bradenton on Thursday to announce a third “DOGE” target: Manatee County, the fast-growing exurb in conservative southwest Florida.

“Today, we’re answering a question,” Blaise Ingoglia, the real-estate developer and former Republican state senator whom DeSantis just chose as Florida’s new chief financial officer, said during a press conference at the Manatee Performing Arts Center. “And the question I’ve seen on social media and from some in the liberal media was, ‘Are you only going to audit and DOGE just blue counties and blue cities?’ Obviously, we’re in a Republican area right now.”

Ingoglia is correct that Manatee County is Republican country: DeSantis won 65 percent of the vote there in 2022.

But what neither Ingoglia nor DeSantis mentioned is that Manatee County has more recently turned against the governor in local elections. It happened a year ago, when five Ron DeSantis-appointed or endorsed candidates were on the Manatee ballot — and all five lost.

Local press called the results a “stunning rebuke” to DeSantis and local real-estate developers who had spent big on behalf of the losing slate of candidates. It was, perhaps, the most embarrassing election result for Ron DeSantis since Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita turned “Pudding Fingers” into a national punchline.

Four of the five races in which the DeSantis-backed candidates lost were for seats on the Manatee County Commission — the same governing body that DeSantis suddenly plans to scrutinize.

The decision to put Manatee County under a microscope was publicly framed as proof that DeSantis’ “Florida DOGE” is a good-faith effort to root out wasteful spending wherever it may be. But it’s really just further evidence that this is little more than an effort to use state power to dig up dirt on political opponents.

And then there’s the hypocrisy of at all.

During his first DOGE stop last week in Fort Lauderdale, DeSantis pointed out that his administration had initially requested reams of information from local governments all over the state, in hopes that they would produce the material voluntarily.

But he said a number of cities and counties refused to fully comply with his requests — which the governor suggested was a sign they have something to hide.

“My view would be you should be proud of what you’re doing and proud of your budgeting and your spending that you should welcome this stuff to be able to trumpet that to your constituency,” DeSantis said.

The comment came even as his own administration continues to hide more than $250 million worth of vendor contracts connected to the immigrant detention facility it just built in the middle of the Florida Everglades. And DeSantis and his aides appear to be breaking the law by doing so.

This came up during another press conference DeSantis held last week at the Everglades facility — the sadistically nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz,” where hundreds of immigrants have been locked up in cages under tents along an isolated airstrip deep in Florida’s famed swamp.

During the press conference, the governor was asked why his administration recently removed electronic copies of contracts and purchase orders connected to the facility from a public transparency website. The administration has since replaced the original purchasing records with one-page summaries that don’t provide nearly as much detail about what exactly taxpayers are paying for.

DeSantis’ emergency management director, Kevin Guthrie, defended the move.

Ron DeSantis and Florida Emergency Management Director Kevin Guthrie. (Source: The Florida Channel)

Guthrie said the purchasing records his agency initially posted included “proprietary information” that had to be redacted. Specifically, Guthrie said the records included the rates that Florida is paying certain vendors at the Everglades detention camp. And Guthrie said that was proprietary because other vendors might be able to exploit that information in future procurement bids.

So Guthrie said his agency replaced the original purchasing records with what he called “summary sheets.”

“We actually put proprietary information on the website,” Guthrie told reporters. “What happened was, our team put the actual detailed line-item PO that then now every other competitive contractor can see what their rate is. So we took that down. We’ve replaced it with summary sheets on the actual amount that they’ve been given.”

There are two problems here.

First, Florida is required by law to post certain information to this transparency database. That mandatory information includes both “electronic copies of the contract and procurement documents" and the “applicable contract unit prices and deliverables.”

This is spelled out clearly in in 215.985 — a law titled, “Transparency in government spending.”

But let's say you buy Kevin Guthrie’s claim that the rates the DeSantis administration is paying vendors are somehow proprietary information and not covered by the requirement to disclose unit prices. The administration is still breaking the law.

That’s because you can’t just remove the original records completely and replace them with “summary sheets.” The same statute is explicit about this.

If state officials want to redact information from these records, they must then post “a properly redacted copy of the contract or procurement document."

Not a "summary sheet.”

At least you can still find many of the original records right here.

*To paraphrase Barbossa, five is more what you’d call a guideline than an actual rule.

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Ron DeSantis starts turning the screws on voters who rejected him

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