Fresh Take Florida
Florida’s public universities and colleges have just two weeks to turn over six years’ worth of records on staffing, research and grant funding as part of the first formal information request under Gov. Ron DeSantis’ newly mandated Department of Government Efficiency – a sweeping effort to identify “inefficiencies” in higher education.+
The DOGE team outlined the first phase of its audit in a letter to university presidents. Institutions were instructed to submit a vast set of documents: every awarded grant application and agreement, all publicly available research or academic drafts, and a full accounting of all non-instructional staff positions — including job titles, salaries, and whether the roles are in-person, remote, or hybrid.
The data request, broken into two deadlines of April 18 and April 30, is the first major operational move since DeSantis’ executive order in February creating Florida DOGE, modeled after tech mogul Elon Musk’s controversial federal cost-cutting consultancy. The letter was dated last week and obtained by Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications.
It orders the DOGE team to work with the State Board of Education and the university system’s Board of Governors to flag “unnecessary spending, programs, courses, staff and any other inefficiencies.”
The April 18 deadline covers raw data on grant materials, research output, staffing records and overhead cost-recovery policies. The April 30 deadline demands follow-up information like abstracts for published research, the funding source of each project and staff assigned to each grant.
The scale and pace of the request have drawn concern from faculty, who say the DOGE team’s demands could significantly disrupt university operations and may further politicize academic governance in the state.
“How on Earth are they going to do that?” asked Meera Sitharam, president of the United Faculty of Florida chapter at the University of Florida. Sitharam, a computer science professor, warned that such scrutiny could harm already precarious research ecosystems, particularly those still jeopardized by the Trump administration’s freezes on federal funding.
“Maybe they think faculty members are on junkets,” she said. “It’s just nuts. I don’t know what they think these monies are being used for.”
Sitharam added that true inefficiencies, if any, are likely to be found in facilities and administrative budgets – not among researchers or faculty.
At the University of Florida, the state’s flagship public university, the last day of classes for the spring semester is April 23, followed by a week of final exams. It’s among the busiest times of the year on campus for students and faculty. In some colleges, research faculty also teach classes.
The DOGE initiative is the latest in a series of sweeping initiatives in Florida’s higher education system under DeSantis. The Governor and GOP-dominated legislature have moved to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs, reshape curriculum and replace university leadership with political allies.
DeSantis has recently argued that Florida’s universities have seen runaway spending growth and need tighter fiscal oversight. In a Board of Governors meeting last month, he pointed to nearly doubling the university system’s annual budget from nearly a decade ago to almost $6 billion in 2025.
A March 26 letter from the DOGE team said further requests could include course syllabuses, facility usage data, and reports on administrative office operations. It also noted that DOGE officials may conduct on-campus visits to “ensure full compliance” with both the executive order and existing state law.
Asked whether universities are complying, DeSantis spokesperson Molly Best declined to provide specifics. “Until these deadlines have passed, it is premature to determine who has been cooperative,” she said.
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Garrett Shanley reports via Fresh Take Florida, a University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications news service. The reporter can be reached at [email protected]. You can donate to support our students here.
