Republicans hope Florida DOGE is Donna Deegan’s undoing

Polls show Donna Deegan could face a tough 2027 reelection against a Republican challenger.

Jacksonville’s budget is approved every year by a City Council with a strong Republican majority. Yet Republicans are hoping that a probe by Florida DOGE and Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia will make the city’s Democratic Mayor newly vulnerable.

Even as powerbrokers locally issue off-the-record pronouncements, Friday’s action shows Ingoglia serving as an attack dog against first-term Donna Deegan. In a fiery tweet, Ingoglia said the “only ‘real momentum’ (Jacksonville) has under (Deegan’s) ‘leadership’ is rising property taxes, a bloated budget and wasteful spending.”

“You’re clearly not listening to the taxpayers. I am,” Ingoglia added, in a post rebroadcast by First Lady Casey DeSantis, who hosted the midday chat show First Coast Living on the same news operation at the same time Deegan was a prominent evening news anchor.

Ingoglia was responding to Deegan’s defense of Jacksonville’s fiscal rectitude under her watch, which included a video critiquing a property tax reduction approved by the Finance Committee. That body is constituted of six Republicans and one Democrat. She said the budget is “pretty skinny,” the city has the “lowest millage rate” in Florida, and the tax reduction “puts a little more than a buck a month” in people’s pockets.

The latest exchange comes after the city initially balked at giving the Florida Department of Government Efficiency access to its financial records. Jacksonville objected to state investigators not wanting to fill out a “simple form.” Ingoglia wondered what Jacksonville was trying to hide through her response to the audit communication.

While he was in City Hall, Ingoglia didn’t talk to Deegan, but found time to talk to Council Finance Committee members Rory Diamond and Ron Salem.

Both Republicans are term-limited in two years and are considering running for Mayor or some other higher office. And both have been aggressive in denouncing perceived overspending.

Salem chaired the Duval DOGE committee that scrutinized local spending for inefficiencies, including whether money was swept into the General Fund from subfunds after projects were completed.

Diamond has proposed a number of amendments to the proposed $2 billion budget. In addition to the property tax cut, he is targeting money for “illegal aliens,” what he described as “so-called” diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), “affinity boards and commissions,” and “abortion and abortion-related services.”

Diamond, Salem and any other Republican on the City Council looking at running for Mayor will start from a poll deficit, according to the University of North Florida’s June survey.

Deegan enjoys 62% approval against 37% disapproval. Only 2% of respondents don’t know how they feel about her, suggesting that she is increasingly well-defined.

Conversely, the supermajority Republican City Council is underwater, with 42% approval against 52% disapproval. And ironically, while 51% of Democrats approve of the Council, only 41% of Republicans feel the same.

One challenge in dethroning Deegan is that prominent Republicans seem more interested in running in 2031, when she is term-limited. The “invisible Primary” between Jacksonville Chamber of Commerce Chair Daniel Davis (who lost to Deegan two years ago despite having a tremendous financial advantage) and Sheriff TK Waters is well underway.

Meanwhile, people behind the scenes hope for an outsider candidate to emerge in 2027. But with 16 months until the January qualifying deadline, it would take a talented politician with a strong team behind them to make that happen. While Alvin Brown lost in 2015 despite being popular, Deegan has a different constituency supporting her, and the city itself has changed in the last decade.

Perhaps the DOGE audit will provide eventual talking points for the challenger.

The audit is considering procurements and contracts valued at $10,000 or more, as well as spending that predated the Deegan era, such as compensation records that go back to Fiscal Year 2019-20, when Republican Lenny Curry (who was once a Republican Party of Florida Chair, like Ingoglia) was beginning his second term.

There are 14 requests related to DEI and another five for spending related to the so-called Green New Deal.

Speaking of Curry — who works for Ballard Partners, which was fired by Deegan’s administration from its lobbying position — Ingoglia’s team will get visibility into lobbying contracts entered into since 2023, including cost and what has been accomplished by those efforts.

The audit will also dive into big-ticket spending, such as on development of the old Shipyards property and renovation of the Jacksonville Jaguars’ stadium.

That latter item, approved almost unanimously by the City Council, is the biggest infrastructure project in Jacksonville history, obligating the city to close to a billion dollars in spending that will be funded through regressive taxation.

It is being financed through a half-cent sales tax now scheduled to expire no later than 2060 that Curry’s team had rerouted to pension obligations, but that Deegan and the Council opted to repurpose to the stadium instead.