ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. — Orange County leaders are fighting back against allegations employees tried to hide information from a DOGE audit earlier this month.
On Wednesday, the state issued 16 subpoenas to Orange County employees, including the county attorney, compelling employees to produce information and documents about how your tax money is spent.
The subpoenas have six specific requests including documents covering file deletion logs, records related to Diversity Equity and Inclusion policies and procedures, and the instructions Orange County leaders may have given employees before DOGE’s visit three weeks ago.
In an internal memo sent from the County Administrator to employees just two-days after a 12-member DOGE team visited Orange County, Orange County Administrator Byron Brooks stated “Our team did a remarkable job of gathering and organizing the substantial amount of data requested.”
According to the memo, the county provided the State DOGE staff with 183,174 files, totaling 596.8 GB of memory space.
However, the state claims that during the visit, Orange County employees read prepared statements, didn’t fully answer questions, and may have tried to hide files from DOGE.
Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings said the accusations were baseless.
“We are a target… this is politically motivated for other reasons,” said Demings,” They’ve already tried and convicted Orange County before they’ve ever really completed their investigation.”
The Mayor said the county will comply with subpoenas which say county employees must turn over all requested documents by September 8th.
According to Florida’s Chief Financial Officer Blaise Ingoglia, Orange County was selected for an on-site audit to begin with, based on the DOGE team’s review of county spending.
Ingoglia claims the county’s property tax collection and spending has increased more than 50 percent over the last 5 years, which he says outpaces population growth and inflation.
“I will not stand idly by while Floridians are forced to pay higher property taxes to fund wasteful and bloated government budgets. I promised to hold local governments accountable on overspending and I am proud to work with Governor DeSantis to keep that promise,” said Ingoglia.
Political Science Professor John Hanley told Channel 9 the Governor came into 2025 looking to make a change on property taxes, so the DOGE audits are a tool to examine possible cuts.
Though Hanley notes a primarily Democratic Orange County, will innately have different priorities than a majority red Tallahassee.
“Orange County commissioners are going to do things that the Governor would not do if he was in the position to make those choices,” said Hanley, “The question is whether the people of the county are free through their elected representatives to make those choices, or whether they’re going to be pushed, coerced to make different choices.”
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