The DeSantis-led initiative tries to rein in local spending.
By Alice Herman/Suncoast Searchlight
Original Air Date: July 24, 2026
Host: A report by Suncoast Searchlight and the Florida Trident reveals what groups and businesses are behind Florida’s Department of Government Efficiency—or DOGE. Here’s Alice Herman with Suncoast Searchlight.
Alice Herman: On a July evening in Washington, D.C, right-wing operatives and artificial intelligence enthusiasts gathered near the capitol to sip cocktails and hear from Florida officials about their efforts to slash local spending across the Sunshine State.
Standing in front of a pair of American flags, Florida’s DOGE director Eric Soskin and a collection of organizational “partners” offered up a pitch.
What Elon Musk tried and abandoned in Washington, they said, is alive in Tallahassee—and up for franchise.
Eric Soskin, director of Florida’s DOGE task force, spoke at the event, which was hosted by State Leadership Initiative | Photo: Michael Barfield, Florida Trident/Florida Center for Government Accountability via Suncoast Searchlight
Eric Soskin: State DOGE and state conservative governance does not end in Florida.
AH: That’s Soskin, Florida’s DOGE director.
ES: It is something that can be replicated and continued and made even better across the 50 states of the United States of America.
AH: The event, which a reporter attended with a ticket, came a little more than a year after DeSantis launched Florida’s DOGE initiative.
During that time, the task force has facilitated “audits” of cities and counties across the state, criticizing local governments for their spending on things like diversity programming and climate initiatives. It has also taken aim at local officials who fought Tallahassee over other concerns. For example, a DOGE report issued in January accused Manatee County of wasteful spending, prompting pushback from local leaders.
Florida’s chief financial officer, Blaise Ingoglia, appeared with Gov. Ron DeSantis in Bradenton in July 2025 to announce the state’s plans to bring DOGE to Manatee County. | Photo: Tiffany Tompkins, Bradenton Herald via Suncoast Searchlight
But DeSantis has been far from the sole force propelling DOGE forward in Florida.
The event offered the first glimpse at the private companies and organizations steering the Florida DOGE push behind the scenes.
Event organizers even passed around a printed playbook and touted plans to duplicate the effort in other states, offering a direct pitch to Wisconsin’s Republican gubernatorial candidate, who was in the room.
The AI firms involved with Florida’s effort were present, too, explaining the tool to potential buyers in other Republican states.
DeSantis created the state’s self-styled DOGE team in February 2025, loosely modeling the task force after Elon Musk’s federal DOGE program, which terminated federal contracts and facilitated mass layoffs of the civil service.
Attendees watched a Florida DOGE panel in Washington, D.C. | Photo: Michael Barfield, Florida Trident/Florida Center for Government Accountability via Suncoast Searchlight
Soskin, a Harvard-trained lawyer and the former U.S. Department of Transportation inspector general, jumped on board as DeSantis’s DOGE adviser after being cut from the federal workforce himself by the Trump administration.
The group’s event in D.C. offered a snapshot of how Florida’s DOGE could soon spread to other states. It also highlighted the group’s ties to far-right organizations.
An official invitation to the function lists Delphica Society, a social club focused on “rebuilding Western culture,” as an event affiliate. It lists Cecilia Hernando-Doldan, who leads the club, as a host. RSVPs for the event were handled by Delphica, meaning the group could have retained the contact information and identities of the more than 100 people, including journalists, who registered for the event.
Soskin, the director of the project, told a reporter he was unfamiliar with Delphica.
But the group’s role in circulating invitations suggests they travel in the same circles.
An invitation to the gathering shows Delphica Society as a “presenter” and Cecilia Hernado-Doldan as a host. | Photo: Michael Barfield, Florida Trident/Florida Center for Government Accountability via Suncoast Searchlight
Under the username “Lady Astor,” Hernando-Doldan repeatedly posted content showing Nazi imagery and other blatantly racist material on the social media platform X in the days leading up to the event.
She shared World Cup-related memes portraying Black soccer players as monkeys and reposted a doctored image showing a Black player kneeling below an Argentine player with glowing red eyes wearing a Nazi armband with a neo-Nazi symbol floating in the background. X appended its own warning to the post: “Visibility limited: this Post may violate X’s rules against hateful conduct.”
Hernando-Doldan has posted other memes celebrating Argentinian star Lionel Messi in Nazi regalia. Yet another meme invoked the 2020 murder of George Floyd, but with soccer players.
“THIS WORLD CUP BELONGS TO THE WHITE MAN,” read a post she shared Wednesday.
State Leadership Initiative and DeSantis advisor Eric Soskin created a playbook for other Republican states, to help them create their own DOGE initiatives. | Photo: Alice Herman, Suncoast Searchlight
Soskin did not respond to additional questions about whether Florida officials had vetted the event’s organizers or whether he or other state officials would attend gatherings associated with Delphica in the future.
Hernando-Doldan did not return requests for comment.
The group at the heart of Florida’s government efficiency efforts is called State Leadership Initiative—an organization that has existed for just over a year.
Launched after President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, State Leadership Initiative was founded by Noah Wall, a veteran conservative operative, and Nate Fischer. Fischer is a far-right venture capitalist known in part for his reported role in the secretive anti-government fraternal organization Society for American Civic Renewal (SACR).
In an email, Wall wrote that the “extent of the involvement of the Delphica Society was sharing the invite with their email list.” Of Hernando-Doldan’s Nazi-themed and racist posts on X, Wall wrote, “Cicilia is Argentinian, and appears to be a soccer fan, enjoying the World Cup, which is an area outside my expertise.”
Fischer, the co-founder of Wall’s group, did not return requests for comment. He has also posted rhetoric on social media tinged with violence.
“A small segment of the population just needs to be killed,” Fischer wrote on X last month, in a post musing about violent crime. “Execute such people for a few generations, and we could have a civil society against (sic).”
Fischer and Wall embrace a vision of the United States that slashes government regulations and funding, while expelling immigrants through a policy of mass deportation.
The place to start, they argue, is in Republican areas, writing on their website that they seek to “deliver a mandate for Red States to enact inspiring, foundational reforms.”
There, the group seeks to launch a “new manifest destiny,” Fischer and Wall wrote in a February 2025 post on X—nodding to the 19th century doctrine that justified white settlers’ expulsion of Native Americans through western expansion.
The group has promoted projects like Florida DOGE as their first step.
This has been Alice Herman, with Suncoast Searchlight. This story was originally co-published with the Florida Trident. For more information, read the story at suncoastsearchlight.org/florida-doge-dc-delphica-soskin.
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