DOGE, Government Waste, and What It Means for Families in Florida’s 16th District

For the first time in decades, the federal government is being forced to answer a question that every family in Bradenton, Riverview, and Lakewood Ranch answers every month: where is the money actually going?

For as long as most Americans can remember, Washington has operated on a single unspoken principle: spend first, justify later, and let the next generation worry about the debt. The federal government now carries over $36 trillion in debt — more than $107,000 for every man, woman, and child in the United States. Families in Bradenton, Riverview, and Sun City Center are not carrying that debt as an abstraction. They are carrying it every time they pay a grocery bill that has grown by 25 percent in five years, every time they open a homeowners insurance renewal that has doubled, and every time a young couple in Lakewood Ranch discovers that the mortgage rate they qualified for last year no longer applies.

The Department of Government Efficiency — DOGE — and its public-facing scrutiny of federal waste has done something remarkable: it has made ordinary Americans angry about specific things instead of just vaguely frustrated with Washington in general. And that anger is entirely justified. When people see that the federal government paid $6.1 million to produce a study on why people fall asleep while watching television, or that a single agency maintained an office with 23 employees and a $12 million annual budget that had not processed a single public request in four years, something shifts. It stops being about politics. It becomes personal.

I support the mission of DOGE. Not because Elon Musk is personally involved, and not as a partisan exercise. I support it because the residents of Florida's 16th Congressional District — families in Lakewood Ranch, veterans in Sun City Center, small business owners in Brandon and Palmetto — deserve a federal government that spends their money as carefully as they spend it themselves. And right now, Washington is nowhere close to that standard.

What DOGE Has Found — and Why It Matters for FL-16

DOGE's public disclosures have pulled back the curtain on a federal bureaucracy that has, over decades, accumulated layers of spending that serve no one except the contractors and agency heads who benefit from the status quo. Among the categories of waste that have drawn the most attention:

Duplicative programs and agencies. The federal government runs dozens of overlapping programs that address the same problems through different agencies with different staffs, different contractors, and different overhead structures. A 2023 Government Accountability Office report found that the federal government maintains over 100 separate workforce training programs across multiple agencies. Most of them produce no measurable improvement in employment outcomes. Consolidating or eliminating these programs would save tens of billions annually — without cutting a single worker who actually needs retraining.

Payments to ghost employees and deceased beneficiaries. Federal audits have repeatedly found that the government continues sending checks to people who have died, to employees who no longer work for the agencies nominally employing them, and to contractors who stopped providing services years ago. These are not rounding errors. The Social Security Administration alone has made billions in improper payments to deceased individuals over recent decades. Every improper payment is money taken from taxpayers in Valrico, Fish Hawk, and Ellenton and handed to no one.

Runaway consulting contracts. The federal government spends more than $300 billion annually on outside contractors and consultants — a figure that has ballooned over the past 25 years as agencies outsourced functions that their own employees used to perform. Some of these contracts have delivered value. Many of them have delivered thick reports that sit unread on digital shelves while the consulting firms cash checks and the agencies lose institutional knowledge they will later pay even more to replace.

Foreign aid and international programs with no accountability. The United States sends billions of dollars annually to foreign governments, international organizations, and non-governmental organizations with minimal auditing and virtually no accountability for results. Some of this spending advances legitimate national security or humanitarian interests. Much of it does not. Families in Parrish and Bloomingdale who are watching their own insurance costs triple should be asking why Washington cannot account for where their money is going overseas.

DEI programs, legacy IT systems, and administrative bloat. The federal civilian workforce has grown steadily for decades, while the services delivered to ordinary citizens have, by most measures, failed to keep pace. Meanwhile, agencies have spent hundreds of millions on diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies, on information technology systems that were obsolete when they were installed, and on administrative overhead that bears no relationship to any outcome that benefits taxpayers.

The Direct Connection to Your Family's Budget

When I talk to families in Riverview, the question I hear most often is some version of this: why does everything cost so much more than it did five years ago? The answer is not simple, but government spending is a central part of it.

Here is the mechanism, as plainly as I can state it. When the federal government spends more than it collects in taxes, it must borrow the difference. To borrow, it issues Treasury bonds. To attract buyers for those bonds when inflation is elevated, it must offer higher interest rates. Higher interest rates ripple through the entire economy — they push up mortgage rates, car loan rates, business loan rates, and credit card rates. They increase the cost of capital for every small business in Brandon trying to buy equipment or expand. They increase the cost of building new homes in Parrish and Lakewood Ranch, which keeps housing prices high.

And before borrowing even enters the picture, deficit spending itself is inflationary. When the government injects money into the economy through spending that exceeds what it collected in taxes, it adds demand without adding supply. More dollars chasing the same goods and services means prices rise. The inflation that families in Bradenton and Palmetto experienced over the past several years — on groceries, on gas, on insurance, on everything — was not an accident or an act of God. It was the predictable result of the largest peacetime spending surge in American history.

Every dollar DOGE identifies and eliminates is a dollar that does not need to be borrowed. Every billion in genuine waste that Congress eliminates is downward pressure on the deficit, the debt, and ultimately on the inflation that is squeezing every family in this district. Washington's spending addiction is directly connected to why everything is so expensive in Florida right now. DOGE is not a perfect solution, but it is a necessary start.

What DOGE Is — and What It Is Not

Some of the criticism of DOGE deserves a direct response, because the loudest voices against it have too often conflated the elimination of genuine waste with cuts to services that people depend on. Let me be clear about the distinction.

DOGE is not about cutting Social Security. The retirement benefits that seniors in Sun City Center have earned over a lifetime of work are a promise that must be kept. John Peters has been unambiguous on this point: he will not support any cuts to Social Security or Medicare benefits for current beneficiaries or those approaching retirement. These programs must be protected, and the path to protecting them long-term runs through fixing Washington's broader fiscal dysfunction — not through benefit cuts to people who already planned their lives around them.

DOGE is not about eliminating veterans' benefits. The men and women who served in the military have earned every benefit they receive. The cuts that DOGE has identified at the VA relate to administrative overhead, redundant contracting, and management dysfunction — not to the healthcare, disability, and education benefits that veterans in this district have fought for and deserve. Veterans in Manatee and Hillsborough counties need more support, not less.

What DOGE is about — or what it should be about — is holding agencies accountable for what they actually accomplish with taxpayer money. It is about asking whether a federal program that has operated for 30 years and received hundreds of billions of dollars has made the problem it was designed to solve better or worse. It is about demanding the same basic accountability from government that every small business owner in Ellenton and Ruskin faces every single day.

The Balanced Budget Amendment: The Structural Fix Washington Refuses to Make

DOGE is a useful tool, but it is not a systemic solution. An advisory initiative led by a private citizen, operating outside the normal structure of government, identifying waste on a case-by-case basis will never be a substitute for the structural change that Washington actually needs: a Constitutional requirement to balance the budget.

Every family in this district lives under a balanced budget requirement. You cannot spend more than you earn indefinitely without consequences. Every small business in Brandon and Valrico operates the same way. Every local government — Manatee County, Hillsborough County — is legally required to balance its budget. The federal government alone is exempt from this basic discipline, and it shows.

A Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution would require Congress to pass a budget in which expenditures do not exceed revenues, except in times of declared war or a supermajority-approved national emergency. It would force the prioritization that Washington has refused to do voluntarily for sixty years. It would make the annual appropriations process a genuine exercise in trade-offs rather than the bipartisan spending festival it has become, where both parties compete to deliver benefits to their constituencies while jointly agreeing to put the bill on the national credit card.

I will support and co-sponsor a Balanced Budget Amendment in Congress. Fiscal responsibility is not a talking point for me — it is a core commitment. The families of FL-16 are not asking Washington to be austere or heartless. They are asking Washington to apply the same common sense to public finances that they apply to their own household finances every month.

What Washington's Debt Costs Every Family in This District

The national debt currently stands at over $36 trillion. With approximately 335 million Americans, that works out to roughly $107,000 per person — or over $420,000 for a family of four. That debt is not theoretical. It is being serviced every day through interest payments that now consume the largest single category of the federal budget, surpassing even defense spending.

In fiscal year 2025, the federal government paid over $1 trillion in interest on the national debt. That is $1 trillion that did not go to border security, infrastructure, veterans' care, or any other government service. It went to bondholders — domestic and foreign — as the cost of Washington's decades-long refusal to live within its means. Every family in Lakewood Ranch, Riverview, and Bradenton is paying for that interest through the inflation tax, through the higher cost of capital that raises their mortgage rate, and through the eventual bill that their children and grandchildren will have to pay when the current path becomes unsustainable.

I find this unconscionable. The people of Florida's 16th District did not run up this debt. They did not vote for the trillion-dollar spending bills that created it. They should not have to pay the price for it in the form of relentless inflation and rising costs. A representative who is serious about serving this district is a representative who is serious about stopping the hemorrhage.

A Smarter Government, Not Just a Smaller One

I want to be precise about what I am advocating, because the debate in Washington tends to flatten everything into a binary: big government versus small government. That is not a useful frame. What the residents of Florida's 16th District need from Washington is not small government — it is effective government. A government that spends what it collects, delivers what it promises, and eliminates what does not work.

There are federal programs that work. The interstate highway system works. The VA Mission Act, when it is funded and implemented properly, gives veterans access to care that would otherwise require hour-long drives. The Small Business Administration loan programs that help entrepreneurs in Brandon and Palmetto finance equipment and expansion work when they are not consumed by fraud and administrative backlogs. These programs deserve their funding.

What does not deserve funding is the consulting contract for a study nobody asked for on a problem nobody can define. What does not deserve funding is the agency regional office that has not processed a single application in four years. What does not deserve funding is the grant to an organization that shares an address with a post office box in a city nobody on staff has ever visited.

DOGE is right to ask these questions. Congress should have been asking them for decades. The fact that it took an outside initiative led by a private citizen to generate this level of public attention is itself an indictment of how thoroughly the culture of spending has captured Washington's political class. I am not running to join that culture. I am running to change it.

What John Peters Will Do in Congress

The residents of Manatee and Hillsborough counties deserve a representative who will treat their money the way they treat it themselves — carefully, accountably, and with respect for what it took to earn it. Here is exactly what I will fight for:

Support a Balanced Budget Amendment. I will co-sponsor and vote for any legislation advancing a constitutional requirement to balance the federal budget, with appropriate emergency exceptions for declared wars and genuine national crises.

Mandatory audits of every federal agency. Every major federal agency should be required to undergo a full financial and performance audit on a regular cycle, with results published publicly. Agencies that cannot account for their spending or demonstrate measurable outcomes should face automatic budget reductions until they can.

Sunset all federal programs every ten years. Every federal program should be required to reauthorize itself through a clean vote every decade. Programs that cannot demonstrate results should expire automatically. The default in Washington should not be that programs run forever without scrutiny.

Oppose any new spending that is not offset. I will vote against any spending bill that increases the deficit without identifying equivalent cuts elsewhere. Every new dollar Washington spends must be paid for — not borrowed from the next generation.

Eliminate duplicative bureaucracies. Where the federal government runs multiple agencies or programs addressing the same problem with separate staffs and overhead structures, I will support consolidation or elimination of the redundant operations.

The families of Bradenton, Riverview, Lakewood Ranch, Brandon, and Sun City Center are not asking for much. They are asking Washington to be as responsible with public money as they are with their own. DOGE has opened the door to that conversation. I intend to walk through it — and stay there.