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Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced a significant financial move on Friday, revealing the state’s return of over $878 million in federal funds to the U.S. government, a transaction that had been pending for several years during the Biden administration.

The announcement came following DeSantis’s meeting with tech entrepreneur Elon Musk and representatives from the newly established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The governor’s office formally communicated the exact amount of $878,112,000 to the U.S. Treasury Department.

“For years, Florida has been trying to return federal funds to the federal government due to the ideological strings attached by the Biden Administration—but they couldn’t even figure out how to accept it,” DeSantis wrote Friday on X.

“Today, I met with @elonmusk and the DOGE team, and we got this done in the same day,” he continued.

In their correspondence with the Treasury Department, state officials indicated their intention to continue identifying additional surplus federal funding that could be returned. The governor encouraged other states to follow Florida’s example in supporting DOGE’s initiatives.

Musk, who serves as a senior advisor to President Donald Trump, acknowledged the development on social media, stating, “Almost a billion dollars of your taxpayer money saved.”

The move aligns with DeSantis’s recent establishment of the Florida DOGE task force, announced last month. This initiative aims to streamline government operations and reduce unnecessary spending. The task force’s responsibilities include eliminating redundant administrative bodies, scrutinizing state educational institution spending, employing artificial intelligence to detect inefficiencies, and monitoring local government expenditures.

“Florida has set the standard for fiscally conservative governance, and our new Florida DOGE task force will do even more to serve the people of Florida,” DeSantis said at the time. “It will eliminate redundant boards and commissions, review state university and college operations and spending, utilize artificial intelligence to further examine state agencies to uncover hidden waste, and even audit the spending habits of local entities to shine the light on waste and bloat.”