American Thought Leaders - Gov. Jeff Landry: DOGE-Like Reforms Coming to Louisiana

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

Joining me today is Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana. Since he took office last year, he’s implemented sweeping changes in public safety, tax policy, and education.We discuss gains made in the state’s educational rankings, as well as his plans for boosting election integrity, increasing manufacturing, and ensuring fiscal responsibility.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

For a long time, we've been convinced that the most conservative approach is free trade. And when you go out into the real world, there's no such thing as free trade. There's only such thing as fair trade, because what you do is you find that other countries are imposing their own will and that they don't embrace what you would call free trade. And I think the president recognizes that, and he wants America to play on a level playing field. Joining me today is Governor Jeff Landry of Louisiana. Since he took office last year, he's implemented sweeping changes in public safety, tax policy, and education. One of the contentious things was you decided that the Ten Commandments need to be in the

schools. I didn't think anything of it. And then, like the liberal media and people went crazy. And I thought to myself, wow, I didn't know the Ten Commandments was a bad way to live your life. And we look forward to litigating this case. It's going to be a great case. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Governor Jeff Landry, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders again. Well, it's always great to be with you, Jan.

So it's been about a year now since you've been in your role as governor. What would you say are the biggest milestones you've been able to hit over the last year? Yeah, you know, we hit the ground running last year in January, and we moved at breakneck speed. We held two, three special sessions and a regular session in a 12-month period and really pushed our legislature on the promises that we made to the people of Louisiana when we were running. And we worked on criminal justice reform, true criminal justice reform that focused on victims and putting criminals behind bars. And we were very successful in that. And we're seeing tangible, demonstrable results in that. New Orleans was at one time

one of the most dangerous cities in the world. Today, murders have fallen by 50 percent, sometimes to its lowest since the 1970s. And we're starting to see that spread around the rest of the state as well. We did educational reforms where we finally were able to pass ESA's educational scholarship accounts, which we're getting able to pass ESA's educational saving scholarship accounts which were getting ready to implement on kids with disabilities and the poorest of the poor and Then right at the end of the year I put the legislature back in and we did something that no one thought could be done in Louisiana We actually did a whole scale tax reform where we flattened our income tax to 3%

We lowered our corporate income tax. We've got tax. We got rid of our corporate franchise tax. Not everything. I didn't get everything I wanted, but we certainly got half the loaf. And we've got a ramp under which we can continue to chip away at improving Louisiana's tax policy. We went on education. We were ranked, we went from 50th to 32.

Louisiana has never been in the 30s, and we saw those results happen that quickly. milestones, we're still we've got plenty of them. In fact, in on the ballot in March for voters in Louisiana is part of that tax reform, which is going to give teachers a permanent pay raise by paying off debt. So we use fiscal responsible policy to give teachers a permanent pay raise. Once in fall, we doubled our deduction for seniors, just a host. We rewrote our entire section of the Constitution that dealt with taxes in one amendment. So we've done a lot. Yeah, but this education piece is really, your ranking on education went from 50 to 30 or 32. How does that even happen?

Well, we started iEducational Form forums through supporting the Bessie Board. I got to appoint. So Bessie is the educational committee, basically, that our constitution creates that oversees K-12 in the state of Louisiana. And they govern the schools. And we appointed five. We got the governor gets five appointees and we kept our superintendent of education who is extremely conservative, great guy, Cade Brumley. So right coming out the box, we put five conservatives on Bessie and they began to go to work. And so we were able to complement some of the things that they did with our educational reforms in the regular session.

And we started to see our reading scores improve. You can be surprised at the type of results that you can see overnight when you start to move fast, when you start to be bold. I mean, look how much President Trump has accomplished in four weeks. OK. And you starting to see tangible results from some of the things that you that he's doing. And so we have we we believe and the ESA work that we did on the educational scholarships have not even gone into effect. But we did things like we put a program together that calls for let the teachers teach. So we started stripping away the bureaucracy of things that we placed on on teachers that have nothing to do with teachers, but trying to make teachers social workers instead of teachers. And so we stripped that away. We concentrated on reading, writing,

arithmetic, you know, going back to the basics, all things that we promised on the campaign trail. And when you empower teachers, to me, Jan, the biggest reason you're seeing some of those metrics is because teachers today in Louisiana believe that they've been liberated, that they have a governor, they have a BESI board, they have a superintendent of education at the state level who support teachers. And it was easy for me because my mom was a teacher and my godmother was a teacher and I had an aunt that was a couple of aunts that were teachers. And so when you recognize that the most important voice in a child's education

are parents and then the most important person in that child's life after the parents are their teachers. And when you empower parents and you empower teachers, you get great results. Yeah. And I mean, but that's really astonishing and commendable that you can get people reading better in such a short period of time by focusing on it. And math. And math. Well, I'm definitely going to be calling your...

Yeah, Kate. We're going to get Kate. Yes, absolutely. I'm going to be calling your uh we're going to get kate yes i'm going to be calling him up no because this is i mean probably there's other people that will want to know what you guys are all up to yeah and and and and again the uh the rankings that came out were were were really astonishing surprised me when kate called me i was like you got to be kidding me and he's like no um and and a lot of those rankings have to do with the reforms that we made the things that we put in place and and I think you should have him on the show. So this is making Louisiana great again,

I suppose, right? It is. Because that's what you said your plan is, right? Absolutely. Look, it builds upon President Trump's motto of common sense and making America great again. You make America great again when you make your state great. And the more states that become great, the greater America becomes. So and one of the contentious things, or at least contentious from what I heard when it comes to education, was you decided that the Ten Commandments need to be in the schools. And so explain to me your thinking. Yeah, well, I didn't know the

Ten Commandments was a bad way to live your life. I just, I still hadn't figured that whole thing out. You know, the funny part about it is that Dodie Harden, who's a state representative from Louisiana, unbelievable person, just a great person. She was the author of the bill. And I didn't realize that the bill was actually moving through the session. I'll be quite honest with you and go to a little confession here. I didn't realize the bill had moved this way all the way through till he got to my desk and I was signing all these other educational improvements. And I looked and they're like, oh, we put in the Ten Commandments in score. I'm like, that's great. Okay, no problem. And I didn't think anything of it. And then like the liberal media and people

went crazy. And I thought to myself, wow, I didn't know the Ten Commandments was a bad way to live your life. And the Ten Commandments are fully on display in the United States Supreme Court. Moses is in full display in the U.S. House Chamber. We know that the original lawgiver was Moses, right? He is the foundational father of law. And so how we can't put that in our schools is amazing to me. Because I'll tell you, you should let your child read the Ten Commandments

or they're going to end up having to learn a criminal code. Well, so I think the criticism, I mean, let's kind of, you know, the criticism is that it elevates Christianity, the Christian faith above all others in the classroom. And that people argue that that shouldn't be the case, right? This is, I think that's the substance of the argument. Well, Judaism, I mean, no, no, no, no, no. The Ten Commandments are not owned by the Christian religion. I mean, look, the Muslim religion, Judaism, Christianity, all of those religions recognize the Ten Commandments.

Moses was there before them all. OK, let's not forget that. And so that to me is again one of the unbelievable tenets of our ability to place the Ten Commandments in full view in a public school. A school is a place of learning, okay? It is an institution under which you teach someone something. And so to keep things like that out basically means that you don't want people to understand what those things are. And so when you take a document like the Ten Commandments and you claim that by placing it there is a violation of church and state, you evidently have never read our Constitution or our Bill of Rights because, again, I think we've had this conversation here before. There is no text in the First Amendment under which it says separation of church and state.

So we look forward to litigating this case. It's going to be a great case. But Attorney General Liz Miro is going to have a field day with this case. You've also banned CRT, right? Critical Race Theory in K-12. What's been the impact of that? I just told you, our report card went to 32, right, critical race theory in K to 12. What's been the impact of that? I just told you, our report card went to 32, right?

Right, well, OK, so that's- When you take those kind of things out of the mix, right? I mean, look, all things like critical race theory, DEI, ESG, all of those things do is divide people, right? America was supposed to be a country which recognized unity. Right. It was a melting pot. Well, when you melt things, you come up with one. Right. It's it you think about you read my mind. That's exactly where I was going. And so, again, I think that what we're doing, and I said this during my inauguration, is that we are going to focus education instead of indoctrination on education. We're going to ensure that teachers get to educate kids and they're not indoctrinating kids.

And I think that things like CRT and DEI and those other very liberal policies only indoctrinate kids. They don't educate them. Was it hard to do that, to institute that ban, to make sure it was happening? No, I mean, you know, you had the normal actors whose hair was on fire. But look, Louisiana is a very conservative state. We have super majorities in both the House and the Senate. And here's what else I'll say. Every one of the reforms that I talked to you about, we pass with bipartisan support. And I'm not talking to just one Democrat, you know, with large bipartisan support

in the legislature. And I think that speaks volumes that these are issues that transcend political parties, right? They're not owned by, I mean, public safety. Who doesn't want to be safe? Who doesn't want their kids to have a better education? You know, who doesn't want a higher standard of living that raises wages for everyone, more jobs and opportunities to go to work? Like, it's not like a Republican thing or a Democrat thing. It's an American thing. Paul Jay Well, another thing that you actually touched on is this executive order on election integrity, right? Robert R. Yes. Yes. In fact, we're getting ready to have our Secretary of State get ready to put an RFP out under which we're finally going to get

some new machines. The prior governor had forwarded the Secretary of State's ability to change the machines. We've got some machines that date back to the 1990s. I don't know how they even work anymore. But we're going to institute an election system under which a voter votes and gets a receipt. So there would be an actual paper ballot that that voter can look at and say, this is how I want to vote. And that is scanned in and tabulated. And then that receipt is put in a box so that we can reconcile that with the voting. And that is the way that it should be, right?

That is a way to not have to depend on electronic voting machines, which there are too many transactions happening in that, and giving voters the confidence that their elections are based upon or sit upon a solid foundation. Do you think that, this is probably a trick question, how is what the Trump administration is doing federally impacting what you're trying to do in Louisiana? Look, I think that the things that the president and his administration are doing have the ability to cause ripples in both positive and sometimes negative ways. But I do believe that when

everything is laid out, the waters will begin to calm, and America will be a much stronger place. I think that what they're doing up here helps to support things that we want to do back in Louisiana. I think that when legislators see the actions of this administration and the president doing things like abolishing DEI, like signing an executive order protecting women in women's sports, taking men out of women's sports, and so forth, like all the things that he's

doing. I think that that provides what I call, and I told the president this, he has an opportunity and he continues to do this. He gives people liquid courage. He gives legislators in our states liquid courage. I think you're going to see Texas pass a school choice, something that has thwarted them. I think Governor Abbott has continuously tried to pass school choice in the state of Texas. But I think because of the way that the president is leaning into that and supporting it, I think it gives courage and cover for those legislators who weren't quite sure to actually make those hard votes. And I don't think they're hard votes. I think they're easy. It's just they listen to a loudmouth minority.

So what is your, you know, you've had this big year as we've been discussing. What's coming next? Oh, well, we're getting ready to really start to dive into the bureaucracy. We're running our own fiscal responsibility project, just kind of like the Doge project that the president's running. It's something that I did when I was attorney general eight, nine years ago. We're going to reorganize our Department of Transportation. We're going to further improve our tax position. So we're going to tweak those things. We're going to look at civil service, which is a real problem as well in our bureaucracy. We're going to further work towards streamlining our regulatory agency, our permitting processes um and you know we're going to take every chance we can to make louisiana open for business and friendly and to improve our quality of life well so and

this is a something i wanted to ask about specifically um manufacturing there's something the president has indicated is that he really wants to have this push towards reinvigorating American manufacturing, which has been kind of on the decline for some time. Does that fit into the Louisiana plan? Absolutely. I mean, look, Louisiana has about 23% of the entire refining capacity of the entire country, is in Louisiana along the Mississippi River and over in the southwestern part near Texas. So manufacturing is something that we know how to do,

and we've got the infrastructure and the ability to expand that manufacturing base. And so we hope that the things that the president is doing are going to be beneficial to Louisiana. You know, and again, when you asked me earlier about, you know, the things that the president do, how do they affect us back home? And I think, again, you hear people say that, you know, when the president imposes tariffs and when he goes to try to ensure that the United States has fair trade, it does cause some disruptions and it does cause some volatility. But it's absolutely necessary to do to ensure that America regains its rightful place on the global scale. I mean, you know, for a long time, we've been convinced that the most conservative approach is free trade. And when you go out into the real world, there's no such thing as free trade. There's only such thing as fair trade because what you do is you find that other countries are imposing their own will and that they don't embrace what you would call free trade.

And I think the president recognizes that and he wants America to play on a level playing field. Let's say I'm someone who's interested in bringing some manufacturing opportunities to Louisiana. What am I going to get? A call from the governor. You call me up and we'll negotiate it. Look, we just announced Louisiana for the first time in the, and boy, I can't remember that publication off the top of my head here, but it was a major business publication that gave Louisiana

the 2024 Platinum Deal of the year for the Meta project when Meta announced building the largest AI facility in the world in northeast Louisiana. It's a $10 billion investment. And it was done. We announced it in December, but those negotiations started in February because they came to see me and said, hey, look, we're thinking about doing some business in Louisiana. We're thinking about building this facility. We're looking at other states. What do you have? And we sat down, rolled up our sleeves and got to work. And and so I would say that those that are looking for manufacturing opportunities, I tell them, please come to Louisiana. We just improved our overall tax position. We lowered our corporate income tax rate.

We've got some great infrastructure opportunities. And the one thing that we have that other states don't have is we've got excess capacity of electrical generation, which is extremely important for manufacturing. We've got great oil and gas reserves. We've got good infrastructure there to further enhance our electrical generational capacity. And so, and we've got great infrastructure for rail and water and transportation. And so, Tim, come on, come on now. Yeah. And combined with this deregulatory approach, which we've been discussing here, right? Absolutely. I can tell you, you want to come down and put manufacturing in Louisiana, we are going to streamline your permit process.

Well, Governor, I'm so glad to host you here again. Any final thoughts as we finish? No, look, always a pleasure to be here. I certainly would encourage you to get Cade on the show. You can talk about some of the great educational things that we're doing. But I can tell you, Louisiana is open for business. Wonderful. Governor Jeff Landry, such a pleasure to have you on again. Thank you. Thank you all for joining Governor Jeff Landry and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.