America's Talking - Awash with billions per year in federal money, Louisiana's funding surges

Episode Date: November 24, 2025

(The Center Square) – Louisiana’s annual budgets swelled more than 71% over the past decade, ticking up year after year under a Democratic governor who expanded Medicaid and led the state through the COVID-19 pandemic. While the pace of spending slowed under a Republican governor elected two years ago, the bottom line keeps growing, an analysis of state records by The Center Square found.Support this podcast: https://secure.anedot.com/franklin-news-foundation/ce052532-b1e4-41c4-945c-d7ce2f52c38a?source_code=xxxxxx Read more: https://www.thecentersquare.com/louisiana/article_867cfa6b-54c3-4b65-92c8-c1fd5707afc6.html Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to America's Talking. I'm our Kane managing editor for investigations at the Center Square. And joining me is one of my reporters on the team, Southwest investigative reporter Johnny Edwards. As part of our fiscal fallout series, Johnny's been digging into Louisiana's state budget and found the full picture isn't as rosy as state leaders like to portray it. Johnny, what is the data that you dug into tell us about Louisiana's budget? Well, like you said, the picture is not as rosy. these numbers are going up, up and up. I looked at a 10-year period, which comprises the entire

10-year of former Democratic Governor John Bell Edwards, as well as the first two years of current Republican Governor Jeff Landry, and found that over that time span, there's been an increase in the total Louisiana budget of 71.5 percent. That is nearly more than double the rate of inflation in that time period, which is roughly 34 percent. It's currently at 53 and a half billion dollars. You know, that's, that's a lot of money. And, um, and like I said, it's, it continues to go up, both under a Democratic governor and a Republican governor, uh, Landry had a little bit of a dip in his first year, but, uh, made up for it with a bigger increase in the second year. So we all know that all the state's got a lot of COVID money. Um,

COVID's been gone for probably three years. Why is the state total budget increased so much and continues to increase after, after COVID subsides? Well, you get the nail on the head is this infusion of federal funds. Louisiana gets an incredible amount of federal money. And that's been going on historically because there's so many natural disasters and other disasters that hit Louisiana. I think floods, hurricanes, Deepwater Horizon. And then also during his first year, former Governor Edwards signed an executive order. Actually, on his first day in office, expanding Medicaid. That really put the federal infusion of money into overdrive. And then, as you mentioned, COVID hit.

And during Edward's years, that was the biggest increase, obviously, was in the COVID years. The total budget went up about 15% during those years. And as with other states, we've looked at in this series, the spending has not gone back down. In fact, since Edwards left office and Landry came into office, the budget's gone up another 5%. So, you know, when you have this big increasing base, spending, and then you continue to increase it from those levels. You know, the pandemic increased in most states, 10, 15, 20 percent over two years. And now they're increasing another three or four or five percent each year above that, but not going back to that base.

What should taxpayers take away from that? Should they be concerned? Well, absolutely, they should be concerned. And in Louisiana, they can look no further than the city of New Orleans, which is kind of having a microcosm of this problem right now. You know, there's a massive deficit in that city, and part of the problem was that they took in a lot of federal money and it dried up, or there were some stalls and some payments, specifically some repair payments after hurricane damage. But it's when you lose that money and you're used to having the money, it makes everything in a deficit or makes it, you've got people clamoring to get this money that they're so used to, and now you don't have it. When you look at the Louisiana state

budget, practically every department and many of the line items have some sort of a federal contribution. So as some of the critics and watchdogs are alleging, that gets you used to having this. And particularly the climate in Washington right now with things like Doge and the people wanting Medicaid reform and SNAP benefits, things like that, there's a real threat that some of this federal money made, the spigot could get tightened. And, you know, you're, you try to talk to the governor he wouldn't talk to you you did find someone to at least explain the side of the state and this person claimed that the budgets really haven't increased other than for Medicaid which ended up buying people health insurance and that that that person thought that was a good

thing um and then otherwise it just kind of tracked with um cost of living do you do buy into that with your research, or do you think that's exaggerating the issue? Well, I mean, that's his point of view. And, of course, it's subjective. That's Jan Mueller. And he's been watching the budgets for a very long time. He's a former journalist. I mean, he really knows his stuff.

But he's talking about the general fund. And yes, the general fund, if you look at that only, it's currently at $12.2 billion, I believe. And that's actually increased in the last 10 years less than inflation. The increase over 10 years is about 27%. But again, they don't live on just the general fund alone. I mean, the total budget we looked at includes all three branches of government, infrastructure spending, and the federal dollars. So you really have to have to look at all of it.

And yeah, and that was kind of Landry's pitch or the message she gave out when he was talking about, you know, this current budget was that we've got spending under control. We're getting it under control. And that's great. But as I said, every department, when you look at the budget, has some kind of a federal contribution. And so you really have to look at the big picture. Not to mention, by the way, I might add that Louisiana taxpayers may only care about the general fund because that's what Louisiana taxpayers pay into, but all of us pay into those federal pots.

So we all ought to be concerned about a state spending this much more money even after a crisis like COVID is over with. you're right about that um so the way these stories work is it kind of do an overall overall view of what um happened in the state and then you start to dig into um things that are more more detail of what of what other what the agencies are spending it on is there any evidence of louisa spending money on items it shouldn't yes that's also a subjective point of view but there's lots of things in the budget that you could argue are wasteful or irresponsible or unaccountable. A big one is the surplus spending. Every year, that tops $100 million, and it includes all kinds of line items that wreak of pork projects. I mean, a lot of its

infrastructure, a lot of its equipment for police, firefighters, parks, things like that. But it's also a lot of things going to nonprofits, NGOs, churches, and religious groups. I was very surprised to see so many religious groups getting infusions of public money. You know, there's, you know, one of the watchdogs I spoke to, you know, was questioning, has there been any audits or any, any looking into whether taxpayers are getting something for that money? Like, are these workforce programs creating jobs? Are these, are these community projects benefiting the community, in fact? Another thing, too, is that Governor Landry has started his own Doge-like program, the fiscal responsibility program. And he's already found some things. He's found what

appear to be unauthorized Medicaid payments in the range of $10 million. People that were, you know, dead people getting Medicaid payments. He spound some leases on some buildings that automatically renewed that might have been inefficient or just not a good deal. So there's lots of things that arguably could be trimmed or cut. And, you know, like I'm saying, if there was some kind of a crisis with the federal money, then you'd have to make some cuts really quick. And, you know, that was the kind of thing that hurt former Republican governor, Bobby Jindle when he was in office back in the days of the Great Recession. He had to make a lot of tough cuts and people didn't like it.

Well, that's great works, Johnny. I'm sure you're going to keep digging into that state and some of the other states you cover. Thanks for joining me on America's Talking. And if you want to read Johnny's story, it's on thecentersquare.com. Thank you.