Gov. Jeff Landry: DOGE-Like Reforms Coming to Louisiana
- EPOCHTV
- Mar 13
- 11 min read
Updated: Mar 23
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.
Watch the video:
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.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek: Governor Jeff Landry, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders again.
Governor Jeff Landry: It’s always great to be with you.
Mr. Jekielek: It’s been about a year now since you’ve been in your role as governor. What are the biggest milestones you’ve been able to hit over the last year?
Governor Landry: We hit the ground running last year in January, and we moved at breakneck speed. We held 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. We worked on true criminal justice reform that focuses on victims and putting criminals behind bars. We were very successful with that, and we’re seeing tangible, demonstrable results.
At one time, New Orleans was one of the most dangerous cities in the world. Today, murders have fallen by 50 percent, 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 now getting ready to implement on kids with disabilities and the poorest of the poor.
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 three percent. We lowered our corporate income tax. We got rid of our corporate franchise tax. I didn’t get everything I wanted, but we certainly got half the loaf. We got a ramp to where we can continue to chip away at improving Louisiana’s tax policy. We went in on education. We went from 50th to 32 in the rankings. Louisiana has never been in the 30s, and we saw those results happen that quickly. Cade Brumley, who’s our superintendent, is doing an unbelievable job. If you ask me about milestones, we’ve got plenty of them.
In fact, 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. We used fiscal responsible policy to give teachers a permanent pay raise, once and for all. We doubled our deduction for seniors. We rewrote our entire section of the Constitution that dealt with taxes in one amendment. So we’ve done a lot.
Mr. Jekielek: Your ranking in education went from 50 to 32. How does that even happen?
Governor Landry: We started our educational reforms through supporting the BESE board that I got to appoint. BESE is the educational committee that our Constitution creates that oversees K-12 education in the state of Louisiana. They govern the schools, and we appointed five. The governor gets five appointees. We kept our superintendent of education, an extremely conservative, great guy, Cade Brumley.
Coming right out the box, we put five conservatives on BESE, and they went to work. 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 would be surprised at the type of results that you can see overnight when you start to move fast, and when you start to be bold. Look at how much President Trump has accomplished in four weeks.You are starting to see tangible results from some of the things that he’s doing.
The ESA work that we did on the educational scholarships have not even gone into effect. We put a program together that says, “Let the teachers teach.” We started stripping away the bureaucracy placed on teachers that have nothing to do with teaching, but trying to make teachers social workers instead of teachers. So we stripped that away. We concentrated on reading, writing, and arithmetic, going back to the basics. These were all the things that we promised on the campaign trail.
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 BESE board, they have a superintendent of education at the state level who supports teachers. This was easy for me because my mom was a teacher and my godmother was a teacher. I also had a couple of aunts that were teachers. The most important voice in a child’s education are the parents. The most important person in that child’s life after the parents are their teachers. When you empower parents and you empower teachers, you get great results.
Mr. Jekielek: That’s really commendable that children can be reading better in such a short period of time by focusing on it.
Governor Landry: And math.
Mr. Jekielek: I will definitely be calling them up, because other people will want to know what you guys are up to.
Governor Landry: Again, the rankings that came out were really astonishing and it surprised me. When Cade called me, I said, “You have to be kidding me.” He said, “No.” A lot of those rankings have to do with the reforms that we made and the things that we put in place. I think you should have Cade on your show.
Mr. Jekielek: This is making Louisiana great again. That’s what you said your plan is.
Governor Landry: 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. The more states that become great, the greater America becomes.
Mr. Jekielek: One of the contentious things was that you decided that Ten Commandments need to be in the schools. What are your thoughts on this?
Governor Landry: I didn’t know that the Ten Commandments were a bad way to live your life. I still haven’t figured that whole thing out. Dodie Horton, a state representative from Louisiana, an unbelievable person, just a great person, was the author of the bill. I didn’t realize that the bill was actually moving through the session. I'll be quite honest with you and give a little confession here. I didn’t realize the bill had moved all the way through until it got to my desk.
I was signing all these other educational improvements. I looked and they said, “We put the Ten Commandments in with these.” I said, “That’s great. Okay, no problem.” I didn’t think anything of it. Then the liberal media and other people went crazy. I thought to myself, “Wow, I didn’t know the Ten Commandments was a bad way to live your life.”
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. He is the foundational father of law. Why 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.
Mr. Jekielek: The criticism is that it elevates the Christian faith above all others in the classroom. People argue that shouldn’t be the case.
Governor Landry: No, the Ten Commandments are not owned by the Christian religion. The Muslim religion, Judaism, and Christianity all recognize the Ten Commandments. Moses was there before them all, let’s not forget that. That to me is 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. It is an institution where you teach someone something. To keep things like that out means that you don’t want people to understand what those things are.
When you take a document like the Ten Commandments and you claim that by placing it there is a violation of church and state, evidently you have never read our Constitution or our Bill of Rights. I think we’ve had this conversation here before. There is no text in the First Amendment that says separation of church and state, so we look forward to litigating this case. It’s going to be a great case, and Attorney General Liz Murrill is going to have a field day with this.
Mr. Jekielek: You have also banned critical race theory in K-12 education. What was the impact of that?
Governor Landry: I just told you our report card went up to 32. That’s what happens when you take those kinds of things out of the mix. Things like critical race theory, DEI, and ESG, all those things do is divide people. America was supposed to be a country which recognized unity. It was a melting pot. When you melt things together, you end up with one thing. Think about our motto.
Again, I think that’s what we’re doing. During my inauguration I said, “We are going to focus on education instead of indoctrination in education. We’re going to ensure that teachers get to educate kids and they’re not indoctrinating kids.” Things like CRT and DEI and those other very liberal policies only indoctrinate kids. They don’t educate them.
Mr. Jekielek: Was it difficult to institute that ban on CRT and make sure it was happening?
Governor Landry: 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. Here’s what else I'll say. Every one of the reforms that I talked to you about, we passed with bipartisan support. I’m not talking to just one Democrat. There was large bipartisan support in the legislature. That speaks volumes that these are issues that transcend political parties.
Concerning public safety, who doesn’t want to be safe? Who doesn’t want their kids to have a better education? Who doesn’t want a higher standard of living that raises wages for everyone, with more jobs and opportunities to go to work? It’s not like a Republican thing or a Democrat thing. It’s an American thing.
Mr. Jekielek: Another thing that you touched on is the executive order on election integrity.
Governor Landry: Yes. In fact, our secretary of state is getting ready to put out an RFP so we can finally get some new voting machines. The prior governor had thwarted the secretary of state’s ability to change the machines. We’ve got some machines that date back to the 1990s. I don’t even know how they work anymore.
But we’re going to institute an election system under which a voter votes and gets a receipt. There will be an actual paper ballot that that voter can look at and say, “This is how I want to vote.” That is scanned in and tabulated, and then that receipt is put in a box so that we can reconcile that with the voting. That is the way that it should be, right? That is a way to not have to depend on electronic voting machines. There are too many transactions happening in that. We are giving voters confidence that their elections are based upon a solid foundation.
Mr. Jekielek: How is what the Trump administration doing impacting what you’re trying to do in Louisiana?
Governor Landry: 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. What they’re doing up here helps to support things that we want to do back in Louisiana.
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, all the things that he’s doing, he gives people liquid courage. He gives legislators in our states liquid courage.
You’re going to see Texas pass school choice, something that has eluded them. Governor Abbott has continuously tried to pass school choice in the state of Texas. But because of the way that the president is leaning into that and supporting it, it gives courage and cover for those legislators who weren’t quite sure about making those hard votes. I don’t think they are hard votes, I think they are easy. They are just listening to a loudmouth minority.
Mr. Jekielek: You’ve had a big year. What is coming up next?
Governor Landry: We’re getting ready to dive into the bureaucracy. We’re running our own fiscal responsibility project, kind of like the DOGE project that the president is running. It’s something that I did when I was attorney general eight or nine years ago. We’re going to reorganize our Department of Transportation. We’re going to further improve our tax position. We’re going to tweak all those things.
We’re going to look at civil service, which is a real problem, as well as our bureaucracy. We’re going to further work towards streamlining our regulatory agency and our permitting processes. We’re going to take every chance we can to make Louisiana open for business and friendly and to improve our quality of life.
Mr. Jekielek: The president really wants to push towards reinvigorating American manufacturing, which has been on the decline for some time now. How does that fit into the Louisiana plan?
Governor Landry: About 23 percent of the entire refining capacity of the whole country is in Louisiana along the Mississippi River and over in the southwestern part near Texas. Manufacturing is something that we know how to do. We’ve got the infrastructure and the ability to expand that manufacturing base. We hope that the things the president is doing are going to be beneficial to Louisiana. You asked me earlier about the things that the president does and how they affect us back home.
Again, you hear people say that when the president imposes tariffs and tries 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 in order to ensure that America regains its rightful place on a global scale. For a long time we’ve been convinced that the most conservative approach is free trade. When you go out into the real world, there’s no such thing as free trade. There is only fair trade, because you find that other countries are imposing their own will and they really don’t embrace free trade. The president recognizes that, and he wants America to play on a level playing field.
Mr. Jekielek: Let’s say that someone is interested in bringing manufacturing opportunities to Louisiana. What will they get from you?
Governor Landry: A call from the governor. You can 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 got done.
We announced it in December, but those negotiations started in February. They came to see me and said, “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?” We sat down, rolled up our sleeves, and got to work.
Those who are looking for manufacturing opportunities, 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.
The one thing that we have that other states don’t have is excess capacity for electrical generation, which is extremely important for manufacturing. We’ve got great oil and gas reserves. We’ve got good infrastructure to further enhance our electrical generation capacity. We’ve got great infrastructure for rail and water and transportation. So come on down.
Mr. Jekielek: It is also combined with your deregulatory approach.
Governor Landry: Absolutely. I can tell you, you want to come down and put manufacturing in Louisiana. We are going to streamline your permit process.
Mr. Jekielek: Governor, it’s great to have you on again. Any final thoughts as we finish up?
Governor Landry: It’s always a pleasure to be here. I would encourage you to get Cade Brumley on the show, because he can talk about the great educational things that we are doing. I can also tell you another thing, Louisiana is open for business.
Mr. Jekielek: Governor Jeff Landry, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.
Governor Landry: Thank you.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
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