Yesterday saw an interesting press release from Gov. Jeff Landry’s office – about an executive order which established Louisiana’s new Fiscal Responsibility Program – a nine member commission which will be charged with scraping all the barnacles from the hull of our ship of state…

Today, Governor Jeff Landry signed an executive order establishing a Fiscal Responsibility Program which will monitor state spending and ensure our government operates in the most efficient and effective manner. The Program will be led by Fiscal Responsibility Czar, Steve Orlando, and will be comprised of a minimum of nine members. These include Senators Hodges, Miguez, Boudreaux, and Stine, who were appointed by the President of the Senate. Also included will be Representatives McFarland, Fisher, Tarver and Berault, who were appointed by the Speaker of the House.

Fiscal responsibility has been a top priority for Governor Landry. As the Louisiana Attorney General, Governor Landry started a “Fiscal Responsibility Project” and in just the first year, he recognized approximately $1 million in savings. As a member of the U.S. Congress, he returned over 10% of his office budget and asked for it to be used to pay down debt.

“In Louisiana, we always strive to have a government that is of, by, and for the people. A government that runs efficiently and effectively is a government that best serves her people. Throughout my time in the U.S. Congress and as the Louisiana Attorney General, I have prioritized finding ways to cut out fiscal waste and end government bureaucracy. My time as Governor is no different,” said Governor Jeff Landry. “I look forward to the work Steve Orlando and the rest of the members will accomplish, as we seek to build a government in Louisiana as good as her people.”

Orlando, in case you’ve not heard of him, is the chairman of Alison Marine Holdings, LLC and the president of Orlando Energy Investments, LLC. He’s an oil and gas guy out of Lafayette and not a bureaucrat, which would seem to be a hopeful sign. Past attempts to scrub Louisiana’s budget have usually been led by somebody who’s a “reformer” from within government, and for some reason they just never get around to the question of whether various governmental functions should exist at all.

So what happens is a lot of nibbling around the edges as they try to preserve all of the tentacles of the governmental octopus but make them a little more “efficient.” And five years after whatever progress is made, government is bigger and more bloated than ever.

What needs to happen in Louisiana is the same thing that needs to happen in Washington; namely, a complete re-examination of how much of this $50 billion monstrosity Louisiana even needs at all, and how much of it wouldn’t be better performed at the local level.

And most of all, how much of these federal matching funds Louisiana is drawing down to do things which cause more harm than good. Because there are lots of those.

Landry’s people told a few legislators during the negotiations around his proposed tax reforms last month that he was committed to cutting half a billion dollars in state spending this coming year and another half-billion next year. He’s probably going to need a commission such as this one to drive that effort, if for no other reason than to spread the blame when the state’s legacy media inevitably decides to spew out sob stories about this individual or that who depends on some utterly wasteful government program which is getting replaced by something more efficient, and they got caught in the change and can’t get their diabetes meds or their free lunch or whatever.

Because government-by-sob-story is part of the Old Game that the Left always plays when anybody attempts to trim down the leviathan. You know the Old Game, right? Bog the other guy down in scandal and recrimination whenever he starts trying to break your rice bowl?

You can see the Old Game at work in the campaign to discredit Pete Hegseth as the nominee for Secretary of Defense, and it isn’t because anybody thinks Hegseth is a degenerate drunken sex addict – he’s a guy who had some infidelity issues in his first two marriages but says he’s past that now, and he returned from military service in the field in Iraq and Afghanistan eager to tie one on when the occasion presented itself, but as moral turpitude goes he’s a whole lot cleaner than many of his detractors. No, they’re playing the Old Game on Hegseth because they’re terrified of the reforms he’s going to impose on the Pentagon, reforms which are desperately needed as our military devolves into a free-money program for defense contractors when it’s not serving as a sex-change factory for the deeply confused loons who are all that’s left of its sclerotic recruitment.

A leaner, meaner military means broken rice bowls all over the military industrial complex, and so Pete Hegseth must be stopped. But they can’t exactly tell the truth about why they don’t like him, so we get upset emails from his mom, weak long-ago sexual assault allegations from a woman who used him to get some strange with her husband and children sleeping in another room at a hotel and unsourced innuendo about how much he drank when he was at Fox News.

You saw the Old Game here in Louisiana most notably in the 2015 gubernatorial election, when David Vitter put out a 50-page reform plan which would gut practically every special interest from trial lawyers to river pilots to nursing home operators, and not one of those people bothered to message a word of complaint about his reforms. Instead, Vitter was dragged for accusations from more than a decade earlier about dalliances with hookers, something he thought he’d gotten past when those attacks were made nonstop in a Senate race he won 57-38 five years earlier. But when a pair of status quo Republican opponents piled them on and created the narrative that it was a bipartisan furor over Vitter’s marital infidelities, the Old Game won.

And we got John Bel Edwards, the most slavish adherent to the state’s corrupt status quo that we’ve had in a generation. Louisiana’s economy has been rendered moribund and all of our social problems have gotten horribly worse since.

This is why the Old Game doesn’t work anymore. When things get bad enough, and they’re definitely that bad both here and nationally, the public stops caring about petty scandals and this faux-Puritan moralizing by people who can only claim not to be hypocrites because they have no standards to fall short of in the first place and starts looking past those to the substance of the question.

Still, Orlando and the legislators on this new fiscal responsibility commission will want to be wary of the Old Game. Because this billet will put them over the target and that’s where the flak is most intense. The forces of the capitol status quo are going to attempt to discredit them by any means they can find and the more serious they are about scrubbing Louisiana’s budget of waste, fraud and abuse (and there are billions of dollars of that to be found, to be sure), the more vitriolic and vituperative the resistance will be.

Here’s hoping they don’t get scared off. Chopping out the bloat in state government is the only path to unleashing the kind of economic growth Louisiana has to have if we’re going to solve the problems of poverty, crime, outmigration, infrastructure and education which have held us back.