Liberal populists largely may have been evicted from power in Louisiana, but their ethos lives on, according to budgetary politics in the Senate to date for next year’s state spending plan.
More often than not, after the general appropriations bill HB 1 makes it way from the House of Representatives, where constitutionally it must start, the Senate will make a few significant changes. The most far-reaching change came concerning Republican Gov. Jeff Landry’s initiative to open up voucher-like programming to families beyond the current eligible pool of students coming from lower-income households–who otherwise would attend lower-ranking schools–to include those from any lower-income household, wrapping all into an education savings account format called LA GATOR.
Landry asked for $43.4 million to cover the existing pool and then $50 million to expand it to a least a small portion of newly-eligible families. But instead, the Senate Finance Committee stripped the additional funds. GOP Sen. Pres. Cameron Henry led the charge, questioning whether the cost of the program would grow too big, too quickly.
Yet this is in the wake of last month’s Revenue Estimating Conference declaration that adjusted fiscal year 2026 revenues higher by $139 million, leaving plenty of funding for not only that, but for other things as well. One was $30 million for a high-dosage tutoring program originally not included in the House version. Instead, the $30 million was funded while the $50 million was removed.
Some of the money went elsewhere to new initiatives. Ten million dollars went to a program to provide grants to fortify roofs against bad weather, millions more to fund increased post-conviction relief measures including review of capital cases, and more millions still to increase the performance of children and family services. But a few large items came the way of existing programmatic expensing.
Incarcerated youth housing went up $4 million to alleviate a shortage there, but sheriffs received a $3 boost in the per diem they get for housing state prisoners, worth $17.4 million. This resulted from a mixture of economics and politics.
When Democrat former Gov. John Bel Edwards muscled through criminal justice changes early in his tenure, these were sold as methods of reducing costs that wouldn’t affect crime rates, relying on reducing the severity of sentences. Instead, violent crime rates rose in Louisiana in the following years–while remaining flat nationally.
Nor was money saved, because the state had been housing a considerable amount of inmates in local jails, so when prisons began to be emptied, sheriffs cried foul in that they had predicated capital spending on larger jail populations. To placate them, the per diem was increased by $2.
Landry and the Legislature reversed most of Edwards’ changes, which under normal circumstances would have solved matters with sheriffs. But the problem now is many of the highest-capacity local jails, usually run privately contracted by a sheriff, have another suitor: the federal government, specifically for illegal aliens as the Republican Pres. Donald Trump Administration has turned much attention to deportation of such aliens, and it pays much better, although these detainees also have higher contracted expenses to cover.
Plus, there was the rampant inflation triggered under the term of Democrat former Pres. Joe Biden. The greater demand for space, plus increased costs, meant the $2 increase of a few years ago – which essentially wiped out “savings” Edwards claimed from his package – now will add $3 more.
There’s an even more destructive legacy the leftist populist Edwards bestowed: Medicaid expansion and creepingly adding other services to Medicaid. Expansion was supposed to improve access; instead, few additional providers came aboard and wait times exploded in length.
Just the state’s portion paid in for expansion at latest reckoning was $400 million, but the budget’s latest iteration throws in roughly a $500 million request for the federal government to reimburse higher rates to attract more providers to cover the shortage caused by expansion–which will cost the state dozens of millions more for its share. If the federal government denies that, however, the money won’t have to be spent, although there’s a case to be made that extra dollars should be there already given that lax administration under Edwards – even after notification of problems that could have been addressed but weren’t – that continued after his exit allowed for $103 million in improper Medicaid payments over most of 2023 and 2024.
One more past populist imposition is the state’s overbuilt higher education system. With too many institutions chasing too few students and demographics working against pie-in-the-sky plans to boost enrollments statewide, it was inevitable that institutions run less well would bite taxpayers, with its resources stretched too thinly and inefficiently across the state’s higher education landscape. The budget succumbs to that, shelling out $2 million to bolster the University of Louisiana Monroe and $20 million for the University of New Orleans, with millions more allocated to transfer UNO back to the Louisiana State University System, a move that there is little reason to believe will help UNO back onto its feet in any way, any time soon.
In short, the hangover from unlocking jail cells, creating a new health care entitlement, and planting senior universities wherever possible – liberal populist agenda items all – combined with the liberal populist ethos of just throwing more money at things that again threatens to strangle the chance for better utilized spending. And, sacrificed was the program anathema to the left’s preferred Soviet-styled one-size-fits-all model for education, LA GATOR.
That program should be restored on the Senate floor this weekend or in chamber negotiations in the coming days. Jettisoning some of these new commitments or at the very least wringing waste out of the state’s Medicaid program will pay for it. We can’t snap our fingers and downsize the state’s higher education system or dump Medicaid expansion overnight, but at least LA GATOR can see the light of day. If that doesn’t happen, it means for now supposedly conservative majorities will acquiesce to a budget shaped by liberal populism.