HAYRIDE: Louisiana DOGE And The Louisiana Budget

Last week there were several news articles published about Louisiana’s DOGE (Louisiana Fiscal Responsibility Program) efforts, and how it has already achieved savings of $1 billion annually. The governor reports that these savings have been accomplished without reducing the services provided by the state. This is, of course, great news. And I doubt that anyone will have trouble believing that $1 billion is able to be cut without negatively impacting the citizens of this state. These are the types of efforts that our state government can and should be undertaking every day. Here is a link to one of those articles, this one published by USA Today.

Sadly, there is another side to this coin. The next question is where are those savings going? How are they being used to positively impact the state? One might think that the end goal of identifying government waste and inefficiencies would be to return unneeded funds to the taxpayers (to whom it truly belongs). Hopefully that will happen at some point, but so far it has not. Here are the total state budget amounts going all the way back to the Blanco years:

The budget numbers clearly do not match up with the news about savings through the state’s DOGE efforts.  This begs the question of where are the savings going?  The legislature passed a budget for 2025-2026 that increased almost 10% over the previous year’s budget.  And with that increase, they were unable to fully fund key priorities such as the LA Gator Program, which received the absolute bare minimum of funding that it needed to continue its existence, much less to allow it to grow as it was intended.

What else did the people of Louisiana get for the 10% budget increase, AND $1 billion in annual savings?  The legislature passed an income tax cut.  That was great, but it was unfortunately paired with a sales tax increase, so the people didn’t really gain much, if anything.  And anything that they did gain was purely an accident on the part of the legislature, since it was intended to be revenue neutral.  And let’s not forget that when the legislature found out from the Revenue Estimating Conference in December that they had extra money ($217 million), they spent that too.  As they do every year.

There are a lot of gains being made in Louisiana, that is certain.  Economic development has had a lot of wins lately.  The changes to the tax system were indeed structural improvements.  But it is hard for the citizens to see how that helps them unless they happen to be the direct beneficiary of one of the jobs being created.  For the rest of the people, it doesn’t really feel like anything has changed.  Good legislation is killed or passed and then not funded.  The already bloated, over-sized state budget continues to grow.  Our tax burden changes shape, but it never actually gets any lower.

The bottom line is that while our conservative legislature and administration talk a great game and say all the right things (they are politicians, after all!), from where the average Joe sits, the results coming out of Baton Rouge still look an awful lot like they always have.