Gov. Jeff Landry wasn’t afraid to throw deep this year, and he usually completed the pass, even if occasionally he had to settle for a field goal instead of a touchdown.
Can he keep the momentum going in 2025? He has a chance to make another big statement in early February, when the Super Bowl, the nation’s most-watched spectacle, returns to Louisiana.
“We have been working on improving the city of New Orleans so we can put our best foot forward for this event,” Landry spokesperson Kate Kelly said by email. “This will be a big moment to bring businesses and major companies to our state.”
The other administration priorities Kelly cited are:
- Economic development and improving the state’s business climate. (Economic Development Secretary Susan Bourgeois plans to propose a new set of tools for her department next year.)
- Reforming DOTD by “streamlining bureaucracy, providing transparency, and increasing public trust in the agency.” (You can read some of our reporting on this subject here and here.)
- More work on the public safety front focused on “holding violent criminals accountable, supporting crime victims, and ensuring the justice system works properly.”
As you can see, the administration plans to revisit issues it tackled this year, and it can expect continued support from the Legislature for most of its agenda. Supporters of the governor’s tax package generally say they are happy with the lower, flat income tax rates they enacted but want to work toward eliminating income taxes altogether.
And the “streamlining” theme will go well beyond DOTD. Landry and legislative leaders have been calling for belt-tightening across state government for months.
During the last special session, Landry released a letter to House Speaker Phillip DeVillier and Senate President Cameron Henry about his plans to create a “fiscal responsibility program.” Each body appoints four members to the task force, led by Landry’s “fiscal responsibility czar.”
Legislators and reporters have compared the effort to President-elect Donald Trump’s DOGE, led by Elon Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. Brent Littlefield, Landry’s longtime political adviser, objects to the idea that Landry is copying Trump in that regard, noting that the governor’s efforts were well underway before DOGE was announced and that Landry implemented a similar initiative when he led the state Attorney General’s Office.
He jokes that Trump and Musk were copying the governor, not the other way around.
“We accomplished a massive amount of our agenda,” Littlefield said, on a more serious note. “Jeff Landry’s not going to let grass grow under his feet. That’s not his personality.”
Notably missing from the administration’s stated agenda is anything to do with insurance costs, which legislators consistently say is their constituents’ top concern. While lawmakers passed several measures focused on property insurance this year, they were unable to agree with Landry on what to do about auto insurance.
New governors typically feel they have a mandate and come in with an aggressive agenda, says Pearson Cross, a politics scholar at UL Monroe.
“Even by that standard, however, I would say that Jeff Landry’s an overachiever,” Cross says.
While Republicans have been running the Legislature for more than a decade, having a supermajority in both chambers is a relatively new development. Combine that factor with the pent-up demand for conservative policies that Gov. John Bel Edwards stymied, and you get a chance to pass a lot of legislation quickly, Cross says.
And unless there’s an unforeseen disaster, Landry may only get stronger, he adds. Every new governor faces a learning curve, Cross says.
“As you move into year two, and three in particular, the governor’s team should operate more like a well-oiled machine,” he says. “There should be more cohesion with the Legislature, a better grasp of what can and can’t be done.”
Barry Erwin with the Council for a Better Louisiana also says that Landry came in with an unusually ambitious agenda and accomplished a lot of it, whether or not one agrees with what he tried to do. He recalls the beginning of Gov. Mike Foster’s administration as the last time a governor passed so much substantive legislation right out of the gate.
“I don’t think his influence has been diminished in any way over the course of this year,” Erwin says. “So I think some of that [momentum] carries forward.”
