Jefferson Parish President Cynthia Lee Sheng was frantic.

It was the end of January and Lee Sheng, a Republican, was in Washington, chairing a task force on federal disaster funding, when the White House’s budget office issued a memo temporarily freezing trillions of dollars in federal assistance.

Back in Louisiana, her staff logged on to web portals where the federal government tracks grant funding and found the information on their awards had been grayed out.  

“We were freaking out,” Lee Sheng said. “I was frantically on the phone that day because we were getting locked out of our systems.”

The White House argued the freeze was necessary to ensure federal spending complied with a blitz of executive orders from President Donald Trump that barred funding for diversity efforts, clean energy projects and other progressive initiatives. But the directive sparked chaos and confusion among state and local governments, schools and organizations that rely on federal funding, and triggered several lawsuits.

Two days after it was issued, the White House rescinded the order. But the episode has become emblematic of the uncertainty that’s filtering down to Louisiana and other states.

‘Large-scale reductions’

Trump has moved swiftly in the first month of his second term to reshape and shrink the federal government, with billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk leading the cost-cutting effort through the newly created Department of Government of Efficiency. 

The cuts have upended the lives of Louisiana workers and impacted businesses — though it’s unclear how many. 

Much of Trump’s agenda has been carried out through executive orders. As of Feb. 20, the White House had issued 70 such orders — surpassing every other president in the past four decades. Trump ordered agencies to “initiate large-scale reductions in force” and directed them to lay off to lay off nearly all their probationary workers, who generally have less than one year on the job and have yet to gain civil service protection. Many of those orders are facing pending challenges in federal court. 

Trump and his allies argue the actions are necessary to root out excessive government spending and ensure the federal bureaucracy is responsive to the president’s agenda. 

Louisiana politicians weigh in

Though jobs and programs in Louisiana are being impacted, most of the state’s GOP lawmakers in Congress are staying silent. U.S Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-Baton Rouge, one of the few Republicans to comment on the actions, said he would prefer the Trump administration take a more surgical approach and “go at this with a scalpel, not with a chainsaw,” but said he remains supportive of the president’s agenda. 

“I respect what [the Department of Government Efficiency] is trying to do. If there’s people not working, let’s uncover that and let’s get those folks off the payroll. Taxpayers are paying those salaries,” Cassidy said in a call with reporters on Tuesday.

Still, Cassidy added, “if it’s people that our state and our country depends upon, then we need to preserve those jobs, and I think that is their intent.”

But some people in Louisiana, including the state’s two Democratic members of Congress, say the changes are too fast and too haphazard, upending people’s lives and causing unnecessary pain. 

“It’s just a bad, bad way of governing,” said U.S. Rep. Cleo Fields, D-Baton Rouge. “It has really put the county, in my view, in chaos.”

Businesses in limbo

The upheaval in Washington, D.C., has left some small businesses in Louisiana in limbo. 

Richard Woods was awarded a $229,000 grant in December from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to install solar panels at his reclaimed wood business in Livingston Parish.

The panels, Woods said, would have generated enough power to cover his business’s energy needs, saving him money on his electricity bill.

Trump, on his first day in office, ordered the USDA to freeze funds appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature clean-energy and health-care law, and that included the Rural Energy for America Program, which provides funding for agricultural producers and rural small businesses.

That’s how Woods’ Albany Woodworks received his grant, and by early January, he had started to interview solar companies. But federal officials told him the reimbursable grant was “temporarily on hold and they don’t know when it won’t be.” 

“There is so much uncertainty,” Woods said. “It’s the hardest thing in the world to execute any kind of business plan. Everything’s in the toilet.”

Federal jobs

Christy Hoover and her family moved from North Carolina to Natchez, Louisiana, in July for a job documenting and promoting the work being done at the Cane River Creole National Historical Park.

She and her husband, a retired military veteran, bought 10 acres of land and enrolled their children in school. Then, earlier this month, she learned she no longer had a job.

Hoover, who was born in Louisiana, said she wouldn’t have moved to Natchitoches Parish if not for the job. Unless she can find remote work, she’s not sure she can afford to stay.

“The economic growth here is completely stunted,” she said.

There were around 19,500 civilian federal workers in Louisiana as of Sept. 2024, according to Office of Personnel Management data. That means the federal government employs roughly 1 in every 100 workers in Louisiana.

It’s unclear how many of those workers have lost their jobs so far. But employees at several federal agencies who live or work in the state have said they were fired in recent weeks.

That includes workers at the National Finance Center in New Orleans; the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Southern Regional Research Center in New Orleans; the Southwest Louisiana Wildlife Refuge; the Kisatchie National Forest; and the New Orleans federal immigration court.

On Thursday, the Trump administration began layoffs of about 800 of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s approximately 13,000 employees, several national news media outlets reported. The agency is responsible for the National Weather Service which forecasts hurricanes and severe weather like the recent snowstorm. 

Sen. Cassidy said even he didn’t know how many federal employees in Louisiana had been affected. He acknowledged that the Trump administration has made missteps in its job cutting strategy. He pointed to the firing of workers at the USDA focused on containing the bird flu.

“There’s going to be some mistakes, and they know that and they’re trying to respond to those mistakes,” Cassidy said.

At a congressional committee meeting last week, U.S. Rep. Troy Carter, D-New Orleans, criticized the Trump administration for firing more than a dozen independent inspectors general at government agencies as part of his purge of the federal workers. 

“If Mr. Musk and my Republican colleagues are sincere about wanting to rid our government of fraud, waste and abuse, it seems to me the last thing you would want to do is to remove individuals that have proven that that is their core task,” Carter said. 

With Trump scheduled to give a speech before a joint session of Congress on Tuesday, Carter invited Chante Powell, an auditor laid off at the National Finance Center in New Orleans, to be his guest.