Louisiana
How are President Trump’s federal job cuts, grant freezes affecting Louisiana? Here’s what we know.
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Two days after it was issued, the White House rescinded the order.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.
Massive alligator causes chaos, attempts to avoid capture
Officers wrangled and released an alligator after it was spotted near a home in Livingston Parish, Louisiana.
Louisiana may expand its wild alligator harvesting opportunities to recreational hunters if the Legislature passes a bill that secured unanimous approval in a committee hearing March 11.
Franklin state Sen. Robert Allain’s Senate Bill 244 would authorize the Louisiana Wildlife Commission to create a recreational season that would be open to 5,000 hunters annually, each with a two-gator limit.
The state already has a commercial hunting season for alligators, which is chronicled in the popular “Swamp People” TV reality series.
“We think the time is right,” Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries Secretary Tyler Bosworth testified during the Senate Natural Resources Committee hearing. “We want to provide a recreational opportunity for the common folk of Louisiana.”
Louisiana’s alligator population has exploded in the past 50 years from fewer than 100,000 to more than 3 million today. Of those, about 2 million are wild with another 1 million farmed.
That’s at least twice the population in Florida, the state with the second most number of alligators.
And their Louisiana numbers have grown throughout the state where they can be commonly spotted from Lake Martin in Breaux Bridge to Caddo and Cross lakes in Shreveport to Caldwell Parish in northeastern Louisiana.
“This is a conservation success story on the highest level,” LDWF general counsel Garrett Cole said during the hearing. “This would create a true recreational opportunity outside our commercial season.”
Garrett said hunters would compete for hunting tags through a lottery will statewide opportunities. Recreational hunters would be limited to hook and line harvesting from land. No gators could be taken by boat as commercial hunters are allowed to do.
If approved, the first season could take place beginning Oct. 1.
Greg Hilburn covers state politics for the USA TODAY Network of Louisiana. Follow him on Twitter @GregHilburn1.
Responsible Anglers United, LDWF release bass into Lake Bouef
Responsible Anglers United team up with Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries to release more than 3,000 Florida bass into Lake Bouef on Oct. 17.
While Louisiana’s largest lake, the Toledo Bend Reservoir, spans 1,200 miles of shoreline, the state’s deepest lake only spans 1,125 acres.
Lake Peigneur is the deepest lake in Louisiana, with a depth measuring approximately 200 feet.
Lake Peigneur is a brackish lake, meaning it contains saltwater but has less salinity than seawater, located in New Iberia Parish in South Louisiana.
How did Lake Peigneur become the deepest lake in Louisiana?
Lake Peigneur was not always considered the deepest lake in Louisiana, as it was only a 10-foot-deep freshwater lake 40 years ago.
On Nov. 20, 1980, an oil rig crew was attempting to free a 14-inch drill bit when they heard popping noises and the rig began to tilt. Shortly after the crew abandoned the rig and headed for shore, the crew watched the 150-foot oil rig disappear into the 10-foot-deep lake.
Soon, a whirlpool formed in place of the oil rig. The whirlpool grew rapidly until it was able to suck up nearby boats, barges, trees, a house and half an island.
At the same location of the oil drilling site, there was also a salt mine, and when the whirlpool formed after the oil rig collapsed, the mine began to fill with water. As the whirlpool grew, water was able to enter the mine at such a force that it caused a geyser to spew out of the mine’s opening for hours until the lake was drained.
After the lake was emptied, the Delcambre Canal began to flow backward, marking the only time in history that the Gulf of Mexico flowed into the continental U.S. This backflow continued until the entire mine and lake were filled with water, except now the lake was filled with saltwater, according to an article published on Louisiana Tech Digital Commons.
Can you swim in Lake Peigneur?
Before the oil rig and salt mine accident, Lake Peigneur was a popular spot for fishing and recreational activities. However, since the lake is almost entirely surrounded by private property, visitors will have to enter the nearby Rip Van Winkle Gardens in order to get a closer look, according to Atlas Obscura.
While there are no reports indicating the lake is unsafe, the lake is not exactly developed for public access. However, there are things to do around Lake Peigneur, like visiting Rip Van Winkle Gardens on Jefferson Island, or visiting Avery Island to tour the Tabasco Factory.
Presley Bo Tyler is a reporter for the Louisiana Deep South Connect Team for USA Today. Find her on X @PresleyTyler02 and email at PTyler@Gannett.com
PENSACOLA BEACH, Fla. — A local fisherman raised concerns about the substance now coating Opal Beach, citing a recent oil spill off the coast of Louisiana.
WEAR News went to officials with the Gulf Islands National Seashore and Escambia County to find out the cause.
They say it’s not related to an oil spill, but is in fact algae.
The Marine Resources Division says they can understand beachgoers’ concerns, and hope to raise awareness.
“You don’t even want to get near it because it’s so gooey and sticky,” local fisherman Larry Grossman said. “It was accumulating on my beach cart wheels yesterday, and it felt like an oil product.”
Grossman messaged WEAR News on Monday after noticing something brown and oozy in the sand. He says it started showing up by Fort Pickens and stretched down to Opal Beach.
Grossman said a park service employee told him it could be oil from a recent spill in Louisiana. So he took a message to social media, sparking some reactions and raising questions.
“it certainly didn’t seem like an algae bloom because I was in the water, I caught a fish and I put some water in the cooler to keep my fish cool and it almost looked like oil in it,” Grossman said. “I know some people think it’s an algae bloom, but it certainly smelled and felt and looked like oil.”
A Gulf Islands National Seashore spokesperson confirmed to WEAR News on Tuesday that the substance is algae.
WEAR News crews were at the beach as officials with the Escambia County Marines Resources Division came out take samples.
“What I found here washed up on the beach is some algae — filamentous algae, single celled algae — that washed ashore in some onshore winds,” said Robert Turpin, Escambia County Marines Resources Division manager. “This is the spring season, so with additional sunlight, our plants, they grow in warmer waters, with plenty of sunlight.”
Turpin says this algae is not harmful.
He also addressed the concerns that this could be oil, saying he’s familiar with what oil spills look like.
He says he appreciates when people like Grossman raise the concerns.
“The last thing in the world we want is something to gain traction on social media that is faults in nature that could harm our tourism,” Turpin said. “Our tourism is very important to our economy, and we want to give the right information out to the public so we all enjoy the beaches and enjoy them safely.”
Turpin says if you see something or suspect something may be harmful on the beach, avoid it and contact Escambia County Marine Resources.
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