Gov. Jeff Landry: DOGE-Like Reforms Coming to Louisiana | CLIP | American Thought Leaders

Your ranking on education went from 50 to 30 or 32. How does that even happen? Well, we started our educational forms through supporting the BSEE board. I got to that point. So BSEE is the educational committee, basically, that our constitution creates that oversees K through 12 in the state of Louisiana. And they govern the schools. And we appointed five. We got the government gets five appointees. And we kept our superintendent of education, who is extremely conservative, great guy, Kate Brumley. So right coming out the box, we put five conservatives on BSEE. And they began to go to work. And so we were able to complement some of the things that they did with our educational reforms in the regular session. And we started to see our reading scores improve. You can be surprised at the type of results that you can see overnight when you start to move fast, when you when you when you start to be bold. I mean, look, look how much President Trump has accomplished in four weeks. OK, and you starting to see tangible results from some of the things that you that that he's doing. And so we have we we believe and the ESA work that we did on the educational scholarships have not even gone into effect. But we did things like we put a program together that calls for let the teachers teach. So we started stripping away the bureaucracy of things that we placed on on teachers that have nothing to do with teachers, but trying to make teachers social workers instead of teachers. And so we stripped that away. We concentrated on reading, writing, arithmetic, you know, going back to the basics, all things that we promised on a campaign trail. And when you empower teachers to me on the biggest reason you're seeing some of those metrics is because teachers today in Louisiana believe that they've been liberated, that they have a governor, they have a BSEE board, they have a superintendent of education at the state level who support teachers. And it was easy for me because my mom was a teacher, and my godmother was a teacher, and I had a couple of aunts that were teachers. And so when you recognize that the most important voice in a child's education are parents, and then the most important person in that child's life after the parents are their teachers, and when you empower parents and you empower teachers, you get great results. That's really astonishing and commendable that you can get people reading better in such a short period of time by focusing on it. And math. I'm definitely going to be calling your— Yeah, Kade. We're going to get Kade. Yes. I'm going to be calling him up because probably there's other people that will want to know what you guys are all up to. Again, the rankings that came out were really astonishing. It surprised me when Kade called me. I was like, you got to be kidding me. And he's like, no. And a lot of those rankings have to do with the reforms that we made, the things that we put in place, and I think you should have him on the show. So this is making Louisiana great again, I suppose, right? It is. That's what you said your plan is, right? Absolutely. Look, it builds upon President Trump's motto of common sense and making America great again. You make America great again when you make your state great. And the more states that become great, the greater America becomes. And one of the contentious things, or at least contentious from what I heard when it comes to education, was you decided that the Ten Commandments need to be in the schools. And so explain to me your thinking. Yeah, well, I didn't know the Ten Commandments was a bad way to live your life. I still hadn't figured that whole thing out. The funny part about it is that Dodie Horton, who's a state representative from Louisiana, unbelievable person, just a great person, she was the author of the bill. And I didn't realize that the bill was actually moving through the session. I'll be quite honest with you all and go to a little confession here. I didn't realize the bill had moved this way all the way through until it got to my desk, and I was signing all these other educational improvements. And I looked, and they're like, oh, we put in the Ten Commandments. And I was like, that's great. Okay, no problem. I didn't think anything of it. And then the liberal media and people went crazy. And I thought to myself, wow, I didn't know the Ten Commandments was a bad way to live your life. And the Ten Commandments are fully on display in the United States Supreme Court. Moses is in full display in the U.S. House chamber. We know that the original lawgiver was Moses, right? He is the foundational father of law. And so how we can't put that in our schools is amazing to me. You should let your child read the Ten Commandments or they're going to end up having to learn a criminal code. The criticism is that it elevates the Christian faith above all others in the classroom, and that people argue that that shouldn't be the case. I think that's the substance of the argument. Judaism. I mean, no, no, no, no, no. The Ten Commandments are not owned by the Christian religion. I mean, look, the Muslim religion, Judaism, Christianity, all of those religions recognize the Ten Commandments. Moses was there before them all. Okay, let's not forget that. And so that to me is, again, one of the unbelievable tenants of our ability to place the Ten Commandments in full view in a public school. A school is a place of learning, okay? It is an institution under which you teach someone something. And so to keep things like that out, basically means that you don't want people to understand what those things are. And so when you take a document like the Ten Commandments and you claim that by placing it there is a violation of church and state, you evidently have never read our Constitution or our Bill of Rights because again, I think we've had this conversation here before, there is no text in the First Amendment under which it says separation of church and state. So we look forward to litigating this case. It's going to be a great case. Attorney General Liz Murrow is going to have a field day with this case. You've also banned CRT, Critical Race Theory, in K-12. What's been the impact of that? I just told you, our report card went to 32, right? So you take those kind of things out of the mix, right? I mean, look, all things like Critical Race Theory, DEI, ESG, all of those things do is divide people, right? America was supposed to be a country which recognized unity, right? It was a melting pot. But when you melt things, you come up with one, right? You think about our motto, you've read my mind. That's exactly where I was going. And so again, I think that what we're doing, and I said this during my inauguration, is that we are going to focus education instead of indoctrination on education. We're going to ensure that teachers get to educate kids and they're not indoctrinating kids. And I think that things like CRT and DEI and those other very liberal policies only indoctrinate kids, they don't educate them. Was it hard to do that, to institute that ban, to make sure it was happening? I mean, you had the normal actors whose hair was on fire. But look, Louisiana is a very conservative state. We have super majorities in both the House and the Senate. And here's what else I'll say. Every one of the reforms that I talked to you about, we passed with bipartisan support. And I'm not talking to just one Democrat, with large bipartisan support in the legislature. And I think that speaks volumes that these are issues that transcend political parties, right? They're not owned by, I mean, public safety. Who doesn't want to be safe? Who doesn't want their kids to have a better education? Who doesn't want a higher standard of living that raises wages for everyone, more jobs, and opportunities to go to work? It's not like a Republican thing or a Democrat thing, it's an American thing. Another thing that you actually touched on is this executive order on election integrity, right? Yes, yes. In fact, we're getting ready to have our Secretary of State get ready to put an RFP out, under which we're finally going to get some new machines. The prior governor had thwarted the Secretary of State's ability to change the machines. We've got some machines that date back to the 1990s. I don't know how they even work anymore. But we're going to institute an election system under which a voter votes and gets a receipt, so there will be an actual paper ballot that that voter can look at and say, this is how I want to vote. And that is scanned in and tabulated, and then that receipt is put in a box so that we can reconcile that with the voting. And that is the way that it should be, right? That is a way to not have to depend on electronic voting machines, which there are too many transactions happening in that, and giving voters the confidence that their elections are based upon or sit upon a solid foundation. Do you think that—this is probably a trick question—how is what the Trump administration is doing federally impacting what you're trying to do in Louisiana? Look, I think that the things that the president and his administration are doing have the ability to cause ripples in both positive and sometimes negative ways. But I do believe that when everything is laid out, the waters will begin to calm and America will be a much stronger place. I think that what they're doing up here helps to support things that we want to do back in Louisiana. I think that when legislators see the actions of this administration and the president doing things like abolishing DEI, like signing an executive order protecting women in women's sports, taking men out of women's sports, and so forth, like all the things that he's doing, I think that that provides what I call—and I told the president this—he has an opportunity, and he continues to do this. He gives people liquid courage. He gives legislators in our states liquid courage. I think you're going to see Texas pass a school choice, something that has thwarted them. I think Governor Abbott has continuously tried to pass school choice in the state of Texas. But I think because of the way that the president is leaning into that and supporting it, I think it gives courage and cover for those legislators who weren't quite sure to actually make those hard votes. And I don't think they're hard votes. I think they're easy. It's just they listen to a loudmouth minority.