Published: February 24, 2026
By: Gracie Thomas, Dakota Laszlo, and Kylah Babin, LSU Manship School News Service
BATON ROUGE–Federal and state budgeting policies could force Louisiana into structural budget shortfalls approaching $300 million in fiscal 2027 and more than $1 billion by 2029, the director of a nonpartisan think tank, Invest in Louisiana, told the Press Club of Baton Rouge on Monday.
“These aren’t my numbers,” said Jan Moller, the group’s executive director and a former statehouse reporter for The Times-Picayune. He said the numbers come from the state Legislative Fiscal Office and the Legislature’s Joint Budget Committee.
Moller said the shortfall predictions are based on what he called “simple math.”
“State revenues peaked in 2024 and are slowly going down, certainly on an inflation-adjusted basis,” Moller said. “And the projected costs of running state government are going up.”
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LSU Manship School Statehouse Bureau 
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