How do you turn a vision for growth into billions of dollars in investment, thousands of jobs, and a new economic trajectory for an entire state?
On this episode of Madam Policy, host Dee Martin and co-host Brooke Wolters, Government Affairs Advisor at Air Liquide, speak with the leader helping drive Louisiana’s remarkable economic expansion: Louisiana Economic Development Secretary Susan Bourgeois.
Secretary Bourgeois discusses the state’s impressive investment wins, including major commitments from SpaceX and Meta, as she shares how listening to communities, building strong partnerships, and creating a “yes, and” culture within government has helped Louisiana stand out in a highly competitive landscape.
Plus, hear her candid thoughts on leadership, confidence, and the value of showing up boldly.
Watch the Conversation on YouTube:
Transcript:
Dee Martin: Welcome, everyone, to Madam Policy. I am your host, Dee Martin. I’m joined today by good friend and cohost Brooke Wolters. Brooke Wolters is a government affairs adviser at Air Liquide. Good morning, Brooke.
Brooke Wolters: Good morning, Dee. I’m so excited to be here.
Dee Martin: Well, you should be, because we have a very exciting guest today. Secretary Susan Bourgeois is here with us. She is Secretary of Louisiana Economic Development. She’s leading Louisiana right now through an historic period of growth, investment, and opportunity. And listen to this: under her leadership, LED has secured more than $250 billion in announced capital investments since 2024, and that includes landmark commitments—and we’re gonna get into these—from SpaceX, Meta, Hyundai Steel, Woodside Energy, and Amazon Web Services. This is just amazing. Louisiana has also become the first state in the nation to earn back-to-back Business Facilities Platinum Deal of the Year awards and has risen into Area Development’s top ten states for doing business. Welcome, Secretary Bourgeois.
Susan Bourgeois: Thank you, and good morning. I appreciate you giving us the opportunity to have this time together.
Dee Martin: Oh, we’re excited. The appreciation comes from us for you spending some time with us. So we’re just gonna go ahead and jump right in. Madam Secretary, you lead LED, which is the cabinet-level agency charged with strengthening the state’s business environment and creating economic opportunity. I wanna just start with what is really an enormous and complex portfolio. What’s your North Star? What guides you every day?
Susan Bourgeois: It’s really pretty simple, actually. For almost thirty years, Louisiana had seen the slowest GDP growth in the nation. We had seen a loss in population. And I’m a native Louisianian. I was born and raised here. I spent a little time in Washington, DC, but we don’t like to claim that. At the end of the day, the North Star is reversing that trajectory and making sure that our kids and our grandkids and our citizens today have the opportunity for the lifestyle they deserve and choose here in Louisiana.
Dee Martin: That is great. And I’ll tell you, just yesterday, I was on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, with one of the members of your federal delegation, and we were just talking about the enormous growth in Louisiana right now. I did tell him, and I will tell you also, that I’m originally from Arkansas, so I consider myself Louisiana adjacent. Oftentimes, that is where we would go for fun. Just so you know.
Susan Bourgeois: You’re north, north Louisiana.
Dee Martin: That’s right. North, North Louisiana. Exactly. Alright. Well, let’s jump into SpaceX. First, congratulations.
Susan Bourgeois: Thank you.
Dee Martin: You just announced that it’s investing $100 billion—that’s $100 billion with a B—to build its largest launch facility in Vermilion Parish. So congratulations on that.
Susan Bourgeois: Yes. Thank you.
Dee Martin: And I understand that the story starts with a phone call in February, and then just a little bit over six months later, the project is announced. But how do you go from the phone ringing and there being interest to closing on or announcing something of that magnitude?
Susan Bourgeois: Well, I think there’s the practical answer to that, which I’m happy to tell you, but there’s also the philosophical answer to that, which is this administration. Governor Landry told us on day one, everyone in his cabinet, there was a sense of urgency to change Louisiana’s outcomes. So we’ve done everything with that same sense of urgency, and it’s a good thing that we do because when you get to engage with a company like SpaceX, an Elon Musk company, frankly, with that sense of urgency. So philosophically, it’s how we do everything. But practically, we got the phone call on the Thursday before Mardi Gras. And for anyone who has any Louisiana experience, you understand that that is really rolling into a dead week, not an on week.
Dee Martin: Well, it’s an on week, but in different ways.
Susan Bourgeois: That’s exactly a very good point, Dee. So the phone call on Thursday was simply that some senior-level executives with the company needed to have a Zoom with me as secretary and Paige Carter, our chief business development officer, the next day. And I thought, the Friday before Mardi Gras, these people are either unaware of Louisiana or really in a hurry. So we did it. And I’m very glad we did because that started the timer, if you will, on a project that ended up being incredibly complex. And as we all know from every word that’s been used to describe what they’re going to do here, it’s transformational, not only for Louisiana, but ultimately for the world and the solar system potentially. So, yeah, six and a half months’ time from that first call to ink dried, paperwork signed, and announcement.
Dee Martin: I mean, congratulations. That is amazing. That has to go down as not only an enormous deal, but one of the fastest deals in history. So congratulations on that.
Brooke Wolters: Now, if I can jump in here, you mentioned Paige Carter, and I have had the privilege of working with you and your team in various aspects of Air Liquide investing in Louisiana and our major footprint of production in Louisiana. And my question really is, you talk about this being a team effort, and I really would like to hear more about how you’ve built this incredible team around you to really support your initiative. Can you tell us more about how you envisioned your team and executed building it out to make all of these huge successful investments happen?
Susan Bourgeois: When the governor asked me to take this job, it was really all based on the premise that we were going to be blowing up any system inside of state government that wasn’t producing the outcomes we thought Louisiana deserved. And so what I asked for from day one from him was the ability to build a team that I thought could accomplish that. But simultaneously, we actually had to make some statutory changes to how a state agency functions differently. So the great news is that the legislature overwhelmingly approved that effort, and we were simultaneously able to go out and find some of the most talented people in Louisiana in the verticals that they represent inside of our department. Some of them had worked at LED in the past in a more junior role. Some of them came purely from the private sector or other economic development agencies, but we identified the four or five verticals that we knew were going to drive the ultimate success of the department and therefore Louisiana. And we went and found the best of the best to lead those verticals. And I will say, while I get to make all the announcements—and I love that I get to be the one to do this, and I love having these kinds of dialogues and conversations—this team that we have assembled at a state agency, I would go to war with them any day. I do, and I wouldn’t want anybody else with me to do it. And so that almost $260 billion now, Dee, and all the success, it’s because of the entirety of the team.
Brooke Wolters: I will just say, I’m an Aggie, so I’ve been spending a lot of time in Baton Rouge. And I will say I have met some of the greatest folks on your team, and just in general, building out that ecosystem for companies like Air Liquide to be able to jump in and have connections and be able to talk to people has been super valuable. So it’s really encouraging to hear how you built out that team. We definitely appreciate how attentive to detail you’ve been with developing folks that are going to push for investment, and that is super incredible. But we have a game coming up, LSU versus A&M. I don’t know when this podcast will be posted, but hopefully it’ll come out to be a good outcome for A&M. But if not, I will be in Baton Rouge to at least celebrate either way.
Susan Bourgeois: Well, how about I find you there, and we’ll have a follow-up to this discussion on game day. Right?
Dee Martin: And that was when the podcast ended. The secretary left. So there we have it. I’ll let you battle this out in Louisiana. Alright. Listen. I wanna pivot to the beginning of when you became secretary. One of the first things that you did was, I think—this is a quote—to get out of Baton Rouge and to go around the state and listen to everyone and listen to what the needs were. I have a particular affinity for that because when young women ask me for career advice, one of the things that I always say is listen. Always really listen to the people with whom you’re working and then restate what it is that you think you’ve heard. You can confirm that you’re on the same page, and then you can be thinking about what the strategy is or what the next step is, but always be listening. So how did you go about your listening tour? And when you were on that listening tour, what did you hear from people across Louisiana that changed or shaped your policy priorities?
Susan Bourgeois: I think we boiled it down. I’m a bit of an organizational development nerd. And those are the kinds of things that really interest me. So when I first came into the organization, it was not just figuring out what was happening internal to the state agency, but also what was happening reputationally, how people thought about us, how people valued our work. So we identified three really core constituencies, if you will, that we needed to talk to. Practically, again, first and foremost, quite honestly, the Louisiana state legislature are the ones that fund our work. They are the ones that set the statute force. So we listened to them, and it’s interesting: we heard the same thing from them as we heard from our locals. So our locals were the second constituency, and the third constituency, and most important, were our existing Louisiana businesses, who were already there, who had already invested, who had already taken the bet. How could we serve them? And what we heard over and over again was twofold. Number one, please don’t sit in Baton Rouge and tell us what’s best for us. Make sure that you understand that, just like politics, all economic development is local first, that we have assets, we have strengths, we have risks, we have nuances to our communities, and we want you to work in our communities first and bubble up a strategy from there. And then secondly, it’s the communication from the department. And I think all things economic development for a long time had developed this sort of shroud of mystery. Like, everything had to be a secret. And in fact, of course, we have confidential processes that have to happen to make deals work. But beyond that, nothing had to be a secret and nothing should be a secret. So two things: we focused on the locals, and we started communicating openly. And I think that went a very long way in building trust and a narrative for both the department and then ultimately the state that is part of the success that we’re seeing now.
Brooke Wolters: At Air Liquide, we like to pride ourselves as the invisible backbone of industry. And when we evaluate different opportunities or locations for new investments, I think what is really important is certainty from the state and its folks to make sure that we are contributing to all of the different factors that you’re looking at, as well as, from a business standpoint, that it has a good return for us. And with that, you mentioned the Louisiana legislature, the locals, and then the businesses. When it comes to factoring all of those in, how do you take a company that is saying, “We’re really interested in Louisiana,” and turn that interest into a yes and bring them into Louisiana? I know for Air Liquide, I can speak that we are in Louisiana. So the yes has been fairly simple. But I would like to hear more about other companies. You mentioned these massive investments that previously didn’t have a footprint in Louisiana. If you could just tell us more about that.
Susan Bourgeois: Yeah. Absolutely. I think, again, there’s a philosophical piece and then there’s a practical piece. The philosophical piece—and I say it every time I speak to the legislature—is that companies like Air Liquide and many, many, many others, I believe, are looking for first or the most important factors. It’s real simple: time, risk, and money. That’s what matters to the private sector and to the decisions you make as a company and everyone else makes as a company. So everything we do inside the department and inside state government continually has to take into consideration that your perspective is time, risk, and money. So that’s the conceptual side. The practical application of that is what we have sort of dubbed our whole-of-government approach to economic development, and that is that to make projects like the ones we’ve announced successful, it can’t be one state agency, Louisiana Economic Development, operating in a vacuum, working a deal, and then handing off to someone else. We work on day one now. This cabinet does together, as well as other, you know, constitutionally created political bodies in Louisiana, the Public Service Commission, the legislature. Everyone is alongside us literally on day one on these projects. We have a strike force. It’s called Project Lightning Speed. So when a project comes to Louisiana and says, “We’re interested, here’s what we want,” we bring every regulator, every touching entity to the table on day one to work the project with us so that when we announce, when we get to that point, pre-application meetings have already taken place for permits. Our environmental—DEQ has already put in their line of sight what they will need and when. Our workforce commission is already looking at what the workforce needs will be. And, frankly, we’ve expanded it to a whole-of-Louisiana approach because we use the locals and the private sector just as much as we use government. And that is the secret sauce. The brilliant consultants at McKinsey, quite honestly, told us if we could formalize that, which we’ve now done, it would be a competitive advantage, and we’re seeing the results of that.
Brooke Wolters: From our side, we’re experiencing it. And you mentioned Project Lightning Speed, the objective of the whole-of-government, whole-of-Louisiana approach. We’ve also had the benefit of utilizing Source Louisiana, which is another amazing program that has benefited both businesses that are investing, making sure that we are in that community and bringing in suppliers that are local and really advancing where we wanna go with our investments. Now, I know we spoke a little bit earlier about your team, and I have to give a quick shout-out to Jacob Ellis because he gets a lot of my emails and phone calls, and he has been great. One thing that I really find valuable is the personal touch that your team and extended team in the other departments have. I have an opportunity to give a call to someone, and they will answer, and it’s a real person who will give me direction on what we are looking for. And I think that is really valuable. And when you are setting up your team, is that something that you wanted to implement, having a point of contact for companies that they can talk to, a real person, whenever they have issues or something arises that they need to talk about?
Susan Bourgeois: Yeah. Absolutely. It’s not just the point of contact. So that’s sort of more internal structure. It’s also, philosophically, that we want to be an agency and ultimately an entire government that makes it easy for you to succeed, you being at any company, Air Liquide and many others, obviously. Because when you’re successful in Louisiana, Louisiana is successful. So we turned the organization into what I call a “yes, and” organization. We won’t always be able to do everything exactly the way you or other folks need, but we will always work to find the best solution. And that ease of use, that commitment that we have, I think, is showing in all of our programs and our incentives and, frankly, just in the way our team operates. So that’s the big piece. But to your point about picking up a phone and talking to a person and getting an answer, that’s also a structural piece. Companies need some consistency in the people that they deal with and in the expectations, because what had happened before is that we’d announce a project, and then that project manager, if you will, would sort of move on to getting the next project instead of the fulfillment side of our commitments and our work. And that was a clunky and perhaps not always successful methodology. And so we have a real commitment to knowing that the fulfillment after the announcement is frankly far more critical to the success of the project than getting to the announcement. And that’s how we work in everything that we do.
Dee Martin: I wanna pivot for just a minute to another major investment sector in Louisiana, which is investment in data centers. We’re seeing the growth of data center investment across the United States. We’ve seen other states wrestle maybe with some of the challenges that can accompany projects of that scale. So when you’re thinking of data centers, how do you evaluate the demands on power, water, infrastructure, or workforce—which I know is really important to you and to the governor—against the jobs, investment, and longer-term economic benefits? Now, from my perspective, it may not be fair to bifurcate them in that way because I think they all work together. But how do you evaluate those projects?
Susan Bourgeois: They do all work together, Dee. It’s a great point. And we got incredibly lucky. There’s always a silver lining to every cloud. Louisiana was really late to the data center game. Three years ago might have felt like a problem, and today feels like a real privilege. Because what it allowed us to do is that Meta, the massive Meta announcement and investment, happened to be our first one. We cut our teeth on Meta. And when you cut your teeth on a project with a company of that size and scale who had so much experience in other states and frankly other countries doing this kind of thing, the deal we worked with Meta up front, before we were talking about this on a national stage—everything you just laid out was a consideration and an element of the deal itself, from protection of natural resources and consumer protection to making sure that the company paid for its generation and more, grid resiliency and upgrades, and local community impact. All of those things were factored into the Meta deal. The $50 billion Meta deal. What that allowed us to do is create a prototype we didn’t realize we were creating at the time, but we’ve now spun that off into a framework under which all data center conversations we have have seven elements that have to be addressed before we will, frankly, give the data center sales tax exemption, which is a pretty critical element to any major data center investment. So we were able to take the learnings from our Meta deal and the success we had in that regard. And I think a lot of people have heard about it, but I can’t say it enough. Richland Parish, which is where Meta is located, is a rural parish, primarily agricultural in nature. And it had seen a loss of population and a loss of economic investment for years and years and years. The Meta investment—the average wage of the Meta jobs is somewhere around $85,000 to $90,000 a year. The sales tax collection increase has led to this: in year one of the construction of the project—they’re not even operational yet—every teacher in Richland Parish got a $50,000 bonus. Bonus, not salary. Because of the sales tax increase in their first full year of construction. And I did an interview with a national reporter. I won’t sell him out, but he was almost condescending in his question when he said, “All of this for…” The original number was five hundred jobs. It’s now a thousand jobs, by the way, permanent jobs. He said, “All of this for five hundred jobs, is it really worth it?” And we were on the site when he said that. And I said, “With all due respect, there’s not a place in Louisiana that you’re gonna hear somebody say only five hundred jobs.” Paying $90,000 to $95,000 a year with health benefits, with private health insurance, with retirement benefits. Maybe that’s a luxury other states have. I’m not sure. But I will tell you that is not a conversation Louisiana has. And so now those five hundred permanent jobs have become a thousand permanent jobs. Five years’ worth of construction jobs have become ten years’ worth of construction jobs. Teachers in Richland Parish are now some of the highest-paid teachers in this state. I’ll take those kinds of projects all day long.
Dee Martin: And I’ll… Okay. I realize I’m not in that interview, and it’s not my job. But I will say this. First of all, I think that was an out-of-touch question. I think that was an out-of-touch response from the reporter. I also don’t know who it was. But also, that doesn’t even count… You have the five hundred, the thousand, and the long-term. That doesn’t even count all of the ancillary job growth when a project like that comes to an area. I feel like that was very shortsighted.
Brooke Wolters: I agree.
Susan Bourgeois: But you know what? I think it is more indicative of a more national narrative around data centers that frankly does not match the Louisiana narrative around data centers, because after Richland Parish announced that teacher raise, I can’t tell you how many leaders of other parishes in Louisiana called our office and said, “Do y’all have any looking here? Can you help us get one here?” That’s very different than what one would think is happening with the national dialogue.
Dee Martin: Well, congratulations on that. And, I mean, you don’t need my help answering any questions on that. I’m glad. So first of all, I have to say, I feel this connection to you because you’ve said all the things that I love. You have a framework. There’s a template. There’s a checklist. You’re an organizational nerd. And I feel like when you’re dealing with a multitude of projects or tasks of the magnitude with which you are contending, you have to have that level of organization. There’s no question there. I just wanted to say thank you. You’ve affirmed my approach to life, and I appreciate that.
Susan Bourgeois: Well, thank you. Kindred spirits.
Dee Martin: Kindred spirits. Alright. We just have two more questions for you, and these are more on a personal note. I’m gonna ask Brooke to go first, and then I’m gonna close this out. Brooke, go ahead.
Brooke Wolters: Yes. So I have had the pleasure of interacting with you this past year in many different facets and venues, and really seeing you be such a strong leader of your department as well as just the community that you represent. And I’m thirty-one years old, and I would love to learn and build my own confidence. But when you walk into a room, you own it. You go in with such confidence. And as someone who is still trying to develop my leadership skills, I would love to know where that comes from for you, or what you worked on to hone in on that strong presence that you bring to the table.
Susan Bourgeois: Gosh. Well, thank you, because that’s an incredibly flattering question. We could have talked the whole time about this because there are a lot of answers to that question. The first thing I will tell you is being authentic. And in that authenticity, I will lead with, I haven’t always been this way. I was a different person. I’ve always had some level of comfort in a room, in a crowd, and I think there are some qualities of leadership that are inherent. Some can be learned, but I believe I was born with a few of them, and I’ve developed a lot more. But there is a tremendous benefit that comes with age—not from a years perspective, age from an experience perspective—that develops your own confidence level and comfort in your own skin. But the other thing I will say, again very authentically, is when I first was in the discussion about this job, I had this huge bout of imposter syndrome. I battled with, what makes me think I can do this? Those weren’t words that I said out loud to many people other than maybe my husband and my sister. But I said, what makes me think that I can do this? And finally, I just went, I know I can do this. This is, at the end of the day, again, organizational development frameworks. So it’s relational. It’s formulaic in many respects. It’s authenticity built into that. And so the biggest advice I could give to you, Brooke—and, by the way, from your appearance, I would have always said you were thirty-one, but from your presence and your professionalism, I would have said you have a lot more years of that experience, so good for you—is trusting your voice. Just trust your own voice because I think—I don’t know, maybe it’s women, maybe it’s young women—I battled it. You might battle it sometimes too. But first and foremost, trust your own voice. You are in the seat that you’re in, and you’re in the role that you’re in—and I say this to the whole audience—because of the skills and the experience you have, wherever you fit on that spectrum, and trust that. And the more you lead with it, the more it works. The more it works, the more you feel it, the more you embody it. And then I’ll tell you another little secret about owning a room, and I got this great advice from another political friend of mine, who happens to have a background in journalism and a media presence. She said she learned a tip early on, and it’s called extreme posture. That before you go in a room or before the camera turns on, you stand or sit. Look, I’m fixing it now in a way.
Dee Martin: I do. I do. I’m telling all our secrets.
Susan Bourgeois: You stand or sit in a way that feels extreme to you. That’s why it’s called extreme posture. But in reality, it just gives you a presence that people notice. So extreme posture when you walk in a room, it’s an amazing thing.
Dee Martin: That is so great. We have done over 150 episodes of Madam Policy, and that is the most practical advice to have and to implement. Thank you for that. So on that note, Madam Secretary, thank you so much for being here. Just one other—we close every episode with—and you’ve given a lot of this already—we close every episode with, what advice would you give to your twenty-four-year-old self?
Brooke Wolters: A bit younger than me.
Susan Bourgeois: Calling that out. My advice to my twenty-four-year-old self would be: be as bold on the outside as you wanna be on the inside. Don’t let the filter between how you feel you should be and what you believe you can do stifle that. Be as bold on the outside as you feel on the inside, because I felt it at twenty-four. I just didn’t act on it.
Dee Martin: Well, that is amazing advice. Every time I meet and talk with you, you get cooler and cooler, so thank you. And thank you so much for joining us today. Look, I’m still doing my extreme posture. Thank you so much for being with us today. It was a real pleasure. Thank you for your time.
Susan Bourgeois: Thank you all for having me.