(The Center Square) – Louisiana’s state government has handed out taxpayer-funded credit cards to thousands of state employees, with more than $1 billion in transactions over the past six years, an investigation by The Center Square found.
The biggest spender by far: Louisiana State University, with more than 4,000 cards issued and accounting for one-third of all expenses. The university rang up $383 million since 2020 – following the state’s last attempt at a comprehensive audit of its employees’ charge card spending.
Gov. Jeff Landry launched a DOGE-inspired initiative in late 2024 to cut fiscal waste. As that effort prepares to zero in on the state’s LaCarte purchasing cards, The Center Square found that for years most of the oversight and auditing of card spending has been done in-house by the agencies. State policy makes each agency responsible for reconciling its charges and conducting its monthly random audits.
Now, the vast sums flowing through the cards, known as PCards, will be under scrutiny by State Inspector General Angele Davis’ office, the Legislative Auditor’s office confirmed to The Center Square.
That review will include LSU, according to the auditor, which has even more independence from state oversight of its card expenses than other government entities. In 2015, the state Board of Regents granted the university “operational autonomy,” allowing LSU to avoid usual scrutiny from the state auditor. It is the only Louisiana institution with such an arrangement, and a huge chunk of the school’s credit card spending is at taxpayers’ expense.
“This is the first time I’ve heard of this,” state Senate President Cameron Henry, R-Metairie, told The Center Square. “I would ask the auditor to look into it and why they have such vast autonomy.”
In 2025 alone, LSU spent $69.6 million through more than 133,000 card transactions. About a quarter of that – $18.7 million – was covered by taxpayers, school officials said. Most of LSU’s budget comes from tuition payments, sports revenues, private grants, donations and other income, but taxpayers fund about 22% of its operations.
Among LSU’s card expenses last year: $3.7 million on hotels, $2.2 million on Delta flights, $251,000 on Chick-fil-A, $178,000 for Airbnb rentals, and $32,000 for limousine services.
LSU’s top PCard spender last year was Jake Steinhardt, a senior business coordinator for travel in the Athletics Business Office. He spent $5.2 million, the vast majority on hotels throughout the country. It’s unclear if the bookings were for sports teams or other business purposes.
Steinhardt and other school employees who spent big on their cards declined interview requests from The Center Square.
The governor told The Center Square he’s confident LSU has spent taxpayer dollars appropriately.
“The LaCarte card is nothing more than a different payment method,” Landry said in an emailed statement. “This is not additional money, but rather money already in LSU’s budget. I am confident that (LSU President Wade Rousse) and the new leadership at LSU will continue to find efficiencies and ensure taxpayer dollars are being put to best use.”
Nearly 4,400 LSU employees, including athletics personnel, administrators, professors, researchers and even graduate students rang up charges with the card, according to data provided in a public records request. There is no limit to the number of cardholders LSU or any state agency is allowed. Some 8,600 other Louisiana state employees have PCards throughout other departments and schools.
“If you had seven kids, and you gave each kid a credit card to spend, that would be a problem,” Sheila Weinberg, founder and CEO of Truth in Accounting, told The Center Square. “Just having all these numerous cards that exist for numerous agencies, there’s a risk for misuse.”
The school isn’t the only state agency racking up millions of dollars per year. The second-highest spender, the Department of Public Safety, spent $17 million in 2025 through 35,000 transactions. The University of Louisiana at Lafayette spent $16.4 million with 43,000 transactions.
Across the past six years, total PCard spending throughout the state government came to $1.18 billion, charged by 2.7 million swipes and taps of cards.
DOGE treatment
Last month, The Center Square reported expenditures made on the LaCarte cards will be examined as part of a broader crackdown by the Louisiana Fiscal Responsibility Program. The program, modeled after the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, has already found almost $1 billion in inefficiencies across state government, Landry said earlier this month.
In fact, the federal initiative led by Elon Musk looked at federal purchasing card spending early last year. DOGE announced in June that its audit of unused and unneeded credit cards resulted in 610,000 deactivated cards across 55 federal agencies – out of 4.6 million cards at the start of the audit.
“I think all they succeeded in doing was taking away cards from people who weren’t using them,” said Richard Palmer, co-author of “Government Use of Credit Cards: Is DOGE Barking Up the Wrong Tree?” published last year in the Journal of Government Financial Management.
Palmer, an accounting professor at Washington University in St. Louis, has been tracking federal PCards since the 1990s. He said the cards have more advantages than disadvantages – saving mountains of expenses by eliminating purchasing and requisition costs.
Among the benefits, PCard spending records are accessible and traceable. The cards can be set up with credit limits, to block unauthorized purchases, to limit purchases to preferred vendors, and to give governments cash back, he said.
That’s the case with Louisiana’s LaCarte program, which generates an annual rebate, according to records reviewed by The Center Square. A 2021 audit put the rebate at $19.2 million over a four-year period.
“It’s not an easy thing to defraud the company or the government on, because you’re leaving a permanent electronic record of what you did,” Palmer said. “They can rip off the taxpayer a thousand ways besides credit cards. Look at Minneapolis if you don’t believe that.”
But Palmer added that PCards should be well-policed.
The state auditor hasn’t fully reviewed the state’s credit card program since the 2021 audit, when it undertook a narrow analysis of finances, detailing only LSU’s total spending from 2016 to 2019. The auditor did not evaluate individual expenditures and did not investigate any failures of oversight and control, but reported spending had risen from $161 million to $192 million.
In various departmental audits since then, the auditor did note poor controls and noncompliance. In 2025, total PCard spending topped $207 million.
Patrice Gremillion, who manages LSU’s card program, told The Center Square that unallowed transactions happen “sporadically” and that “we are not 100% clean, but we are 100% audited.” She added that the state can also be reimbursed for any unallowed charges.
LSU “receives taxpayer support because they are viewed as public goods that provide significant economic returns, workforce development, and essential research for the state,” LSU told The Center Square in an emailed statement. “These expenses are incurred to support the mission of LSU as an institution of higher education and are governed by the university, state, federal, and any other applicable policies.”
But that state governing is limited. LSU’s “operational autonomy” was authorized a decade ago by the Louisiana Granting Resources and Autonomy for Diplomas Act. The legislation allows public universities to enter agreements with the Board of Regents for certain autonomies if they met various performance standards, like improving graduation rates and partnerships with high schools to prepare future students.
Now LSU controls the cards, the rules and the auditing.
What are they buying?
The Center Square obtained a spreadsheet of LSU’s 2025 PCard spending, showing cardholders’ names, vendor names, purchase amounts and billing dates. Backup documentation of individual charges was not provided in time for publication.
Many of the highest charges appear to be related to sports teams and recruitment, with four employees in the athletics department racking up over $10 million dollars alone, the data shows. The largest single expenditures are for hotels, including roughly $2 million at Hilton, $1.3 million at Marriott, and $386,000 at Holiday Inn. One Hilton charge was nearly $400,000, despite the card being designed for “small dollar purchases.”
Other expenses: $82,000 in Uber rides, $22,000 in Lyft rides, $30,000 charged to ChatGPT, $57,319 for the Oxford University Press, $19,290 for food and pet supplies for the veterinary school and K9 police, and $153,000 in various expenses for the golf program, to name a few.
Expenditures related to research purposes from the Pennington Biomedical Research Center make up over $3.7 million.
With such a vast universe of cards and transactions, Weinberg, of Truth in Accounting, said she doubts the Inspector General can scrutinize every credit card charge. More likely, she said, they’ll use a test of transactions, which means pulling a sample of cards and checking for proper authorization, legitimate spending, and compliance with policies, she said.
“From that, if there’s a problem, then they extrapolate that to all of the cards,” said Weinberg, a certified public accountant. “If there were problems, it would lead probably to an even larger review.”
