Donald Trump

BATON ROUGE — Today, Gov. John Bel Edwards wrote an op-ed in the American Press highlighting the strength of Southwest Louisiana and the state's booming energy economy, as President Donald Trump travels to Cameron Parish. 

The op-ed is below: 

Shining a spotlight on Southwest Louisiana, and Our State’s Energy Sector
By Gov. John Bel Edwards

The Trump administration has agreed to rewrite regulations to help thousands of Louisiana homeowners with damage from the 2016 floods access federal aid, the state's U.S. senators said Thursday.

Republican Sens. Bill Cassidy and John Kennedy said that U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson spoke with them and confirmed details of the fix. HUD oversees the disaster assistance money.

The federal government shutdown will cause slight permanent harm to the economy — about $3 billion — according to a report Monday by the Congressional Budget Office. The report says the five-week shutdown has slowed growth in the near term but that most of the lost growth "will eventually be recovered."

The partial government shutdown is a double-whammy for Cara and Philip Mangone, a married couple from Philadelphia.

Both are agents with the Transportation Safety Administration, both working full time at the Philadelphia airport.

Neither knows when they might again start drawing their paychecks. Part-time jobs are out of the question — they work opposite shifts timed to make sure one of them is always home with their kids, ages 2 and 5. So donations of food and diapers have been a real help as savings are being stretched thin.

Vacation jaunts and hobnobbing with global elites at a Swiss ski resort are out for President Donald Trump. Visits with troops and farmers are OK.

Like some of his recent predecessors, Trump is carefully picking and choosing where he'll travel during the partial government shutdown.

He visited with U.S. troops stationed at a military base in western Iraq the day after Christmas and flew to the U.S.-Mexico border in southern Texas last week to try to buttress his argument for billions of dollars to build a wall to stem illegal immigration, drug trafficking and crime.

President Donald Trump often points to farmers as among the biggest winners from the administration's proposed rollback of federal protections for wetlands and waterways across the country.

But under longstanding federal law and rules, farmers and farmland already are exempt from most of the regulatory hurdles on behalf of wetlands that the Trump administration is targeting.