BATON ROUGE (AP) — Gov. John Bel Edwards and Attorney General Jeff Landry appear to have worked out their latest budget dispute.
The attorney general sought to boost spending in his budget on Medicaid fraud investigations and to take money from the health department to defend Louisiana abortion laws against a lawsuit. But the Edwards administration refused to advance the requests to the Legislature's joint budget committee for consideration.
After a Friday meeting between the two men, Edwards says he's found a mechanism to pay for the abortion lawsuit work that doesn't involve taking dollars from the health department. And the governor says he's working with Landry to bolster the fraud investigation unit.
The elected officials didn't agree on a separate dispute involving blocked legal contracts, and Edwards filed a lawsuit Friday against Landry.
