Those heady days are long gone. In December, Jindal had a 41 percent approval rating, according to SMOR Louisiana Report, an independent state poll. Analysts say voters think he has cut too much and been inattentive to the state’s needs while pursuing his national political ambitions. On a per-student basis, Jindal’s cuts to the public colleges and universities have been the deepest of any state over the past eight years, according to the Center on Budget & Policy Priorities. Raising tuition—which does not count as a tax increase, although the effect is the same—has filled most of the gap. Tuition at the public institutions will be 90 percent higher in 2015 than when Jindal took office.

In 2013, Jindal sought to eliminate state income taxes, as several other Republican governors were proposing at the time. He abandoned the plan on the opening day of the legislative session. Legislators rebelled because he would have offset the lost income tax revenue by raising business taxes and giving Louisiana the country’s highest sales tax rate. This move technically would not have violated the no-tax pledge because it would simply have replaced, rather than raised, tax revenue. But it wouldn’t have helped the fiscal situation, either, for precisely the same reason.

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Reluctant to pay the political price to cut more and sticking by the pledge has put Jindal in a fiscal box. His solution: Rely increasingly on what Richardson, the LSU economist, calls “all sorts of gimmicks”—balancing the budget through one-time sales of state property, legal settlements with companies sued by the state, the elimination of vacant state jobs and a tax amnesty program. “Doing it for one year is not bad policy,” said Richardson. “But doing it for four or five years is not sustainable.”

Steve Winham, who served as the state’s budget director for Democratic and Republican governors, knocks Jindal for another patchwork scheme: taking money from state agencies or programs to plug the overall hole and, in the process, creating new and often more expensive problems. For example, the Jindal administration has taken about $7 million per year away from the state park maintenance fund. The result: a $21 million backlog in repair work for state parks. Winham also points to techniques he describes as shell games: A $25 payment to get an Animal Friendly license plate, for example, hasn't gone to spay cats and dogs—as many people believe—but instead has provided a total of $30,000 for the budget. And then there are budget schemes that have yet to materialize. For the past two years, the Jindal administration said the state would collect about $15 million by selling the campus of Southeast Louisiana Hospital. The sale has yet to happen.

These tactics have failed to close the budget shortfall. Louisiana finished 2014 with an operating deficit of $167 million, said Richardson. “We just kind of muddle through every year,” Winham said. “But we’re finally hitting the wall. It’s sad.”

Jindal bragged in a 2008 Wall Street Journal op-ed that he had ended the practice of using one-time money to fill budget gaps, but he now says the state legislature’s budgeting practices have forced him to resort to the device. This year’s budget has $1.1 billion in money that won’t be available next year—four times as much as the 2013 budget. His increasing use of one-time funds has given rise to a group of dissatisfied Republican state House members known as the Fiscal Hawks. Their leader is state Rep. Brett Geymann, a conservative Republican and oil pipe salesman from the city of Lake Charles. Geymann and other Fiscal Hawks have sought meetings with Jindal to discuss their concerns, to no avail. “He’s a conservative in that he doesn’t want to raise taxes and wants a business-friendly environment,” Geymann said. “But this administration—with a Republican legislature—has continued to spend more than it has taken in. That in my view is not fiscally conservative.”

Like Winham, Geymann believes another reason Jindal has exhausted the easy options is because he has drawn down the various state reserve funds. When Jindal took office, the Medicaid Trust Fund for the Elderly had $800 million. That money is now gone. The Office of Group Benefits—the health insurance program for current and retired state employees—had $500 million in 2011. Then the Jindal administration lowered the premiums that both the beneficiaries and the state had to pay to the fund, which helped fill the state’s budget hole but helped drop the fund’s bottom line to $120 million. The state rainy day fund had $730 million when Jindal took office. Today? $460 million. At one point, Jindal had a $450 million fund to subsidize companies for investing in Louisiana. That money is—you guessed it—gone. “He’s drained every savings account we have,” said Kennedy, the state treasurer.

The result is a budget crisis, according to Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne, a Republican who is running for governor this year. “It’s as bad as I’ve seen it over my career,” he said. “If I’m governor, I’ll have my sleeves rolled up every day dealing with the problem. It’s staggering the number of days he’s gone. I don’t know what he’s doing. It does not appear that the budget problems are on his radar screen.”

Republican U.S. Sen. David Vitter, the early front-runner in the governor’s race, has said that, if elected, he would call a special session as soon as he took office next year “to stabilize the state budget and promote greater job growth.”

Jindal believes that his successor will be building on his successes, which include improved bond ratings and billions of dollars in new investment in the petrochemical industry. Independent analysts attribute much of the new investment to low natural gas prices that were outside Jindal’s control. The governor insists, however, that reducing taxes and shrinking the size of government has been the key. “We’re a top five state for private-sector growth,” he told me.

Economic growth in Louisiana has slowed since 2010, however, and Louisiana was one of only two states where the unemployment rate rose in 2014. Jindal attributes that to population growth and more people looking for work. Louisiana’s labor force grew at the fastest rate of any state last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But Louisiana’s economy is worsening now with the oil price drop. Sasol, a South African conglomerate, announced last week it would delay a $14 billion natural gas project in Lake Charles that Jindal had repeatedly touted as a sign of the state’s economic boom. In the meantime, no one can deny that the cuts to the state’s colleges and universities will hurt job creation.

Political insiders believe that Jindal thought he could skirt the budget problems during his final year while he decamped to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina—critical early states in the 2016 presidential race. That no longer seems possible. The fate of a modest program that Jindal championed last year illustrates why. The initiative provided $40 million for the state’s colleges and universities to craft programs to educate students for high-demand jobs. The Associated Press reported last week that the initiative was facing the ax. The Baton Rouge Advocate promptly editorialized that the decision was “typical of the chronic mismanagement of the state budget under” Jindal.

Jindal’s administration just as promptly backtracked and is now proposing to save the program. How? By taking $30 million from a federal hurricane recovery fund.