page_title: Bobby Jindal
section_title: Foster administration
hierarchical_section_title: Bobby Jindal / Early political career (1996–2003) / Foster administration
caption_attribution_description: Bobby Jindal at Department of Health and Human Services. He served as Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation.
context_page_description: Piyush "Bobby" Jindal is an American politician who served as the 55th Governor of Louisiana from 2008 to 2016. Jindal previously served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives and Chairman of the Republican Governors Association.
  In 1995, Jindal was appointed secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals. In 1999, he was appointed president of the University of Louisiana System. At 28, Jindal became the youngest person to hold the position. In 2001, President George W. Bush appointed Jindal as principal adviser to the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services.
  Jindal first ran for governor of Louisiana in 2003, but narrowly lost in the run-off election to Democratic candidate Kathleen Blanco. In 2004, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, becoming the second Indian American in Congress, and he was reelected in 2006. To date, he is the only Indian-American Republican to have ever served in Congress. Jindal ran for governor again in the 2007 election and won. Jindal was re-elected in 2011 in a landslide, winning more than 65 percent of the vote.
context_section_description: In 1993, U.S. Representative Jim McCrery (whom Jindal had worked for as a summer intern) introduced him to Governor Mike Foster. In 1996, Foster appointed Jindal as Secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, an agency that represented about 40 percent of the state budget and employed over 12,000 people. Foster called Jindal a genius who had a great deal of medical knowledge. Jindal was 24 at the time.
  During his tenure, Louisiana's Medicaid program went from bankruptcy with a $400 million deficit into three years of surpluses totaling $220 million.
  Jindal was criticized during the 2007 campaign by the Louisiana AFL-CIO for closing some local clinics to reach that surplus. Under Jindal's term, Louisiana nationally rose to third place in child healthcare screenings, with child immunizations rising, and introduced new and expanded services for the elderly and the disabled.
  In 1998, Jindal was appointed executive director of the National Bipartisan Commission on the Future of Medicare, a 17-member panel charged with devising plans to reform Medicare. In 1999, at the request of the Louisiana governor's office and the Louisiana State Legislature, Jindal examined how Louisiana might use its $4.4 billion share of the tobacco settlement.
  In 1998, Jindal received the Samuel S. Beard Award for greatest public service by an individual 35 years old or under, an award given annually by Jefferson Awards.
  At 28 years of age in 1999, Jindal was appointed to become the youngest-ever president of the University of Louisiana System, the nation's 16th largest system of higher education with over 80,000 students.
caption: Jindal while working for the Department of Health and Human Services
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