AUSTIN – The Texas House approved a roughly $337 billion two-year spending plan early Friday, putting billions toward teacher pay, border security and property tax cuts, after more than 13 hours of debate that saw hundreds of amendments — from Democrats and hardline conservatives alike — meet their demise.
The House budget largely aligns with a version the Senate passed in March, though lawmakers made several changes on the floor that will have to be ironed out behind closed doors with their Senate counterparts. The biggest amendment of the day, from Rep. Mary González, D-Clint, eliminated funding for the Texas Lottery Commission and for economic development and tourism in the governor’s office, to the tune of more than $1 billion. Both remain funded in the Senate’s latest budget draft.
The House’s proposal, approved on a 118 to 26 vote, would spend around $154 billion in general revenue, Texas’ main source of taxpayer funds used to pay for core services. The bulk of general revenue spending would go toward education, with large buckets of funding also dedicated to health and human services and public safety agencies.
Both chambers’ spending plans leave about $40 billion in general revenue on the table, coming in well under the $195 billion Comptroller Glenn Hegar projected lawmakers will have at their disposal. But the Legislature cannot approach that number unless both chambers agree to bust a constitutional spending limit, a virtual nonstarter at the GOP-controlled Capitol.
Rep. Greg Bonnen, a Friendswood Republican who is the House’s lead budget writer, kicked off Thursday’s floor debate by emphasizing the budget’s spending restraint — informed by some 119 hours of public meetings and testimony before the House Appropriations Committee, which he chairs.
“I am confident that the amendments that we will consider today and the legislation that this chamber will debate in the coming weeks will produce a final budget that is fiscally conservative and represents the priorities of this state,” Bonnen said.
The dissenting votes included freshman Rep. Mike Olcott, R-Fort Worth, who said in a floor speech that he opposed the bill because it did not include enough money for property tax relief. Across the aisle, Democratic Reps. John Bryant and Gina Hinojosa voted against the bill over its funding for school vouchers, which Bryant called a ”dagger to the heart of our public school system” in a floor speech.
In all, 19 Republicans and seven Democrats opposed the budget.
House lawmakers filed close to 400 budget amendments, including proposals to zero out the Texas Lottery Commission and shift funding set for a school voucher program toward teacher pay and public schools.
More than 100 of those amendments were effectively killed en masse just before lawmakers began churning through the list, including many of the most contentious proposals. The casualties included efforts to place guardrails on school vouchers and a proposal to zero out funding for a film incentives package prioritized by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. Also quashed was an amendment to pay Attorney General Ken Paxton the salary he missed out on while impeached and suspended from office.
Among the amendments that survived the purge was a proposal by Rep. Tom Oliverson, R-Cypress, to move $70 million of state Medicaid spending to Thriving Texas Families, the rebrand of the state’s Alternatives to Abortion program that funds anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers. The centers provide services like parenting classes and counseling.
The House approved Oliverson’s amendment, continuing the Legislature’s recent trend of ramping up funding for the program in the wake of the state’s near-total abortion ban. The lower chamber also approved an amendment in 2023 to reroute millions from Medicaid client services to the anti-abortion program.
Democrats, outnumbered 88 to 62 in the House, saw a number of their wish list items shot down throughout the day, and even before debate began. Those included perennial efforts to expand Medicaid and boost public school funding, including by shifting over the entire budget for school vouchers. Also killed were proposals to track the impact of tariffs and federal funding freezes imposed by the Trump administration and an effort to expand access to broadband services in rural areas.
Rep. Jessica González of Dallas notched a rare Democratic win, securing approval, 100 to 42, for an amendment directing the Department of Public Safety to conduct a study of religious leaders in Texas who have been “accused, investigated, charged or convicted of any offense involving the abuse of a child.” The House unanimously passed legislation earlier this week to bar the use of nondisclosure agreements in child sexual abuse cases.
In the end, more than 300 amendments were withdrawn or swept into Article XI, the area where measures are often sent to die if they lack enough floor support.
Another eight were voted down by a majority vote. Just 25 were approved — 18 by Republicans and seven by Democrats.
None of those amendments are guaranteed to stay in the final budget plan, which will be hammered out in private negotiations between a conference committee of members from the House and Senate. After that, each full chamber will have to approve the final version before it can be sent to the governor’s desk — where items can also be struck down by the veto pen.
The House budget proposal would send $75.6 billion to the Foundation School Program, the main source of state funding for Texas’ K-12 public schools.
Lawmakers, in separate legislation, want to use that bump to increase the base amount of money public schools receive for each student by $395, from $6,160 per pupil to $6,555. That amount, known as the basic allotment, has not changed since 2019.
The Senate similarly approved a spending bump for public schools, but focused its increase on targeted teacher raises based on years of experience and student performance.
Both chambers also have budgeted $1 billion for a voucher program that would let families use taxpayer dollars to pay for their children’s private schooling and other educational expenses. That funding survived multiple amendments from House Democrats aimed at redirecting it elsewhere, none of which came up for floor votes.
Unlike in previous sessions, no lawmaker filed an amendment to bar state dollars from being used on school voucher programs. Such amendments, which routinely passed the House with support from Democrats and rural Republicans, served as test votes to gauge the chamber’s support for voucher-like bills. This year, a narrow majority has signed on in support of the chamber’s school voucher bill, a milestone for the historically voucher-resistant House.
The budget would shell out another $51 billion — 15% of the state’s total two-year spending plan — to maintain and provide new property tax cuts, a proposal that some budget watchers worry is unsustainable.
Huge budget surpluses in recent years have helped pay for property tax reductions, including the $18 billion package lawmakers approved two years ago. Now, lawmakers are looking to a $24 billion surplus to help cover new cuts and maintain existing ones.
Texans pay among the highest property taxes in the country, which fund public services, especially public schools, in a state without an income tax. The Legislature has tried to tamp down on those costs in recent years by sending billions of dollars to school districts to reduce how much they collect in property taxes.
Several hardline conservative members tried unsuccessfully to amend the House budget to funnel even more money into tax cuts. Their proposals would have drawn $2 billion from a proposed dementia research institute and hundreds of millions of dollars to punish universities that offered courses or degrees in LGBTQ+ studies or diversity, equity and inclusion.
The university amendments, which sought to zero out the state’s funding to the University of Texas at Austin and Texas State University, sparked heated debate as Democrats expressed incredulity over the idea.
“If the House adopts this amendment, and it becomes law, how many fewer mechanical engineers will we have in this state as a result of UT being defunded?” Rep. Chris Turner, D-Grand Prairie, asked the amendment author, Rep. Andy Hopper, R-Decatur.
Hopper at first responded, “Here’s the thing — how many people are you willing to indoctrinate at our universities?” When pressed for a direct answer, Hopper said, “It’s not relevant, sir.”
Both chambers’ spending plans dedicate $6.5 billion to border security, raising total state spending on Operation Lone Star to almost $18 billion since Gov. Greg Abbott launched Texas’ border crackdown in 2021.
Most of the funding would go to the governor’s office, which would receive $2.9 billion; the Texas Military Department, which would receive $2.3 billion; and the Department of Public Safety, which would receive $1.2 billion.
Several Democrats filed amendments that sought to reroute some of the border security money for other uses, including child care, housing assistance and installing air conditioning units in state prisons. One amendment, by Rep. Ana-María Rodríguez Ramos, D-Richardson, aimed to use the entire border security budget for teacher pay raises. Each amendment was withdrawn or moved to the Article XI graveyard.
The partisan rift over border security spending lit up during a sharp exchange between Rodríguez Ramos and Rep. Tony Tinderholt, R-Arlington, over the Democrat’s doomed amendment to redirect $5 million in border spending toward a dashboard “tracking indicators of household economic distress,” such as eviction filings and unemployment claims.
“We could give you a trillion dollars, and you would still cry with this red meat nonsense,” Rodríguez Ramos said, after Tinderholt argued that money should not be drawn from the border budget. “Let us focus on our job, which is to save the lives and make the lives better of working Texans.”
The House also approved a $12 billion supplemental budget early Friday, covering unexpected costs and unpaid bills from the current budget cycle. The bill, approved 122 to 22, would put $2.5 billion toward shoring up Texas’ water crisis by fixing aging infrastructure and expanding water supplies.
It would also spend $924 million to bolster the state’s wildfire and natural disaster response and $1 billion to pay down the unfunded liabilities of state employees’ pension fund. In addition, it would pump another $1.3 billion into the Texas University Fund, a multibillion-dollar endowment created by the Legislature in 2023 for “emerging” research universities around the state.
A second attempt to grant back pay to Paxton while he was suspended from office also failed after lawmakers voted to take up the supplemental budget without considering any amendments. Hopper, the Decatur Republican, had filed an amendment that would have used leftover money from the attorney general’s office budget to pay Paxton.
Article originally published by The Texas Tribune. To read the originally published article, click here.
