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Since President-elect Donald Trump’s victory final week, Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick — the state’s prime two elected officers — have signaled a brand new willingness to probably reduce the state’s historic spending on border safety.
On the marketing campaign path, Trump vowed to crack down on unlawful immigration by reimplementing insurance policies from his first time period whereas beginning new ones, like mass deportations.
Abbott advised reporters final week that Texas should proceed its border safety measures as a “stopgap effort” in the course of the time it takes Trump to implement his border and immigration insurance policies. However as soon as they’re in place, Abbott stated, Texas “will have the opportunity to consider” repurposing the state cash it has plowed into Operation Lone Star, the multi-prong effort Abbott launched in 2021 shortly after President Joe Biden took workplace.
Up to now, OLS has value $11 billion, and Abbott’s workplace had requested lawmakers to approve one other $2.9 billion within the upcoming legislative session. Abbott now says OLS cash might be used for issues like property tax cuts or schooling.
“President Trump will provide a more secure border than any president in the history of the United States of America,” Abbott stated a day after the election. “I’ve had private talks with the president, and he’s going to be stronger and better at securing the border than he was in his first term, which was very strong and effective.”
In the meantime, Patrick additionally stated that Trump’s victory might imply shifting spending priorities for the state.
“We had to do everything we could to protect our citizens,” Patrick stated in an interview with WFAA-TV in Dallas revealed Sunday. “We’re going to be able to take a lot of that money now and put it back to our taxpayers, for roads, for water, for education, for health care, for all the things that we need that Joe Biden forced us to spend because he was letting millions of people cross the border.”
It’s unclear precisely how the state’s border spending breaks down, however the cash has been used to surge Texas Division of Public Security troopers and Texas Nationwide Guard troops to the border; ship busloads of migrants to cities run by Democrats; and bolster native governments which have joined the OLS effort via grants — together with sheriff’s places of work that used the cash to rent deputies.
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Even because the state’s spending on border safety has elevated, polling has proven that Republican Texans really feel the state might spend much more to safe the state’s 1,254-mile border with Mexico.
Trump’s victory “provides an enormous amount” of political cowl to cut back spending now, stated James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Venture at UT Austin. And with an initiative so costly, “it’s hard not to feel like there’s room for some reductions,” he stated.
“When you spend government funds, constituencies develop among those funds, and that’s one of the reasons it’s hard to cut back on spending,” Henson added.
Different legislators have additionally indicated it is perhaps time to chop again on border safety spending on the state degree.
“I don’t know that we’ve gotten a great bang for our buck on some of it,” state Rep. Gary VanDeaver, a Republican from New Boston who has supported the border clampdown, stated this week throughout a Texas Tribune occasion. “I believe it is time for us to scale that back, start using those resources for infrastructure and needs within our state and I believe we need to send Congress a bill for the money we spent.”
Two public coverage consultants advised the Tribune that it appears unlikely Texas might be reimbursed by the federal authorities for its border spending, even with Trump within the White Home and Republican majorities in each chambers of Congress, as a result of Trump additionally promised to chop authorities spending — and cash is all the time tight in D.C.
Abbott has credited the state’s efforts for a drop in unlawful migration into the nation via Texas this yr; however individuals who research immigration say a number of variables contribute to migration patterns, like violence and poverty around the globe.
The larger “losers” of any spending reductions on border safety might be DPS, the Nationwide Guard and native businesses that “often come to rely on this additional money,” stated Tony Payan, director of the Heart for the US and Mexico on the Baker Institute, a nonpartisan coverage analysis group based mostly at Rice College in Houston.
“It’s an opportune moment, I think, for the Abbott administration because obviously the Republican trifecta in Washington means that now Washington will invest additional resources” on the border, Payan stated. ”So if it goes away, it is a penny saved for all of us in Texas who pay taxes and noticed it extra as political grandstanding.”
Disclosure: Rice College has been a monetary supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan information group that’s funded partly by donations from members, foundations and company sponsors. Monetary supporters play no function within the Tribune’s journalism. Discover a full record of them right here.
