After spending billions of state tax dollars on border security, claiming the federal government had dropped the ball, Texas' top elected officials appear ready to stand down once the Trump administration is up and running. Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick have signaled a new willingness to potentially scale back the state’s historic spending on border security after President-elect Trump’s election victory, the Texas Tribune reports. Trump vowed to crack down on illegal immigration during his campaign by reviving policies from his first term while starting new ones, like mass deportations. Abbott told reporters last week that Texas will have to continue its border security measures as a “stopgap effort” during the time it takes Trump to enact his border and immigration policies. But once they are in place, Abbott said, Texas “will have the opportunity to consider” repurposing the state money it has plowed into Operation Lone Star, the multi-prong effort Abbott launched in 2021 shortly after President Joe Biden took office. To date, OLS has cost $11 billion, and Abbott’s office had asked lawmakers to approve another $2.9 billion in the upcoming legislative session. Abbott now says OLS money could be used for things like property tax cuts or education.
It is unclear exactly how the state’s border spending breaks down, but the money has been used to surge Texas Department of Public Safety troopers and Texas National Guard troops to the border; send busloads of migrants to cities run by Democrats; and bolster local governments that have joined the OLS effort through grants — including sheriff’s offices that used the money to hire deputies. Even as the state’s spending on border security has increased, polling has shown that Texas Republicans feel the state could spend even more to secure the state’s 1,254-mile border with Mexico. Trump’s victory “provides an enormous amount” of political cover to reduce spending now, said James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at UT Austin. And with an initiative so expensive, “it's hard not to feel like there's room for some reductions,” he said. “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. Other legislators have also indicated it might be time to cut back on border security spending at the state level.
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