Texas’ top elected officials signal Texas could cut border spending after Trump takes office

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Since President-elect Donald Trump’s victory last week, Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick — the state’s top two elected officials — have signaled a new willingness to potentially scale back the state’s historic spending on border security.

On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to crack down on illegal immigration by reimplementing 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 implement 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.

“President Trump will provide a more secure border than any president in the history of the United States of America,” Abbott said 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.”

Meanwhile, Patrick also said that Trump’s victory could mean shifting spending priorities for the state.

“We had to do everything we could to protect our citizens,” Patrick said in an interview with WFAA-TV in Dallas published 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 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 Republican Texans 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.

“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, said this week during a Texas Tribune event. “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 policy experts told the Tribune that it seems unlikely Texas will be reimbursed by the federal government for its border spending, even with Trump in the White House and Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress, because Trump also promised to cut government spending — and money is always tight in D.C.

Abbott has credited the state’s efforts for a drop in illegal migration into the country through Texas this year; but people who study immigration say multiple variables contribute to migration patterns, like violence and poverty around the world.

The bigger “losers” of any spending reductions on border security will be DPS, the National Guard and local agencies that “often come to rely on this additional money,” said Tony Payan, director of the Center for the United States and Mexico at the Baker Institute, a nonpartisan policy research organization based at Rice University 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 said. ”So if it goes away, it's a penny saved for all of us in Texas who pay taxes and saw it more as political grandstanding.”

Disclosure: Rice University has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.