On top of dozens of laws taking effect on Jan. 1 and the incoming midterm elections, the new year also comes with developments on numerous policy issues affecting the state. They range from criminal justice to education to international trade, setting up a year that could bring about sweeping changes for Texans.

Here are some important issues to watch in 2026.

Uvalde school shooting trial

The first criminal trial connected to the botched law enforcement response to the 2022 Robb Elementary school shooting, which killed 19 students and two teachers, is happening this month. The trial for Adrian Gonzales, a former Uvalde school officer who is facing 29 counts of child endangerment, is slated to start on Jan. 5 in Corpus Christi.

The timeline for the trial of former school district police Chief Pete Arredondo, who is facing 10 counts of child endangerment, is however still unclear. Paul Looney, Arredondo’s attorney, said in mid-December that his team was still waiting for the resolution of the federal lawsuit filed by Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell to compel testimony from Border Patrol agents who responded that day.

Gonzales and Arredondo are the only people facing criminal charges out of nearly 400 federal, state and local officers involved in the response to the deadliest school shooting in Texas. They both pleaded not guilty. — Alex Nguyen

Prison AC trial

The trial over the lack of air conditioning in Texas prisons is expected to start in late March, according to Erica Grossman, an attorney representing the inmates. It follows U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman’s March 2025 order that says excessive heat is “likely serving as a form of unconstitutional punishment,” while acknowledging the high cost of implementing air conditioning in these facilities. The federal judge, which pushed both sides toward a trial instead of ordering temporary ACs, also considered the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s pace of installing air conditioning to be insufficient.

Since the order, the majority of people incarcerated in Texas prisons are still without air conditioning, as the agency reported just over 50,000 cool beds as of Dec. 1. The legal fight also followed another legislative session in which state lawmakers failed to pass legislation requiring air conditioning in all Texas prisons, but they did provide $118 million for its installation. TDCJ says this funding will add 18,000 additional cool beds, though this would still not be adequate to cover every inmate in the state. — Alex Nguyen

Hemp

The laws and regulations surrounding the use of consumable hemp in Texas will continue to shift in 2026. Rulemakers with the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission and the Department of State Health Services both plan to finalize permanent rules governing the sale of the products in the first couple months of 2026.

Hemp products, which include smokeable flower, edible products and drinks sold in smoke shops and corner stores around the state, have been sold under a regulatory gray area in Texas for more than five years. In that time period, the industry has exploded in the state, and lawmakers spent much of 2025 trying to add new restrictions around its use. After he vetoed a ban passed by the Legislature, Gov. Greg Abbott ordered both state agencies to write rules that restrict the sale of the products to people 21 or older, among other restrictions. TABC plans to finalize its rules on Jan. 20 and is currently accepting public comment. DSHS intends to finalize its emergency rules within the first several months of 2026.

Meanwhile, a provision included in the Congressional bill that reopened the government in November will ban the sale of consumable hemp nationally when it takes effect November 2026. A bipartisan group of lawmakers have already said they intend to revisit the issue, and advocates supporting the hemp industry said they intend to lobby for the provision’s removal. — Paul Cobler

International trade

The first mandatory review of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement is scheduled for July 1 as the Texas economy absorbs President Donald Trump’s ongoing trade war. The agreement, negotiated by Trump in 2018, governs trade between the three countries. Mexico and Canada are Texas’ two largest trading partners, and most imports and exports between the three countries are currently exempt from tariffs under the terms of the deal. That has allowed Texas to avoid the worst effects of the trade war. However, Trump is expected to leverage the talks to seek concessions from Mexico and Canada on longstanding trade disputes and non-trade issues like drug trafficking and migration, turning the once routine assessment into a high-stakes negotiation.

Formal discussions that will launch the review are expected to begin in mid-January and extend through much of the first half of the year. If all parties agree to renew, the deal will remain in place for another 16 years. The next review is scheduled in 2032. If the renewal is delayed or denied, however, a period of annual reviews could begin, or one or more of the countries could withdraw from the deal altogether and significantly alter national trade policy. In 2024, trade between Texas and Mexico totaled $281 billion. That same year, trade between Texas and Canada was $76.1 billion. — Paul Cobler

Higher education

At the start of the new year, a new statewide Office of the Ombudsman is expected to begin taking complaints related to curriculum, hiring and faculty discipline at Texas public universities and colleges, with the authority to investigate campuses and recommend funding penalties. Abbott appointed Brandon Simmons, who was serving as chair of the Texas Southern University Board of Regents, to lead the office. TSU is currently under investigation after the state auditor found evidence of poor bookkeeping and financial mismanagement.

Boards of regents are also expected to receive updates from campus officials on curriculum reviews launched this fall. New systemwide rules at the Texas A&M and Texas Tech University systems could force revisions or the cancellation of some spring classes that touch on race, sex and gender.

The House and Senate Select Committees on Civil Discourse and Freedom of Speech in Higher Education, formed after campus reactions to the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, are expected to invite public testimony this year. These hearings are expected to examine how universities are enforcing new state laws on campus protests and free speech, as lawmakers consider whether additional changes are needed. In 2025, the panels heard invited testimony from University of Texas at Austin officials, who said Senate Bill 2972 gave the university clearer authority to manage disruptive activities, including limiting amplified sound, overnight protests and access to campus by non-students. The UT System is currently blocked from enforcing parts of the law because of a pending lawsuit.

Lawsuits may continue to shape how universities regulate campus expression. In January, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals is set to rehear a challenge to West Texas A&M University’s drag show ban, after tossing an earlier ruling that found the ban likely violated students’ free speech rights. The decision could influence how far public universities can go in restricting expressive events, including in a separate challenge to a Texas A&M Systemwide drag ban. — Jessica Priest

School vouchers

Applications for families interested in joining Texas’ school voucher program will open on Feb. 4. The program officially launches during the 2026-27 school year, allowing families to use public taxpayer dollars to fund their children’s private or home-school education.

The application window will remain open until March 17. The comptroller’s office — overseen by Texas’ chief financial officer, who lawmakers chose to manage the voucher program — has said it expects to begin providing award notifications in early April.

Funding for the students — $10,474 for most private schoolers and $2,000 for those in home school — will become available on July 1 through education savings accounts, a digital platform allowing families to pay school tuition and make educational purchases from approved vendors.

Applications for private schools and vendors that want to participate in the program opened in early December. The state will accept those applications on a rolling basis. — Jaden Edison

Ten Commandments in schools

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Jan. 20 will hear oral arguments in a case challenging a state law requiring public schools to display posters of the Ten Commandments in every classroom. The court, one of the most conservative in the nation, will hear the Texas case along with Louisiana’s — the first state to pass the Ten Commandments law.

The hearing will come as legal challenges against the law continue to mount in Texas. Two federal judges have blocked, in total, 25 school districts from complying with the law and declared the requirement unconstitutional. A coalition of civil rights organizations — representing families of various religious and nonreligious backgrounds — recently filed a class action lawsuit against another 16 districts, urging a federal judge to block every Texas school district from displaying the Ten Commandments.

Meanwhile, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued the Round Rock, Leander, and Galveston districts for allegedly not complying with the requirement as arguments over its constitutionality proceed in federal court.

Attorneys representing the families and the attorney general’s office have argued in court over the role Founding Fathers like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison played in developing the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment, which protects Americans’ freedom of religion. Both parties have debated the Ten Commandments’ influence on the country’s legal and educational systems and whether the version of the directives required to go up in schools belongs to a particular religious group. They have also sparred over whether the law reflects an attempt by Texas officials to force students into adhering to conservative Christian principles.

The case has the potential to reach the U.S. Supreme Court, which the law’s advocates hope will overturn the court’s 1980 ruling that the posting of the Ten Commandments in classrooms is unconstitutional. — Jaden Edison

School accountability

Texas is taking over a record four school districts. Fort Worth, Beaumont, Connally and Lake Worth school districts will all see its locally elected board of trustees ousted, replaced with a state-appointed board of managers.

Districts risk the most severe form of state intervention after chronic academic underperformance. In Texas, five years of failing grades at one campus can open the entire district up to a takeover. A fifth district, Wichita Falls, has also reached that threshold, but the Texas Education Agency has not yet announced plans to intervene.

A Texas appeals court sided with the Texas Education Agency in 2025 in lawsuits over the school accountability system. That prompted the release of three years of grades, opening the door to penalties for underperformance.

The state Legislature also in 2025 replaced STAAR, the end-of-the year standardized test that the accountability system largely hinges on. The Texas Education Agency is developing three shorter tests, to be administered at the beginning, middle and end of the year, with plans to launch them in the 2026-27 school year. — Sneha Dey

Vaccine exemptions

After Texas started making it easier for parents to access a vaccine exemption form in September, families will see this year whether vaccination rates in schools have dropped.

Texas now offers parents a downloadable vaccine exemption form, eliminating the need to wait for it to be mailed if they want their children to opt out of state-required immunizations to attend school.

Parents can show the same form for two years before having to fill out a new one. The form still needs a notary’s signature before it can be presented to school officials.

Even before the new form became easier to access, the state received 17,197 requests for a vaccine exemption form in July, 36% higher than the number reported in July 2023. Since 2018, requests to the Texas Department of State Health Services for a vaccine exemption form have doubled, from 45,900 in 2018 to more than 93,000 in 2024.

Texas leads the nation with the most kindergartners — more than 25,000 — who were not fully vaccinated against measles, followed by Florida and California, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data released in July. The Texas measles kindergarten vaccination rate of 93.24% is the lowest it’s been since at least 2011, ranking the state 18th nationally. — Stephen Simpson

Flood warning systems

Texas is taking swift steps toward helping communities fund flood warning systems in the Hill Country, one of the most flood-prone areas in the nation. But whether these systems will be fully in place by the next major rainy season remains uncertain.

Spurred by the deadly July 4 weekend floods in Kerr County that killed more than 100 people, state lawmakers approved $50 million this year to help speed flood preparedness projects. Kerr County plans to build an estimated $5 million flood warning system that would include sirens, rain gauges, flashing warning signs and a public website to track flood conditions. The website is already in the works, but officials say they need help to fund the rest. They expect the state to be “a large funding mechanism” for the project.

To accelerate the process, the Texas Water Development Board has fast-tracked grants of up to $1 million, with counties eligible to request an additional $250,000. The 30 counties included in the governor’s disaster declaration can bypass some approval steps and get that money, though larger funding requests, above the amount OK’d by the board, will still face a slower review process.

While the speedy funding is a win for communities, experts in funding programs have said that allocating funding does not equate fixing a problem. In other state flood funding programs, the grants have paid for so little of the total project costs that communities simply could not move forward and many projects have remained unbuilt.

The key question in 2026 is timing and sufficiency: it’s unclear whether state funding and approvals will move quickly enough to get systems installed before the spring, when Texas typically sees its heaviest rains. Emergency experts caution there is no single solution to preventing future flood disasters, but researchers say sirens could be especially effective in rural Hill Country areas with limited cell service, if paired with clear public guidance on how residents should respond when warnings sound. — Alejandra Martinez

Dementia research fund

Still ongoing is a lawsuit blocking Texas’ $3 billion dementia research fund. A trio of voters suing the state have claimed the voting machines used in the election were faulty.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick championed the fund during the legislative session and slammed the lawsuit as frivolous.

The plaintiffs, who are representing themselves without an attorney, do not explain why they singled out the Dementia Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (DPRIT), which voters overwhelmingly approved in November, and not the other 16 propositions Texans considered on the same ballot. But the plaintiffs note the large amount of taxpayer money involved in funding the research initiative.

Legal experts and lawmakers say faulty voting machines aren’t the chief concern of the plaintiffs in these types of constitutional amendment challenges, who are typically conservative citizens who oppose any attempts at increasing government spending. Their main goal is to block an expensive piece of legislation and not the 16 other relatively low-cost constitutional amendments that passed this year from going into effect. DPRIT would initially provide $3 billion in funding to researchers, with up to $300 million annually thereafter.

A 2021 constitutional amendment that would have allowed counties to issue more bonds still hasn’t gone into effect after a similar lawsuit.

This strategy was used in 2023 to block all constitutional amendments. Soon after those lawsuits were filed, the constitutional amendments went into effect because the state’s attorneys showed that the plaintiffs had not adequately served the Secretary of State with their lawsuits. Because they had not properly served the Secretary of State, Abbott was able to certify the results, allowing the ballot measures to go into effect. — Stephen Simpson

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