State Sen. Sarah Eckhardt on Wednesday vowed to be a government watchdog should she win the November election to be the state’s next comptroller, starting with an audit of Texas’ new $1 billion school voucher program.
In a live interview, Eckhardt told Texas Tribune Editor-in-Chief Matthew Watkins she would inspect who receives the vouchers and how they spend the money. The program, known as the Texas Education Freedom Accounts program and administered by the comptroller’s office, gives parents taxpayer funds to send their kids to private school and buy educational materials.
“Auditing is an important function of government, both financial auditing and performance auditing,” Eckhardt said. “And that is a function of the comptroller’s office.”
Eckhardt will face GOP nominee Don Huffines, a former state senator from Dallas, in November’s general election to be the state’s next chief financial officer. No Democrat has won a statewide election in Texas since 1994.
The comptroller’s office is tasked with a number of fiduciary responsibilities, including , overseeing state contracts, collecting taxes and estimating state revenue for the Legislature to draft the state budget every two years. The revenue estimate, typically unveiled just before the Legislature convenes every other January, is among the comptroller’s most visible responsibilities, serving as the official marker of how much money lawmakers can budget.
Eckhardt said she would be diligent about not “putting a political thumb on the revenue estimate at any time.”
The comptroller does not otherwise play an active role in deciding spending priorities, but Eckhardt said she would use the office’s bureaucratic might to analyze how the state is using its funds. The comptroller’s access to spending data “gives an opportunity to more deeply inform Texans, but also their representatives, when it comes time for the Legislature to convene,” she said.
“Getting inside the machinery of government to see where we are investing with success and where we are not investing is exciting to me,” Eckhardt said. “A chance to have all of the numbers, and 3,000 dedicated public servants, who will do the analysis, do the comparisons, and set our investments in the context of federal, state and local investment, is extremely exciting.”
Asked about Huffines’ spending, Eckhardt said she was running a grassroots campaign centered on outreach to individual voters, a playbook she said has worked for her in “every campaign I’ve ever run.” She sought to contrast her approach to Huffines, who largely self-funded his primary campaign.
“I’ll raise the money necessary, and then we’re going to do a lot of outreach,” she said. “I think people are tired of seeing very wealthy men purchase power.”
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