Texans value every hard-earned dollar. They work hard to put food on the table, pay for college, save for retirement and satisfy their desires.
Given some dollars pay taxes, every dollar collected by the government should go to essential programs that preserve liberty. It’s essential to evaluate every taxpayer dollar spent and pass a conservative budget every session.
Recently, the Texas Comptroller issued a report outlining state programs “not funded by appropriations.” While not all of the surveyed state agencies had programs to report, the reported 170 programs cost more than $166 million.
That’s a lot of pocket change for programs not considered important enough for legislators to appropriate funds. While some of these programs are self-supporting, many of them rely on funds diverted from their original purpose.
One of the more outrageous expenditures is the $22,500 spent on a “report of reports” by the Texas State Library and Archives Commission, described as a written report of all the statutorily required reports submitted to the state. Although the Comptroller’s report doesn’t list where the funds were diverted, surely these funds can be better used than $22,500 for compiling a report of government reports.
Why are some of these programs being supported if the Texas Legislature doesn’t consider them worthy of appropriations?
For example, does it really take over $10 million to license and certify real estate agents in the state of Texas? The Real Estate Commission justifies these expenses because they are supposedly “protecting” the consumers of Texas but, they are just as likely to be protecting their own bureaucracy.
There are other instances of wasteful spending in the state, like the Health and Human Services Commission burning $230,000 manually entering contract data into the LBB portal.
To truly promote Texans’ prosperity, our legislature needs to emphasize cost-effective expenditures and work to eliminate wasteful unappropriated programs.