Hinojosa Wants to Shutter the School Voucher Plan. Can She? The Governor Alone Cannot — the Fight Runs Through the Legislature, a Line-Item Veto, and a New Comptroller's Audit
About 110,000 Texas students now spend public money at private schools under Gov. Abbott's $1 billion program. Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa campaigned on ending it and repeal bills were filed Monday — but Republicans kept the Senate, and the honest answer, per the analysts, is chess, not a switch.
AUSTIN — It was the promise at the center of her victory speech: “We will work tirelessly to undo the damage of the Texas voucher scam,” Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa said on Election Day. T-SPAN's Nov. 10 analysis, read in full by this desk, works through what that promise can and cannot do — and the first fact is structural. “The powers of the governor in Texas state government, they don't have the power to introduce a bill into the legislature,” said Austin Bussing, an assistant professor of political science at Trinity University. “So she can, sort of through rhetoric and speeches, try to establish an agenda of things that were important in the campaign and things that she's politically committed to.” The program — Texas Education Freedom Accounts, roughly $1 billion, with about 110,000 students using vouchers a year after it launched under Gov. Greg Abbott — exists in statute. Ending it takes the Legislature, where repeal bills (HB 164 and SB 106) were among Monday's 1,262 first-day filings, and where Republicans still hold the Senate 19-12.
The governor's real levers are narrower but not nothing, and T-SPAN names them: she can veto a specific line item in the budget without vetoing the whole budget, and she can call a special session specifically on eliminating vouchers — the same tool Abbott used to pass them in the first place. Bussing also notes the politics are not a clean party line: some rural Republicans opposed vouchers, so the fight could come down to key Senate Republicans. Her fastest wins are administrative — Hinojosa has said her first order of business is firing Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath — but even there, Bussing cautions, the replacement is “going to be subject to Senate confirmation.” What happens to the 110,000 children now attending private school with tax dollars if the program unwinds remains, in T-SPAN's words, unclear.
The oversight fight starts before the session does. The voucher fund will come under Comptroller-elect Sarah Eckhardt, the Democratic state senator replacing longtime Republican Comptroller Don Huffines. “They could make that data public, which is something that Huffines has refused to do,” Bussing said. Eckhardt's team, in a statement to KSAT quoted by T-SPAN, held the legal line while committing to the audit: “The Comptroller's office does not have the authority to make or change the law. It will be up to the Legislature whether to continue funding the program, at what level, and whether to deliberate any additional changes to the program,” her spokesperson said, adding that the comptroller-elect is committed to “conducting a thorough audit to ensure maximal transparency for Texans and their representatives.” For Dallas–Fort Worth, the stake is not abstract: the TEA whose commissioner Hinojosa would replace is the agency running the state takeover of Fort Worth ISD — so the same transition that decides the voucher fight also decides who oversees Fort Worth's schools.
