Your Government’s Workforce, Your Grandmother’s Phone, Your Teacher’s Pension

Threat legislation usually picks a lane, cybersecurity, financial fraud, national security, and stays in it. These four bills, taken together, show how much ground that kind of threat actually covers in a single legislative session: a government training requirement, a scam targeting retirees, a state employee’s travel voucher, and a pension fund’s stock portfolio.

Every state and local employee who touches a computer for a quarter of their job now takes annual AI training alongside the cybersecurity training they already do. It’s job-relevant by design, not a generic awareness course, and it has real teeth: a local government that lies about completing it on a grant application can lose the entire grant and get barred from applying again for two years. No new agency, no citizen-facing mandate.

A cloned voice, thirty seconds of audio pulled from social media, is enough to convincingly fake a family emergency call. SB2373 gives victims a direct civil lawsuit against anyone who knowingly uses AI-generated media or phishing to defraud them, plus a separate attorney-general civil penalty up to $1,000 a day the fraudulent material stays live. It passed both chambers without a single no vote, sponsored by a Senate Democrat.

Texas stands up its first dedicated DPS unit tracking foreign-government influence operations, bars state employees from accepting adversary-nation-funded travel or gifts, and requires cybersecurity training to name the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department directly. The unit and the gift ban are clean. The reporting mandate isn’t: any state employee has to report, within 30 days, any interaction with someone “acting on behalf of a foreign adversary,” backed by a state jail felony, with no precise definition of what triggers it. A state employee with a missionary contact overseas or a routine academic-conference interaction could trigger that duty without meaning to.

Five major Texas retirement systems and the permanent school fund can no longer knowingly invest in companies controlled by Communist China or legally bound to cooperate with its intelligence services. Unlike SB2514, this one built in real protections for the people it affects: a fund can delay divestment if it would cause a documented financial loss, and pooled holdings get a workable clean-fund alternative instead of a forced disruptive sale. Retirees don’t absorb the cost of the policy.

HB3512 and SB2373 protect ordinary Texans, a government workforce that understands the tools it’s starting to use, and fraud victims targeted by AI-generated deception. SB2514 and SB667 protect the state’s own institutional exposure to a specific foreign adversary, one through a state employee’s conduct, one through a portfolio. The pension bill got the safeguards right. The state-employee reporting mandate didn’t. That gap needs closing before the felony exposure gets tested on someone who did nothing wrong.

This is our read of the bills. We encourage you to read them yourself and reach your own conclusions.