Five Bills About Taxpayer Money. Not All Five Are Finished.

Fiscal and government-reform bills rarely get graded honestly in one place, they either get waved through as harmless housekeeping or treated as uniformly suspect. These five deserve neither. Read closely, they split into three real categories.

SB2587 is a large technical cleanup: it removes Social Security number as a required identifier for several state background-check processes, replacing it with a photo-ID number instead, and closes a real gap in guardianship oversight by extending background checks to anyone with actual custody of a ward, not just the person named guardian on paper. It passed unanimously in both chambers. SB379 bars SNAP benefits from purchasing sweetened drinks and candy, contingent on federal approval Texas already secured, live statewide as of April 2026. Neither restricts what anyone can buy with their own money. Both simply redirect what taxpayer dollars specifically pay for.

HB5061 bars state contractors from surveilling, intimidating, or improperly influencing legislators and state employees over procurement decisions, with real teeth: contract termination, penalties up to $2 million, a 10-to-15-year contracting ban. The core prohibition is a legitimate, overdue integrity measure. The affiliate-liability definition isn’t tight enough, it’s broad enough to sweep in a parent company or joint-venture partner that “shares business goals” with a violator, whether or not that affiliate had any actual involvement. That’s the one piece a future amendment should fix.

HB2765 nearly triples which counties count as “rural” for a state economic-development subsidy fund, from a 75,000 population cap to 200,000, without a matching increase to the fund’s appropriation. It also strips out the statutory requirement that loans carry a monthly repayment schedule, handing that decision to agency rulemaking instead. Neither change is alarming on its own. Together they mean more applicants competing for the same pool of money, with less statutory discipline over whether it gets repaid. SB1194 stands up a new regional water authority, the Central Texas Water Alliance, with an appointed board, eminent domain authority (excluding water rights themselves), and revenue-bond authority requiring no public vote and no stated dollar ceiling. Regional water infrastructure is a real need. The accountability gap around who approves the borrowing isn’t resolved by this bill, just built on Texas’s existing template for water districts.

Two of these five are settled, no caveats needed. One is settled at its foundation with a fixable flaw. Two carry real, unresolved oversight gaps that good intentions built but didn’t finish closing.

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