Texas will likely spend less on border security when President-elect Donald Trump takes office, reports the Texas Tribune.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick in recent weeks have signaled a willingness to scale back the state’s spending on border security, which has totaled more than $11 billion.
“It’s going to be a process for President Trump to be able to get his border and immigration reforms in place,” Abbott said a day after Trump beat Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.
“We have to be a stopgap effort as it takes some time to get that in place, but I've had private talks with the president and he's going to be stronger and better at securing the border than he was in his first term, which was very strong and effective. He already knows the leverage to pull, he's going to be very effective at it because President Trump will provide a more secure border than any president in the history of the United States of America. Texas will have the opportunity to consider repurposing that money for other purposes,” he added.
Patrick in an interview with WFAA-TV published Sunday defended the state’s spendings and said that money can now be used “for roads, for water, for education, for health care, for all the things that we need that Joe Biden forced us to spend because he was letting millions of people cross the border.”
James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at UT Austin, told the Tribune that Trump’s victory “provides an enormous amount” of political cover to reduce spending now.
And with an initiative so expensive, “it's hard not to feel like there's room for some reductions,” he said.
“When you spend government funds, constituencies develop among those funds, and that's one of the reasons it's hard to cut back on spending,” Henson added.