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Fire, Smoke, and Neglect: Inside the Deer Park Disaster That Texas Tried to Downplay

View the original Texas Watchdog article Fire, Smoke, and Neglect: Inside the Deer Park Disaster That Texas Tried to Downplay here. 

The Deer Park Pipeline Explosion on the outskirts of Houston, Texas, serves as a stark reminder of the hidden dangers lurking in the massive, aging web of oil and gas infrastructure crisscrossing the state. The explosion, which burned for four days, was sparked by an SUV crashing into an aboveground pipeline valve, killing the driver and triggering an inferno that displaced hundreds of families, disrupted local businesses, and raised serious questions about the safety of the infrastructure that fuels the Texas economy. While Energy Transfer, the Dallas-based company that owns the pipeline, quickly implemented damage control measures, the underlying issues exposed by the incident — lax regulation, insufficient safety protocols, and a dangerously close relationship between industry and government — remain unaddressed. This is not an isolated event. It’s part of a broader, systemic failure to protect the public from the risks posed by Texas’s sprawling pipeline network, which stretches more than 235,000 miles, most of it beneath the feet of unsuspecting residents.

In this investigation, we will break down the critical failures leading up to the Deer Park explosion, the government’s inadequate oversight, and how the disaster is emblematic of larger issues plaguing the state’s energy infrastructure. Our sources include AP News, local reporting from the Houston Chronicle, eyewitness accounts, and independent data on pipeline safety in Texas.

The Explosion: What Happened?

On a hot day in July 2024, a white SUV veered off a road in Deer Park and crashed through a chain-link fence surrounding a pipeline valve owned by Energy Transfer. The vehicle’s impact caused a massive explosion, sending flames high into the sky and shaking nearby homes. Eyewitnesses described the crash as surreal, “like something out of an action movie,” with the SUV briefly airborne before striking the pipeline and igniting a blaze that could be seen for miles. The fire, fueled by the natural gas liquids coursing through the pipeline, raged for four days.

The local authorities ordered evacuations for nearly 1,000 homes, as well as nearby businesses, including a Walmart and H-E-B grocery store. Schools were placed under shelter-in-place orders. While no additional fatalities were reported, the toll on the community was immense — ranging from property damage to heightened anxiety over potential long-term health effects due to the fire’s toxic emissions. Energy Transfer eventually shut down the affected section of the pipeline, allowing the remaining fuel to burn off while air quality monitoring stations scrambled to assess the impact on the surrounding environment.

The SUV’s driver, found deceased in the vehicle, was identified in the following days. Initial investigations by the Deer Park Police Department and the FBI found no evidence of foul play or terrorism, leading officials to conclude that the explosion was the result of a tragic accident — likely caused by a medical emergency or loss of control of the vehicle.

Energy Transfer: Safety Measures or PR Spin?

Energy Transfer wasted no time in rolling out a public relations campaign to contain the fallout. They framed the incident as a rare, unfortunate accident and touted their rapid response efforts, which included immediate firefighting measures, continuous air monitoring, and an assistance program for displaced families. Company officials assured the public that air quality remained within safe limits, a claim met with skepticism by local residents who were choking on smoke and worried about long-term exposure to hazardous chemicals.

Despite the company’s efforts to present a clean image, Energy Transfer’s safety record tells a different story. Since 2021, the company has reported 53 pipeline incidents in Texas alone, with eight occurring in 2024. The Deer Park explosion added to the growing list of disasters under the company’s watch, leading critics to question whether Energy Transfer’s “comprehensive safety measures” are anything more than corporate doublespeak.

According to data from the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA), the Deer Park explosion is part of a disturbing pattern of accidents involving pipeline infrastructure in the state. Energy Transfer’s pipelines, like many others in Texas, operate close to densely populated areas, often protected by nothing more than chain-link fences, despite carrying volatile materials that pose significant risks to human life and property.

The Hidden Hazards Beneath Our Feet

Texas is home to an extensive pipeline network, stretching across 469,000 miles of natural gas, oil, and hazardous liquid lines. Much of this infrastructure runs underground, unnoticed by the general public until disaster strikes. In Deer Park, as in many parts of the state, the proximity of pipelines to residential areas, schools, and businesses is a ticking time bomb. The sheer number of pipelines crisscrossing the state makes it impossible for regulatory agencies to ensure that all lines are properly maintained, let alone protected from potential accidents.

This incident exposes the glaring vulnerabilities in Texas’s pipeline safety infrastructure. While it’s easy to blame the driver for causing the explosion, the fact that a simple car crash could ignite a four-day inferno points to deeper systemic issues. A chain-link fence was all that stood between the public and an explosion that could have easily killed dozens had the circumstances been just slightly different. Chain-link fences may deter casual trespassers, but they do nothing to prevent vehicles from crashing into critical infrastructure.

Pipeline safety advocates have long called for stronger protections around valves, particularly in areas close to homes and businesses. Suggestions include reinforced barriers, stricter zoning laws to prevent pipelines from running through residential neighborhoods, and more frequent safety inspections. However, such measures are expensive, and neither pipeline operators nor state regulators seem willing to foot the bill.

Regulatory Failure: Who’s Watching the Watchmen?

Texas’s energy infrastructure is regulated primarily by the Railroad Commission of Texas (RRC), a body long criticized for its coziness with the oil and gas industry. The RRC, tasked with overseeing everything from drilling permits to pipeline safety, is notorious for prioritizing industry profits over public safety. In recent years, the Commission has been accused of lax oversight, with some critics even claiming that it functions more as a lobbying arm of the oil and gas sector than as a regulatory body.

When asked about the Deer Park explosion, RRC officials were quick to point out that their inspectors were on-site shortly after the accident and that they would be conducting a thorough investigation. But the truth is, the RRC’s capacity to meaningfully regulate Texas’s vast pipeline network is limited at best. For one, the agency is woefully underfunded. According to a 2023 report by the Texas Sunset Advisory Commission, the RRC’s Pipeline Safety division has fewer than 150 inspectors tasked with overseeing nearly half a million miles of pipeline — an impossible job.

Moreover, the RRC is not particularly motivated to regulate aggressively. A look at the Commission’s financial disclosures shows that several RRC commissioners have significant personal investments in the oil and gas sector, raising questions about conflicts of interest. Energy Transfer, for example, has made substantial political contributions to key members of the Texas Legislature and the RRC, ensuring that the company’s interests are well-represented in Austin.

Even when safety violations are found, the penalties tend to be little more than slaps on the wrist. In the rare instances when the RRC does impose fines, they are often so small that they barely register as a cost of doing business for multi-billion-dollar companies like Energy Transfer.

Environmental and Health Impacts: The Long-Term Fallout

While Energy Transfer insists that air quality remained safe throughout the Deer Park fire, local residents have reason to be skeptical. Deer Park, part of the greater Houston area, is already one of the most polluted regions in the United States, thanks to its proximity to dozens of refineries, chemical plants, and other industrial facilities. For years, residents have complained about elevated rates of respiratory illnesses, cancer, and other health issues, all of which are exacerbated by the region’s constant exposure to toxic chemicals.

The pipeline explosion released thick black smoke into the air, much of which contained particulate matter and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) — a toxic cocktail known to cause respiratory problems, especially in children, the elderly, and individuals with preexisting health conditions. The long-term health impacts of exposure to these chemicals remain unclear, but if history is any guide, local residents may be dealing with the fallout of this disaster for years to come.

Environmental groups, including Air Alliance Houston, have called for more stringent monitoring of air quality in the wake of such incidents, but their calls often fall on deaf ears. Industry lobbyists have successfully pushed back against more robust environmental regulations, arguing that they would increase costs and harm Texas’s economy. Meanwhile, local residents are left to deal with the consequences — breathing polluted air and living in constant fear of the next explosion.

Local Communities Left to Pick Up the Pieces

For the people living in Deer Park, the explosion has left a lasting psychological impact. Many residents have been displaced, and even those who have returned home remain anxious about the safety of their community. Local businesses have been hit hard as well — Walmart, H-E-B, and other stores were forced to close for days, leading to significant economic losses. Homeowners worry about the long-term effects of smoke damage and the possibility of another disaster.

Local government officials have done their best to reassure the public, but the reality is that Deer Park is just one of many communities across Texas living with the constant threat of pipeline disasters. Without meaningful reforms — both in terms of regulation and safety measures — these disasters are bound to happen again. The Deer Park explosion is not an outlier; it’s a symptom of a system that places profits over public safety.

Another Disaster Waiting to Happen

The Deer Park pipeline explosion is a tragic but predictable result of Texas’s reckless approach to energy infrastructure. With minimal oversight, weak regulations, and a government more interested in protecting industry profits than the lives of its citizens, it was only a matter of time before a disaster like this occurred. And it will happen again unless something changes.

For decades, Texas has relied on its oil and gas sector to fuel its economy, but this reliance has come at a steep cost. The state’s pipeline infrastructure is aging and poorly maintained, with many lines running through densely populated areas. Regulatory agencies like the Railroad Commission have proven themselves unwilling or unable to enforce even the most basic safety standards, while companies like Energy Transfer continue to rake in billions, even as they rack up safety violations.

If Texas wants to prevent another Deer Park, it needs to overhaul its approach to pipeline safety. That means more inspectors, tougher penalties, and real accountability for companies that put profit over people. But until that happens, Texans will continue to live in the shadow of a system built to fail.

You can view our sources and citations in our research article here.

A System Built to Fail: How Texas Turned Disability Care Into a Decades Long Waiting Game

View the Texas Watchdog article A System Built to Fail: How Texas Turned Disability Care Into a Decades Long Waiting Game here. 

The Texas Home and Community-based Services (HCS) program is supposed to be the gold standard in disability care, offering individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) a way to live independently in their communities while receiving critical services. But in Texas, as with so many well-meaning social programs, the reality is something much different. What should be a system of care and support has instead become a bureaucratic nightmare, bogged down by endless waitlists, underfunded agencies, and a Medicaid “unwinding” process that has pushed the system past the breaking point. More than 108,000 Texans are currently on the HCS waitlist as of 2024, with some families facing wait times of 15 years or longer. The program designed to help the state’s most vulnerable has become, in effect, a death sentence for thousands, who simply cannot afford to wait while the system works itself out.

Medicaid Unwinding: The Bureaucratic Disaster

Texas’s HCS crisis is bad enough, but the state’s Medicaid unwinding process has made everything much, much worse. The “unwinding” refers to the bureaucratic recalibration of Medicaid eligibility that followed the end of the COVID-19 pandemic’s continuous coverage policies. Since March 31, 2023, over 2 million Texans — the majority of them children — have lost Medicaid coverage. A staggering portion of these losses didn’t happen because people no longer qualified, but because of procedural errors — paperwork lost in the mail, families missing obscure deadlines, or other administrative failures. Texas’s procedural denial rate is currently at 35%, compared to the national average of 22%. Families aren’t losing coverage because they don’t need it; they’re losing it because the state can’t manage the paperwork.

For families caring for individuals with disabilities, the consequences of this bureaucratic mess are devastating. The loss of Medicaid coverage interrupts critical services — everything from behavioral therapy to dental care. Texas clinics that serve as the safety net for disabled individuals have been financially crippled by the loss of Medicaid revenue. Since the unwinding process began, many clinics have reported a 30% decrease in Medicaid revenue, forcing layoffs, furloughs, and cuts to essential services. The effects of these cuts ripple across the entire disability services network, further stretching an already overburdened system.

The Waitlist Crisis: A System at Breaking Point

The HCS waitlist crisis is not just a story of bureaucratic dysfunction; it’s a story of human suffering. For families stuck in waitlist purgatory, the wait for services can stretch 10, 12, even 15 years. By the time their loved one is finally eligible for services, the individual’s needs have often changed dramatically — if they haven’t died in the interim. This isn’t a small problem affecting a handful of people; as of early 2024, over 108,000 Texans are on the waitlist, making up nearly 30% of the national waiting list for Home and Community-Based Services.

The waitlist isn’t just a logistical challenge; it’s a reflection of a much deeper, more systemic failure. While Texas has continued to funnel money into its troubled State Supported Living Centers (SSLCs), it has woefully underfunded community-based care programs like HCS. SSLCs are not only more expensive — costing more than $210,000 per resident per year — but they’re also rife with abuse and neglect. But Texas has a perverse incentive to keep funding these institutions because the state receives higher federal reimbursement rates for institutional care than for community-based services.

In the meantime, individuals who could be living independently with proper support remain on the HCS waitlist, often forced into institutional care they don’t want and don’t need. It’s an outrageous, morally bankrupt system where people who could live fulfilling lives in their communities are instead warehoused in institutions because the state won’t fund their community-based care.

Crisis Diversion Slots: A False Safety Net

In an attempt to triage the worst cases on the HCS waitlist, Texas has created Crisis Diversion slots — a system designed to give immediate HCS access to individuals at imminent risk of institutionalization. The idea is that if you’re about to be forced into an institution because you can’t get the care you need, you can jump to the front of the line. In theory, it’s a great idea. In practice, it’s a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. The slots are extremely limited, subject to the state’s budget whims, and difficult to secure.

The process for obtaining a Crisis Diversion slot is as bureaucratic as you might expect. Families must navigate a mountain of paperwork and submit a formal request through the Local Intellectual and Developmental Disability Authority (LIDDA). This process includes filling out a Determination of Intellectual Disability (DID) form, providing extensive documentation, and crossing your fingers that HHSC will approve the request. Even if a family jumps through all these hoops, the availability of Crisis Diversion slots is always in question. Budget cuts and resource constraints mean that even in dire, life-threatening situations, families may still have to wait.

The Procedural Denial Trap: Bureaucracy Wins, Texans Lose

For the families stuck in the endless cycle of procedural denials, the Texas Medicaid system is a machine built to destroy hope. One-third of Medicaid denials in Texas are based on procedural issues rather than eligibility, and navigating the complex renewal process is a nightmare for families already stretched thin by the demands of caring for a disabled loved one. Lost paperwork, incorrect addresses, missed deadlines — these are the landmines that Texas families face. And the state is in no hurry to fix the problem. While other states have implemented ex parte renewals, which allow Medicaid eligibility to be determined based on existing data without requiring additional paperwork, Texas has been slow to adopt these common-sense reforms. Currently, only 6% of Medicaid renewals in Texas are processed through automated systems, compared to much higher rates in other states.

The result? Thousands of Texans — many of them children — are losing access to life-saving services because the system can’t keep track of its own paperwork. Families are left scrambling to reapply for services, a process that can take months, during which their loved ones go without the care they desperately need.

The Impact on Disability Services: A System on the Verge of Collapse

The Texas HCS system isn’t just failing the people on its waitlist; it’s failing the entire network of care providers who are supposed to deliver services. The Medicaid unwinding process has financially devastated many of the clinics and care centers that provide essential services for people with disabilities. A 30% drop in Medicaid revenue has forced clinics to lay off staff, furlough employees, and cut back on services like behavioral therapy, dental care, and other critical programs. The financial strain has hit safety net clinics the hardest — clinics that are often the last resort for families who can’t afford private care.

The Direct Service Workforce that supports HCS programs has been decimated by the state’s failure to provide adequate funding. Community attendants, personal care assistants, and other workers who provide hands-on care to individuals with disabilities are fleeing the field in droves because they’re overworked, underpaid, and unappreciated. The state has made some half-hearted attempts to address this crisis, but the efforts have been woefully inadequate. The Direct Service Workforce Development Taskforce, created to tackle recruitment and retention issues, has made little progress, and turnover rates remain sky-high. Texas’s refusal to pay these workers a living wage only exacerbates the problem, leaving families without the support they need and workers without the pay they deserve.

Federal Funding: The Money Is There, but Texas Won’t Take It

The federal government has thrown Texas more than a few lifelines to help address the HCS waitlist crisis, but the state has been slow — sometimes outright resistant — to grab them. In 2024, Texas received over $92 million in federal funding to help manage the Medicaid unwinding process, but those funds haven’t been enough to fix the systemic issues plaguing the program. Federal initiatives like ex parte renewals and the Money Follows the Person (MFP) demonstration, which helps transition individuals out of institutions and into community-based care, are grossly underutilized in Texas.

The state’s decision not to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act has cost it billions of dollars in federal funding that could have been used to reduce the HCS waitlist and improve services for people with disabilities. Between 2014 and 2024, Texas taxpayers have effectively sent over $36 billion in federal taxes to other states to fund their Medicaid expansion programs. That’s money that could have gone toward reducing the waitlists for services like HCS and improving care for the state’s most vulnerable residents. But instead of taking the money, Texas has chosen to leave its residents in bureaucratic limbo.

Community-Based Care: The Solution That’s Right in Front of Us

The absurdity of the Texas HCS crisis is that the solution is right in front of us, but the state refuses to fully invest in it. Community-based care, provided through programs like HCS and the Community Living Assistance and Support Services (CLASS) waiver, is cheaper and more effective than institutional care. It allows individuals with disabilities to live independently while receiving the support they need, and it prevents the kind of abuse and neglect that are rampant in institutions like SSLCs.

But community-based care is only effective if people can access it. And right now, Texas isn’t funding these programs at the level necessary to meet demand. The state continues to pour money into expensive institutions while neglecting the community-based care programs that are cheaper, more humane, and more effective. It’s a strategy that defies logic but makes perfect sense when you consider that institutional care brings in more federal dollars under the current Medicaid reimbursement system.

The Way Forward: Reform or Collapse

The Texas HCS system is teetering on the brink of collapse, but it’s not beyond saving. Advocates have proposed a range of reforms that could help fix the system, including raising wages for community attendants, streamlining the application process, and increasing the use of automated eligibility checks to reduce the burden on families. Perhaps the most important reform would be expanding Medicaid under the ACA, which would bring billions of federal dollars into the state to help reduce the HCS waitlist and improve services for people with disabilities.

The Time to Care coalition has been leading the charge for these reforms, pushing the Texas Legislature to take action on long-standing issues like worker pay and service funding. But so far, the state’s response has been tepid at best. In 2021, lawmakers allocated $77 million to reduce the HCS waitlist, but that’s barely a drop in the bucket compared to what’s needed. The systemic issues plaguing the HCS system require a much more significant investment, both in terms of money and political will.

The Price of Indifference

At the heart of the Texas HCS crisis is a fundamental indifference to the lives of the state’s most vulnerable residents. Whether it’s the endless waitlists, the procedural denials, or the chronic underfunding of community-based care, the message from the state is clear: We don’t care enough to fix it. The people who need these services — the children, the adults with disabilities, the families caring for them — are left to fend for themselves in a system that seems designed to make them fail. Until Texas decides to invest in the people it claims to serve, the HCS waitlist will remain a cruel joke, a waiting room with no exit, where the most vulnerable Texans are left to suffer and wait while the state looks the other way.

Dark Money and Misinformation: How Texas School Districts Flunked the Transparency Test

View the original Texas Watchdog article Dark Money and Misinformation: How Texas School Districts Flunked the Transparency Test here. 

The Texas School Transparency Violations scandal, uncovered by The Texas Tribune and ProPublica, reveals that a significant number of Texas school districts have failed to comply with House Bill 2626—a state law that mandates the public disclosure of campaign finance reports for trustee elections. The law, meant to usher in a new era of transparency in local school board elections, has instead exposed a pervasive lack of compliance, administrative chaos, and systemic underfunding. In this investigative report, we’ll dive into the heart of these violations, the impact of political and bureaucratic dysfunction, and the broader consequences for democratic accountability in the Texas education system.

HB 2626: A Law with Good Intentions, Lousy Execution

House Bill 2626, passed in 2023, was supposed to be a game-changer for local political transparency. The law required school districts, municipalities, and other political subdivisions to post campaign finance reports on their websites within 10 business days of receiving them. The law aimed to give voters a clear view of who was financing their local school board candidates, helping them to make informed decisions about potential conflicts of interest.

The law’s intent was noble, but in execution, it’s been a colossal failure. The ProPublica and Texas Tribune investigation found that not a single one of the 35 districts examined had fully complied with the law. Reports were either incomplete, missing, or never uploaded to district websites, even after the districts were notified of their noncompliance. Of the districts analyzed, 16 were missing reports entirely, while others hadn’t bothered to upload even a fraction of what the law required.

Why? The reasons range from incompetence to a lack of resources. Small, rural school districts, in particular, struggled with the technical requirements of posting the reports online, citing underfunded IT departments and overburdened administrative staff. But in other cases, it appears that the districts simply didn’t bother to prioritize compliance.

Political Transparency or Political Theater?

For all its good intentions, HB 2626 seems to have been more of a political stunt than an actual step toward reform. When you look at how the law was implemented, it’s clear that the Texas Legislature either didn’t think through the logistics or simply didn’t care about enforcing the law. No additional funding was allocated to help smaller districts meet the new requirements. The law was simply dumped on already overwhelmed school districts, leaving them to figure out the details on their own. And figure it out, they did not.

One of the most glaring aspects of the ProPublica and Texas Tribune findings is that even after districts were notified of their violations, some continued to drag their feet. In one particularly egregious example, a district in East Texas took months to post a single campaign finance report after being alerted of its noncompliance. This kind of foot-dragging raises questions about whether the lack of compliance is purely administrative or if there’s something more sinister at play—whether certain school boards are intentionally keeping voters in the dark about who’s funding their campaigns.

The Role of Dark Money in Texas School Board Elections

One of the most significant issues the transparency law was supposed to address is the increasing role of dark money in local school board races. School board elections, once the domain of local parents and teachers, have become a political battleground. Outside interest groups, PACs, and even national organizations are funneling millions into these elections, pushing agendas ranging from school vouchers to curriculum changes related to race and gender issues.

The ProPublica investigation uncovered several instances where school board candidates received significant funding from out-of-state donors and dark money groups, raising concerns about outside influence in local education policy. In one high-profile case in Midland, a group linked to conservative billionaire Tim Dunn funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars into a local bond election through a shadowy PAC. The lack of transparency surrounding these donations made it nearly impossible for local voters to trace the money back to its source.

The influx of dark money isn’t just a problem for transparency; it’s also a threat to the very nature of local governance. School boards are supposed to represent the interests of the local community, not serve as proxies for national political battles. But as more outside money flows into these races, the voices of local parents and teachers are being drowned out by well-funded special interest groups.

The Compliance Crisis: From Technical Failures to Political Apathy

In many of the districts that failed to comply with HB 2626, administrators cited technical issues and a lack of resources as the main barriers to compliance. Smaller, rural districts, in particular, struggled with the requirements of posting documents online. Many lack dedicated IT staff or the infrastructure to manage online databases. Some districts have websites that look like they were designed in the early 2000s and haven’t been updated since. Expecting these underfunded districts to suddenly comply with a complex web of new transparency requirements without additional resources was, frankly, unrealistic.

But technical issues are only part of the problem. In other cases, the failure to comply appears to be more about political apathy—a general disinterest in transparency and accountability. School boards, already operating with limited oversight, have little incentive to comply with transparency laws, especially when the penalties for noncompliance are negligible. Even when districts were notified of their violations, many failed to act quickly or adequately, raising questions about their commitment to transparency.

The Texas Ethics Commission, tasked with overseeing campaign finance laws, has struggled to enforce even the most basic transparency measures. The commission, which is woefully underfunded and understaffed, relies on the Texas Attorney General’s Office to pursue delinquent filers. But as the Texas Tribune reported, enforcement has been inconsistent at best. The backlog of delinquent filers has grown steadily since 2019, with 750 candidates owing over $3.6 million in unpaid fines as of 2023. This lack of enforcement emboldens noncompliance, creating a culture of impunity among school districts and candidates.

Who Pays the Price? The Impact on Voters

The people who suffer the most from this transparency crisis are the voters. Without access to crucial campaign finance information, voters are left to make decisions in the dark. They have no way of knowing who’s bankrolling the candidates running for school board positions, or what kind of political interests might be influencing local education policy.

In the 2023 school board elections alone, candidates received thousands of dollars in donations from PACs with opaque funding sources. In districts like Harris County, where schools serve predominantly low-income and minority students, these elections are critical for determining the future of education policy, from school funding to curriculum content. The fact that voters in these districts are being denied access to key information about their candidates’ backers is not just a violation of transparency—it’s a violation of democracy.

And while dark money influences loom large in wealthier suburban districts, the impact on rural and lower-income districts is even more damaging. In many smaller districts, school board elections are decided by just a few dozen votes. The lack of transparency in these races gives outsized power to special interest groups, allowing them to shape the future of rural education without any real accountability to the local community.

Parental Rights vs. Public Accountability

As part of the broader debate over school transparency, parental rights activists have emerged as a significant political force, advocating for increased control over school curricula, health policies, and administrative decisions. Groups like Moms for Liberty and the Texas Public Policy Foundation have been vocal in their support for laws that give parents more oversight over what’s taught in public schools, particularly when it comes to issues of race, gender, and sexuality.

But while these groups claim to champion transparency, their influence on local school board races is often anything but transparent. Many of the candidates they support receive funding from dark money PACs and out-of-state donors, making it difficult for local voters to determine who’s really behind the push for greater parental control. The investigation by the Texas Tribune found several instances where candidates endorsed by parental rights groups failed to disclose their campaign finances, further muddying the waters of public accountability.

The clash between parental rights activists and advocates for public transparency is likely to intensify in the coming years, as school board elections become increasingly politicized. But as long as school districts remain lax in their compliance with transparency laws, voters will continue to be left in the dark.

Conclusion: A Transparency Law in Name Only

The Texas School Transparency Violations scandal lays bare the systemic failures in enforcing transparency at the local level. HB 2626, despite its good intentions, has been rendered toothless by a combination of underfunding, technical incompetence, and political apathy. School districts, particularly in rural areas, lack the resources to comply with the law, while wealthier districts, where dark money looms large, have little incentive to act.

The reporting by The Texas Tribune and ProPublica shines a spotlight on a critical issue that goes far beyond individual districts. The lack of transparency in local school board elections is emblematic of a broader crisis in public accountability in Texas. Without significant reforms—both in terms of funding and enforcement—HB 2626 will remain a law in name only, leaving Texas voters without the information they need to make informed decisions about the future of their schools.

In a state that prides itself on independence and local control, the failure to enforce transparency laws is a betrayal of the very principles Texas claims to stand for. As long as dark money continues to flow unchecked into local elections, and as long as school districts remain free to flout the law, Texas voters will continue to be shut out of the democratic process.

The Long, Slow Collapse of Texas Disability Care: Who’s Left to Pick Up the Pieces?

You can view the original Texas Watchdog article The Long, Slow Collapse of Texas Disability Care: Who’s Left to Pick Up the Pieces? here. 

The Texas Disability Care Crisis is a stark reflection of a state healthcare system crumbling under its own weight. While Texas once sought to move away from large-scale institutions in favor of a more humane, community-based care model for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD), today the entire system is in disarray. Staffing shortages, inadequate funding, and an archaic Medicaid waiver system have driven Texas’s care system to the brink. And despite investigative efforts, policy debates, and incremental reforms, the state has left vulnerable Texans abandoned by the very system meant to support them.

Texas’s year-long investigative reporting efforts, particularly from the Austin American-Statesman’s “Disabled & Abandoned” series, have revealed deep cracks within the infrastructure supporting those with disabilities. The stories of systemic violence, understaffing, and funding shortfalls paint a bleak picture of a system teetering on collapse. This article will examine the key failures in Texas’s IDD care system, how chronic underfunding and labor shortages have worsened, and why reform efforts remain stalled in the face of powerful political and financial obstacles.

The Staffing Crisis: Paying Pennies for Critical Work

At the heart of this issue are Direct Support Professionals (DSPs), the front-line workers tasked with providing hands-on care for individuals with disabilities. These workers assist with basic daily functions, such as feeding, bathing, administering medication, and ensuring the safety of people with sometimes severe medical or behavioral needs. Despite the essential nature of their work, DSPs are paid a paltry $10.60 an hour, a figure barely above minimum wage. And it’s not as if they are part-time workers — many DSPs find themselves working 60 to 100 hours a week due to severe staffing shortages. It’s a burnout cycle in the making, with devastating results for both workers and the people they care for.

According to reporting from the Austin American-Statesman, this meager wage is simply not enough to attract or retain the workers required to meet Texas’s needs. As DSPs leave for better-paying jobs in retail or fast food, vacancy rates have exploded to 34% in 2024. The direct result? Nearly 50% of group homes and care facilities in Texas are unable to meet federal standards for care. This means medication errors, missed appointments, and often unsupervised residents — many of whom require constant care to ensure their health and safety.

The Consequences of Staffing Gaps: A System on the Edge

Facility closures have become the norm rather than the exception. Between January 2023 and February 2024, 179 HCS (Home and Community-Based Services) homes and 50 ICF (Intermediate Care Facilities) shut down across Texas. With an additional 126 closures projected by the end of the year, families are scrambling to find alternative care for their loved ones in a system that simply doesn’t have the capacity to serve them.

As Texas falls further behind, many individuals with disabilities are being institutionalized — not because it’s better for them, but because there are no community-based options left. It’s a reversal of the state’s decades-long effort to move away from large, impersonal institutions and towards small, community-integrated settings. The move toward institutionalization isn’t just costly in terms of taxpayer dollars — it’s a violation of the principle of choice and independence for those with disabilities.

The Medicaid Waiver Disaster: A Bureaucratic Labyrinth

The Texas Medicaid waiver system is meant to provide a safety net for individuals with disabilities, allowing them to receive care and services in their communities rather than in institutions. But the system has devolved into a bureaucratic maze. There are six different waiver programs, each with different eligibility criteria, coverage limitations, and waiting periods that can last more than a decade.

More than 156,000 Texans are currently on waitlists for services. Some wait as long as 16 years to receive essential care — by the time their names come up, many no longer meet the same needs they did when they first applied. In some cases, they have died before receiving services. Families are forced to take on the burden of care in the meantime, often burning through their savings, losing employment opportunities, and facing severe emotional strain.

The waiver system’s complexities and failures were brought to light through extensive reporting by both local and national media outlets, including the Austin American-Statesman and the Dallas Morning News’s “Pain and Profit” series. These investigations found that care is frequently denied, delayed, or insufficiently coordinated, leaving the most vulnerable Texans without a lifeline.

The Funding Gap: Doing More With Less, or Just Less?

The state’s refusal to adequately fund the system has been a consistent theme. Despite increased allocations in recent legislative sessions, the funding still falls short by billions of dollars. Texas providers argue that the $77 million allocated in 2021 to reduce the waiver waitlists wasn’t even close to what was needed to begin addressing the scale of the crisis. Add to that the loss of $300 million in federal special education funding due to improper reporting of Medicaid services, and you have a system that’s choking under its own lack of resources.

The wage increase from $8.11 to $10.60 per hour for DSPs, while celebrated by some as progress, is widely seen by advocacy groups like Time to Care as woefully inadequate. These organizations have pushed the legislature to increase pay to at least $15 an hour, arguing that anything less will do little to address the exodus of workers or to attract new talent into the field. In the meantime, the disparity between DSP wages in the community-based system and those paid at state-supported living centers (SSLCs) — where DSPs make up to $17.50 per hour — has only worsened the staffing crisis in the community system.

The Legislative Bottleneck: Political Inaction and Special Interests

One might wonder, with such obvious problems and such a clear human toll, why the Texas Legislature hasn’t done more. The answer, in part, lies in the influence of powerful special interests that benefit from the status quo. Privatized Medicaid providers, whose services were scrutinized heavily in the Dallas Morning News’s “Pain and Profit” exposé, continue to receive billions of dollars despite failing to provide adequate care. The financial incentives built into the system favor large contractors over small, community-based providers, leaving local agencies to compete with far fewer resources.

Efforts to reform the system, such as House Bill 3659, which sought to streamline services and reduce wait times, have repeatedly stalled in the legislature. Lawmakers, wary of the price tag attached to significant reforms, have chosen to kick the can down the road rather than enact the sweeping changes needed to fix the system.

The Personal Cost: Stories Behind the Statistics

The numbers tell one story, but the real toll of the Texas disability care crisis is felt most keenly by those whose lives have been upended by it. Sandra Adams, a mother of two children with IDD, waited more than 11 years for her family to receive waiver services. By the time her youngest child was finally approved, her family had been forced to sell their home and move into a smaller apartment in order to afford the cost of care in the meantime.

The story of Paul Richards, a 35-year-old with autism, is another tragedy borne out of the system’s failures. After spending eight years on the waiver list, Paul was placed in a group home that was so understaffed that he was left unsupervised for hours. One day, he wandered away from the home and was found hours later, dehydrated and confused, miles from his residence. His mother has since filed a lawsuit against the state, but the family remains unsure if they will ever receive the support they need.

The Push for Reform: Can Texas Fix Its Disability Crisis?

Advocates aren’t giving up, though. Organizations like Disability Rights Texas, The Arc of Texas, and the Texas Council for Developmental Disabilities have continued to push for reforms, from wage increases for DSPs to a revamping of the waiver system to prioritize those with the most urgent needs. They’re calling for greater oversight of care providers, higher Medicaid reimbursement rates, and a commitment to ending the backlog of waiver applicants.

In 2023, the Time to Care coalition pushed a legislative agenda that included proposals to reduce wait times, increase funding, and address the geographic disparities in care — rural areas, in particular, have been left behind. But the road ahead is long. Without political will and a commitment to reform, many fear that Texas’s IDD care crisis will continue to deteriorate, further punishing those who are least able to advocate for themselves.

Leaving the Most Vulnerable Behind

The crisis in Texas’s disability care system is, at its core, a story of neglect — not just of individuals with disabilities, but of the very principles of care and community that are supposed to define a just society. The investigative reporting from the Austin American-Statesman and the Dallas Morning News has peeled back the curtain on a system that is failing at every level, from the underpaid DSPs to the families left waiting for years for services. The question now is whether the Texas Legislature will take the bold steps needed to fix the problem, or whether the state will continue to abandon its most vulnerable citizens in the name of fiscal conservatism. Until that answer comes, the lives of more than half a million Texans hang in the balance.

You can view our sources and citations in our research article here.

Promised a Lifeline, Given a Nightmare: How Texas’s HCS Program Fails Families with Disabilities

View the original Texas Watchdog article Promised a Lifeline, Given a Nightmare: How Texas’s HCS Program Fails Families with Disabilities here. 

The Texas Home and Community-Based Services (HCS) program has long been hailed as a lifeline for families dealing with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). It’s supposed to offer care, services, and support that keep people with IDD out of institutions and allow them to live in their communities. In theory, it’s a beautiful concept. In practice, however, Texas’s HCS system has devolved into a sprawling, bureaucratic mess that leaves tens of thousands of people waiting — sometimes for over a decade — for services they desperately need. What was supposed to be a humane and responsive system has instead become a Kafkaesque nightmare, with families trapped on endless waitlists, drowning in paperwork, and watching as their loved ones languish without the help they need.

How Texas Became Ground Zero for a Healthcare Crisis

Texas is no stranger to healthcare crises. The state has consistently ranked near the bottom when it comes to access to healthcare, particularly for low-income individuals. It’s also one of only 12 states that have refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), a decision that has left hundreds of thousands of Texans without coverage. And then there’s the HCS waitlist — a symptom of a much larger, much deeper problem. As of 2024, more than 108,000 Texans were stuck on the HCS waitlist, with some families waiting 15 years or longer for services. Yes, you read that right: 15 years. That’s enough time for a child to go from kindergarten to high school graduation without ever receiving the help they need.

The Texas Tribune reported that many of these individuals have been trapped on the waitlist for so long that their needs have changed dramatically by the time their name is finally called. Some die before they ever receive services. Others are forced into institutional settings, exactly the kind of outcome the HCS program was designed to avoid. And yet, despite the growing demand for services, Texas’s Medicaid system remains woefully underfunded, understaffed, and overwhelmed.

The Perfect Storm: How Medicaid “Unwinding” Made Everything Worse

As if the HCS waitlist wasn’t already bad enough, the state’s bungled Medicaid “unwinding” process has made things even worse. After the federal government ended continuous Medicaid coverage in March 2023 — coverage that had been in place since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic — Texas rushed to redetermine eligibility for more than 5.9 million people. The result? Chaos. More than 2 million Texans lost their Medicaid coverage, many of them because of procedural denials rather than actual ineligibility. Translation: people were kicked off Medicaid because of paperwork errors, lost forms, or bureaucratic incompetence, not because they no longer met the eligibility requirements.

For individuals with disabilities who were relying on Medicaid to access HCS services, the unwinding process has been particularly brutal. Many have lost their coverage entirely, while others have seen their services disrupted by administrative delays. According to reports, Texas’s procedural denial rate is 35%, far higher than the national average of 22%. In other words, one-third of the people who lose Medicaid coverage in Texas are losing it because of paperwork issues. It’s a level of dysfunction that would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic.

A System Designed to Fail: The Bureaucratic Maze of HCS Enrollment

If you’ve ever tried to apply for Medicaid in Texas, you know it’s not exactly a user-friendly process. The system is complex, confusing, and riddled with bureaucratic hurdles that make it nearly impossible for families to navigate. The Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC), which oversees the HCS program, relies heavily on manual processes for both application and renewal forms. Even when forms are submitted online, they often have to be re-entered manually by eligibility workers, adding unnecessary delays and increasing the likelihood of errors. As of early 2024, families were waiting an average of 88 days just for someone to start processing their Medicaid applications.

And then there are the procedural denials — those dreaded moments when you find out your application has been denied not because you’re ineligible, but because some bureaucrat lost your paperwork, or you missed a deadline you didn’t even know existed. Texas has become infamous for this. The state’s heavy reliance on paper-based processes, combined with its refusal to adopt modern data-driven approaches, means that only 6% of Medicaid renewals are processed through automated systems. In other states, that figure is much higher, which means fewer errors, fewer delays, and fewer people falling through the cracks. But in Texas, the cracks are more like gaping chasms, and they’re swallowing up the people who need help the most.

The Crisis Diversion Slots: A Band-Aid on a Bullet Wound

In an attempt to stem the tide of institutionalization, Texas has created Crisis Diversion slots within the HCS program. These slots are reserved for individuals who are at imminent risk of being institutionalized and allow them to jump ahead of the 108,000 others stuck on the waitlist. Sounds good in theory, right? The problem is, these slots are few and far between, and they’re subject to the whims of state budget allocations. Even in emergency situations, there’s no guarantee that a Crisis Diversion slot will be available. Families who are desperately trying to keep their loved ones out of institutions are often left waiting, even when they meet the qualifications for immediate help.

The process for securing a Crisis Diversion slot is, unsurprisingly, another bureaucratic maze. Families have to submit a Request for Home and Community-based Services Crisis Diversion Slot to HHSC, along with a mountain of supporting documentation, including the individual’s Determination of Intellectual Disability (DID) and Inventory for Client and Agency Planning (ICAP) booklet. HHSC staff then review the request and decide whether the individual qualifies for a slot. If they do, and if a slot is available, enrollment in the HCS program is authorized. But again, this is all contingent on there being enough slots to go around, which there rarely are.

The Impact on Disability Services: The Domino Effect of Medicaid Cuts

The Medicaid unwinding process hasn’t just affected the people who lost coverage — it’s also had a devastating impact on disability services across the state. Safety net clinics, which often serve as the primary care providers for individuals with disabilities, have reported a 30% decrease in Medicaid revenue since the unwinding began. This financial hit has forced some clinics to lay off staff, furlough employees, and cut back on essential services like behavioral health and dental care. For people with disabilities, many of whom rely on these clinics for their care, the loss of services has been catastrophic.

And then there’s the Texas foster care system, which is already under federal court supervision because of its many failures. The Medicaid unwinding process has only made things worse, especially for children with disabilities who are already struggling to get the care they need. Foster children with special needs are now facing additional barriers to accessing services, thanks to the state’s bungled Medicaid renewal process. In some cases, these children are losing coverage altogether, leaving them without the critical services they depend on.

The Staff Shortages: A Workforce in Crisis

It’s not just the people who need services who are suffering — the people who provide those services are in crisis too. The workforce that supports Texas’s disability services has been gutted by budget cuts, layoffs, and an inability to recruit and retain staff. The Direct Service Workforce Development Taskforce, which was supposed to address these issues, has made little headway in solving the problem. Community attendants and personal care assistants — the people who provide hands-on care to individuals with disabilities — are leaving the field in droves because they’re overworked, underpaid, and undervalued.

The result is a system that is teetering on the brink of collapse. Clinics and care facilities are struggling to keep up with demand, and the quality of care is deteriorating as staff are forced to take on more patients than they can handle. The people who rely on these services — people with disabilities, foster children, low-income families — are bearing the brunt of these failures, and there’s no end in sight.

Federal Funding: A Lifeline, or a Missed Opportunity?

The federal government has tried to throw Texas a lifeline, but the state has been slow to grab it. In 2024, Texas received over $92 million in federal funds to help manage the Medicaid unwinding process, but that money has done little to stem the tide of coverage losses and service disruptions. Federal initiatives like ex parte processing, which allows states to determine Medicaid eligibility using publicly available data, have been embraced by other states, but Texas has lagged behind. Only 6% of Medicaid renewals in Texas are processed through automated systems, compared to much higher rates in other states.

The federal government has also encouraged states to expand their Home and Community-Based Services (HCBS) programs, offering temporary increases in federal Medicaid matching funds to incentivize expansion. But Texas, predictably, has been slow to take advantage of these opportunities. The state’s refusal to expand Medicaid under the ACA has also cost it billions of dollars in federal funding, money that could have been used to reduce the HCS waitlist and improve services for people with disabilities.

Community-Based Care: The Solution That’s Right in Front of Us

The irony of the HCS crisis is that there’s a solution sitting right in front of us, but Texas refuses to fully embrace it. Community-based care, the very thing the HCS program was designed to provide, offers a more humane, cost-effective alternative to institutionalization. Programs like the Community Living Assistance and Support Services (CLASS) waiver and the Texas Home Living (TxHmL) program allow individuals with disabilities to live in their own homes or in small group settings, receiving the services they need to thrive. These programs are generally cheaper than institutional care and lead to better outcomes for individuals with disabilities.

But access to community-based care is limited by the same thing that plagues the HCS program: long waitlists, underfunding, and bureaucratic delays. Families who apply for CLASS or TxHmL often find themselves waiting years for services, just like those on the HCS waitlist. It’s a vicious cycle, and until Texas invests more in community-based care, it’s not going to get any better.

The Way Forward: Fixing a Broken System

It’s clear that the Texas HCS system is broken, but it’s not beyond repair. Advocates have called for a range of reforms that could help fix the system, including streamlining the application process, increasing the use of automated eligibility checks, and expanding Medicaid to increase funding for disability services. Raising wages for community attendants and personal care assistants would also help address the staffing shortages that are crippling the system.

Perhaps the most important reform, however, would be expanding access to community-based care. By investing more in programs like CLASS and TxHmL, Texas could reduce the waitlists for services and ensure that people with disabilities get the help they need without having to wait a decade or more. The money is there — the state just has to choose to spend it on the people who need it most.

A Crisis of Indifference

At the heart of the Texas HCS crisis is a simple, brutal fact: the state doesn’t care enough to fix it. Whether it’s the bureaucratic bungling of Medicaid renewals, the refusal to expand Medicaid under the ACA, or the failure to adequately fund community-based care, the result is the same: people with disabilities are being left behind. For the families stuck on the HCS waitlist, the message from the state is clear: wait your turn, even if that turn never comes. It’s a crisis born of indifference, and until Texas decides to care, nothing will change.

Highway Robbery: How Texas Cops Turn Civil Asset Forfeiture into a Cash Grab at Your Expense

View the original article by Texas Watchdog Highway Robbery: How Texas Cops Turn Civil Asset Forfeiture into a Cash Grab at Your Expense here. 

The Texas Civil Asset Forfeiture system is a deeply controversial practice that allows law enforcement to seize property suspected of being connected to criminal activity—even without charging the owner with a crime. Critics argue it violates constitutional rights and disproportionately impacts low-income communities, often without providing a fair process for property recovery. This practice is rooted in legal and financial mechanisms that prioritize law enforcement profits over justice. Texas seized over $50 million through this method in 2017 alone, without substantial accountability for its application.

Seizing Property Without Charging a Crime: A License to Plunder

In Texas, you don’t need to be convicted—or even charged—with a crime for law enforcement to take your stuff. This is the ugly core of the state’s civil asset forfeiture system, a legal framework that permits the seizure of property based on little more than a whiff of suspicion. In practice, law enforcement needs nothing more than probable cause that your assets—whether cash, cars, or even homes—might be connected to illegal activity. And "probable cause," as anyone who’s ever read a police report can tell you, is the most elastic legal standard there is. It's a glorified guess. Once your property is seized, the burden of proof shifts from the state to you—an innocent citizen—who must now prove your own innocence. Yes, you read that right. You must prove that your assets weren't connected to a crime, even if you weren’t charged with one.

Innocence Doesn’t Matter When There’s Cash to Be Had

Perhaps the most jarring aspect of this legal fiasco is that 80% of civil asset forfeiture cases nationwide never lead to criminal charges. In Texas, while detailed data remains scarce due to reporting gaps, it's clear the state follows this troubling trend. This system flips our justice principles on their head—innocent until proven guilty becomes guilty until you can afford a lawyer to prove your innocence. Take the case of a couple traveling through Tenaha, Texas in 2012. Police seized over $6,000 during a routine traffic stop, accusing them of trafficking cash with no other evidence—no drugs, no weapons, just cash. Even though no charges were ever filed, they had to endure a drawn-out legal battle to reclaim their money. And the city of Tenaha is no stranger to such dubious practices. Between 2006 and 2008, local law enforcement raked in more than $3 million from motorists in similar circumstances, many of whom were never charged with a crime. This legal piracy is not an anomaly but a systemic feature of Texas’s forfeiture machine.

The Impact on Innocent People: Legalized Theft

The harsh reality for many innocent property owners is that the financial and emotional costs of contesting these seizures are prohibitive. The burden of proof is so lopsided in favor of the state that many simply give up, particularly when the legal costs of recovering their property outweigh the value of what was taken. One particularly egregious case involved Elizabeth Young, a grandmother whose house and car were confiscated after her son was arrested for selling less than $200 worth of marijuana. She had no knowledge of her son’s activities, yet she had to fight for years to get her property back. This system operates on the assumption that the property itself is guilty—an absurd concept known as in rem proceedings, where the state sues the property rather than the owner.

The Financial Incentive: Policing for Profit

Here’s where things get really dystopian: Texas law allows law enforcement agencies to keep up to 100% of the proceeds from forfeitures. That’s right—the very people seizing your property get to keep it, or at least the cash value of it. It’s no wonder forfeiture has become such a favorite tool for Texas cops. In many cases, small towns and counties rely on forfeiture proceeds to prop up their budgets, creating a perverse incentive to seize as much as possible. In Reeves County, with a population under 20,000, forfeiture proceeds in 2012 were 15 times larger than the local prosecutor's annual budget. This is the definition of a conflict of interest—when the same people enforcing the law stand to benefit financially from its application, how can they possibly be trusted to act impartially?

A System with No Safeguards: The Challenges of Reform

Given the outrage, you’d think reform would be a slam dunk, but in Texas, where law enforcement holds sway over the legislature, reform is easier said than done. In 2017, a bipartisan coalition tried to introduce several reforms to the system, including a requirement for criminal convictions before forfeiture could occur. Law enforcement officials fought back hard, claiming that this would cripple their ability to fight drug cartels and organized crime. These scare tactics worked; none of the major reforms passed. And in 2023, despite growing bipartisan support for change, the reform bill House Bill 3659—which sought to raise the burden of proof and limit small-dollar seizures—passed in the House but stalled in the Senate without so much as a hearing.

The problem is obvious: civil asset forfeiture, as it stands, generates too much easy money for local police departments and prosecutors. And that money isn’t going toward rehabilitating drug users or funding community programs. It’s going to shiny new police cars, upgraded tactical gear, and who knows what else. The financial incentives baked into the system make meaningful reform nearly impossible because the people benefiting from forfeiture are the very ones tasked with enforcing the law.

A Tale of Two Justice Systems: Targeting the Vulnerable

If you think civil asset forfeiture applies equally to all Texans, think again. Like so many abusive law enforcement practices, civil forfeiture disproportionately affects low-income individuals and communities of color. In Harris County, where over 300 vehicles are seized annually, many of those targeted are Black or Latino drivers. These individuals often don’t have the financial resources to hire a lawyer to fight for their property, meaning they’re far more likely to lose it by default. And it's not just cars and cash being taken—homes, businesses, and even life savings have been seized, often with no criminal charges ever filed.

The legal fees to contest a seizure often exceed the value of the property, especially in cases where small amounts of cash are taken. Imagine losing your vehicle during a routine traffic stop and being told that if you want it back, you’ll have to pay more in legal fees than the car is worth. This is how civil forfeiture operates—a rigged system designed to dissuade challenges and maximize profits for law enforcement.

The Legal Labyrinth: Good Luck Getting Your Stuff Back

Once your property has been seized, getting it back is a Kafkaesque nightmare. The legal process is arcane and filled with enough red tape to suffocate a small country. In many cases, property owners have as little as 10 days to file a claim contesting the forfeiture, and if you miss a single court date or file a document incorrectly, you could lose your property for good. And unlike criminal cases, where you have the right to an attorney, civil forfeiture cases don’t offer court-appointed lawyers. If you can’t afford one, you’re on your own.

Even when property owners manage to file the necessary paperwork and attend multiple hearings, the state still only needs to prove by a preponderance of the evidence—a much lower standard than “beyond a reasonable doubt”—that the property was connected to criminal activity. The deck is stacked, and the state knows it.

The Push for Reform: Too Little, Too Late?

Reform advocates aren’t giving up, though. Groups like the Institute for Justice and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) have been fighting to change Texas’s civil forfeiture laws for years. They point to successful reforms in other states like New Mexico and Nebraska, where forfeiture is now only allowed after a criminal conviction. But in Texas, entrenched interests make reform a long, uphill battle. Law enforcement agencies argue that forfeiture is a crucial tool in the fight against drug trafficking, but the reality is that most forfeitures target small amounts of cash and property, not large-scale criminal enterprises.

There’s growing public support for change, and all three major political parties in Texas—Republican, Democrat, and Libertarian—have included civil forfeiture reform in their platforms. But unless lawmakers muster the courage to stand up to law enforcement lobbyists, meaningful reform may remain out of reach.

Conclusion: A Broken System Built on Profits, Not Justice

View the original article from Texas Watchdog Highway Robbery: How Texas Cops Turn Civil Asset Forfeiture into a Cash Grab at Your Expense here. 

Texas’s civil asset forfeiture system is a cash cow for law enforcement, a broken system where your property can be taken without charges and where innocence is meaningless. The financial incentives ensure that law enforcement will continue to resist reform, and the legal barriers make it nearly impossible for property owners to reclaim what’s rightfully theirs.

Until Texas decides to prioritize due process and constitutional rights over police profits, innocent Texans will continue to be victims of a system that’s more about filling coffers than fighting crime. In a state that prides itself on personal liberty and limited government, civil asset forfeiture stands as a stark reminder that those principles don’t always apply when there’s money on the table.

Smoke, Mirrors, and Broken Promises: Texas State Supported Living Centers Continue to Fail the Most Vulnerable

You can view the original article by the Texas Watchdog here.

 

The Texas State Supported Living Centers (SSLCs), which are meant to care for some of the state’s most vulnerable residents — people with intellectual and developmental disabilities — are facing an ever-growing crisis. These institutions, once designed as havens for care, have instead become synonymous with neglect, abuse, and systemic failures that persist despite years of federal oversight and a $112 million settlement. In classic style, the Lone Star State made all the promises to fix the problem but delivered nothing but smoke and mirrors. Beneath a glossy surface of “reforms” lies a cold, brutal reality: Texas’s SSLC system is failing its residents in ways that are not just shocking but also criminal.

SSLC System History: A Slow-Burning Crisis Ignored for Too Long

Texas’s SSLCs were established as a safety net for residents with developmental disabilities, promising care that would be more personal and integrated than cold, institutional alternatives. Over time, these centers morphed into something altogether different — a bureaucratic dumping ground where staff often outnumber residents but abuse is still rampant. The system has become notorious for failing to meet even the most basic care standards. After a 2009 Department of Justice investigation uncovered rampant physical abuse, neglect, and exploitation in these centers, Texas agreed to overhaul its SSLC system. They slapped a $112 million band-aid on the problem, promised sweeping reforms, and went back to business as usual. Fast forward over a decade, and what do we have? Continued abuse. Neglect. Compliance levels so abysmal that it’s hard to believe the state spent even a dime trying to fix anything. As of 2014, five years after the settlement, SSLCs had achieved a pathetic 30% compliance with mandated reforms. Thirty percent. That’s like paying a contractor to fix your roof and they only bother patching up a third of the tiles.

Why the DOJ Stepped In: Abuse, Neglect, and Shocking Fatalities

The Department of Justice didn’t decide to investigate Texas SSLCs out of some bureaucratic routine. No, they were practically dragged into it by the sheer number of horrifying incidents coming out of these centers. Take the Lubbock SSLC, for example, where between 2004 and 2005, 17 residents died under suspicious circumstances. Seventeen people — dead — and nobody could give a straight answer as to why. At the Corpus Christi SSLC, staff were caught on video forcing residents, some with severe autism, to fight each other for their amusement. Yes, a “Fight Club” for the developmentally disabled. That’s the kind of place Texas was running. And it didn’t stop there. Physical abuse at these centers included staff lashing residents with belts, stepping on their throats, and keeping them restrained for hours on end. One man at the Denton SSLC was beaten so badly that he was left in a wheelchair, unable to feed himself. And this, mind you, was the result of Texas’s version of “care.”

Sean Yates: The Tragic Face of Institutional Failure

Perhaps no story highlights the SSLC system’s failings more tragically than that of Sean Yates. Sean was a 35-year-old with severe Asperger’s syndrome and attention deficit disorder who had been living at the Corpus Christi SSLC for ten years. Despite his history of running away, the center’s staff inexplicably decided to reduce his supervision level in early 2014. Big mistake. Sean ran away, and his body was found nearly a month later in the Corpus Christi ship channel. What’s even more appalling is that Sean may have been a victim of the so-called “Fight Club” that was operating within the center. Federal monitors slammed the SSLC for their complete “lack of urgency” in addressing the rampant problems at the facility. Sean’s family had no idea what he had been subjected to, let alone that he had died because of institutional negligence. And Sean wasn’t the only one. Other residents, like a 28-year-old man at the Richmond SSLC, died from blunt force trauma in 2010, leading to criminal indictments for the staff members involved.

Federal Oversight: Window Dressing for a Rotten Core

When the DOJ swooped in, you’d think things would change. The 2009 settlement agreement required Texas to meet 171 federally mandated performance measures, all aimed at dragging the SSLC system into the realm of basic human decency. Independent monitors were assigned to assess the SSLCs every six months. Yet, despite this federal oversight, abuse, neglect, and medical malpractice continued. By 2014, most facilities had barely scratched the surface of compliance, with many only achieving 30% of the mandated reforms. It’s as if the entire system is wired to resist change. Sure, a few hundred staff members were fired or forced to resign in 2014, but let’s face it — that was little more than a PR stunt. For every abuser caught, how many more slipped through the cracks?

The Cost of Doing Nothing: Texas’s Financial and Moral Bankruptcy

You’d think that with all this money Texas is throwing into the black hole that is the SSLC system, someone might ask whether the entire thing is worth it. Spoiler alert: it’s not. In 2015, the average annual cost per SSLC resident was more than $210,000, making these centers one of the most expensive care options for individuals with disabilities. That’s taxpayer money, mind you. And what are we getting for it? Substandard care, abuse scandals, and a system that actively harms the people it’s supposed to protect. Meanwhile, alternative community-based care options, like Home and Community-Based Services (HCS), cost a fraction of what SSLCs do and generally produce better outcomes. But Texas seems hellbent on maintaining these money pits. Even as the state’s budget hemorrhages from the cost of maintaining 13 SSLCs, enrollment has plummeted by 70% over the past three decades. We’re paying more to care for fewer people, and doing a worse job while we’re at it.

Community-Based Care: The Obvious Answer Everyone’s Ignoring

Here’s the kicker: there’s a solution sitting right in front of Texas’s face, but the state refuses to fully embrace it. Community-based care, specifically through the HCS waiver and the Texas Home Living (TxHmL) program, offers a more humane, cost-effective alternative to the SSLCs. These programs provide tailored care, allowing individuals with disabilities to live in their own homes or smaller group settings while receiving the services they need. They’re not perfect — thanks to years of underfunding and long waiting lists — but they’re undeniably better than the horrors going on in the SSLCs. The problem? Texas hasn’t invested nearly enough in these alternatives. The waitlists for HCS services are legendary, with some families waiting more than a decade for help. Meanwhile, SSLCs continue to vacuum up resources, despite overwhelming evidence that they’re outdated, ineffective, and downright dangerous.

Reform Efforts: Politicians Tinker While the System Burns

In response to the ongoing catastrophe, the Texas Sunset Advisory Commission floated the idea of closing six of the 13 SSLCs in 2014. Naturally, this sparked a wave of outrage from families of SSLC residents and various advocacy groups. So the Texas Legislature punted. They shelved the closure plans, leaving the centers open and the problems unresolved. It’s a classic case of Texas lawmakers making just enough noise about reform to look like they care, while quietly ensuring that nothing really changes. In 2015, Senate Bill 204, which proposed closing the Austin SSLC and establishing a restructuring committee for other centers, was defeated. It was a missed opportunity to overhaul a failing system, and it’s the residents who are paying the price.

Staffing Woes: The Workers Are Set Up to Fail

Let’s be clear: part of the reason these centers are such a disaster is that the staff — who are often underpaid, undertrained, and overstretched — are set up to fail. Sure, the state tried to address staffing shortages in 2011 by filling 94% of positions, but that did nothing to solve the larger systemic issues. Even when staffing levels improved, abuse continued. Why? Because the problem isn’t just numbers; it’s culture. The SSLCs have cultivated a toxic environment where abuse is tolerated, medical care is inadequate, and residents’ rights are trampled on. And without meaningful changes in leadership, training, and oversight, no amount of new hires will fix that.

The Path Forward: Burn It Down and Start Over

At this point, it’s clear that the SSLC system, as it exists today, can’t be saved. It’s too expensive, too broken, and too dangerous. The best way forward is to phase it out entirely, focusing instead on expanding community-based care options that actually work. The money Texas is wasting on maintaining SSLCs would be better spent on fixing the waitlists for HCS and TxHmL services, ensuring that people get the help they need when they need it. But that requires political will, something in short supply in the Texas Legislature. Until then, we’re left with a system that fails everyone involved — residents, families, staff, and taxpayers.

A System That Destroys, Not Protects

Texas’s SSLCs were supposed to provide care and protection for the state’s most vulnerable residents. Instead, they’ve become emblematic of a system that destroys more than it protects. The abuses are rampant, the costs are astronomical, and the reform efforts have been a joke. The fact that these centers are still open is a testament to Texas’s refusal to confront its own failures. It’s long past time for the state to shut down these glorified prisons, invest in community-based care, and finally deliver on the promises it made over a decade ago. Until that happens, the residents of Texas’s SSLCs will remain trapped in a system that was designed to care for them but has done nothing but fail them.

The Texas IDD Caregiver Crisis: How the Lone Star State Abandoned Its Most Vulnerable

View our original article The Texas IDD Caregiver Crisis: How the Lone Star State Abandoned Its Most Vulnerable here. 

In Texas, caring for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) was supposed to be a community-based solution—progressive even. Instead, it's become an exercise in government failure so stark, it would make Kafka shake his head in disbelief. Welcome to the Texas IDD Caregiver Crisis, where Direct Support Professionals (DSPs), the underpaid and underappreciated workforce keeping this house of cards from crumbling, are abandoning ship. The predictable result? A human disaster in slow motion, hitting the most vulnerable populations first.

What started out as a decent idea—keeping individuals with IDD out of large institutions and integrating them into the community—has deteriorated into one of the state’s biggest social care crises. The entire system is being strangled by chronic underfunding, neglect, and a workforce exodus that’s turning an already dire situation into a catastrophe. Meanwhile, the state pretends it’s “working on it,” offering piecemeal solutions while the cracks in the foundation grow larger by the day. It’s a slow-motion collapse, and the casualties are the people who need help the most: individuals with IDD and the DSPs who are barely hanging on.

The Great DSP Exodus: A Workforce on the Brink of Collapse

Let’s get one thing straight: the system’s foundation is Direct Support Professionals—the DSPs. They’re the ones who assist with day-to-day needs like eating, bathing, dressing, and taking medication. You know, the stuff of basic survival. For their trouble, Texas pays them a laughable $10.60 an hour, a wage so low it should be considered a public insult. This isn’t work that anyone can walk into. It’s emotionally taxing, physically demanding, and vital for the people they serve. But in Texas, it’s treated like a part-time gig at a fast-food joint.

And here’s the kicker: that $10.60 is after the state authorized a slight bump in wages. Before that? It was $8.11 an hour—less than what most people make scanning groceries. Let that sink in for a second. You’ve got people managing the lives of Texans with serious developmental disabilities, often working 60 to 100 hours a week, and their paychecks wouldn’t even cover rent in most Texas cities.

What happens when you pay people this poorly to do such important work? They leave. In droves. Vacancy rates for DSPs in Texas have climbed to 34% in 2024, up from 30% in 2021. It’s like a slow-rolling tidal wave of attrition. DSPs are quitting, facilities are shutting down, and individuals with IDD are left in limbo, often sent back into institutional settings that are supposed to be the last resort. This isn’t a workforce shortage; this is a full-on labor collapse.

Facilities Closing at Alarming Rates: An Avoidable Catastrophe

The math is simple: fewer DSPs means fewer facilities can stay open. Since January 2023, 179 HCS homes and 50 ICF facilities have closed, with projections showing another 126 facilities will shutter before the end of 2024. These numbers are not some abstract policy issue; they represent people—residents who lose their homes, their caregivers, and any sense of stability.

Families in rural areas are hit particularly hard by these closures. In small towns, when a facility closes, there’s no Plan B. There’s no secondary facility just down the road; there’s nothing. These families are now faced with impossible choices: either move their loved ones to institutions far from home or take on the overwhelming responsibility of care themselves. Neither option is humane. Neither option is right.

A Caregiver Workforce on Life Support

Meanwhile, for the DSPs who are hanging on, the work conditions are absurd. Many are working double or even triple shifts to make up for the shortage in staffing. The result? Burnout, exhaustion, and mistakes. Medication errors in care facilities have spiked by 20% since 2021, and there’s been a 30% increase in behavioral incidents. These are the inevitable outcomes when you ask a workforce to work twice as hard for wages that barely keep the lights on. It’s like trying to build a skyscraper with dollar-store tools.

Texas isn’t just failing DSPs; it’s failing the people they serve. The turnover and shortage in staff mean that the residents—Texans with IDD—are stuck in an endless churn of new caregivers. There’s no consistency, no continuity in care. And for people with IDD, many of whom rely on structure and routine, this is disastrous. Every new caregiver is a disruption, and every disruption can lead to behavioral regressions, anxiety, and emotional distress.

The Hollow Promise of Community-Based Care

When Texas first began moving people with IDD out of large institutions and into community-based care, it was hailed as a major step forward. Instead of warehousing people in faceless institutions, the idea was to give them more independence by offering care in smaller, more personal settings. It was supposed to be more humane, more integrated, and more responsive. But somewhere along the line, Texas stopped funding the vision.

The state’s refusal to adequately fund the system has turned a once-promising model of care into a bureaucratic horror show. The Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC) is tasked with overseeing this mess, but their hands are tied by decades of budget cuts and mismanagement. Despite numerous reports highlighting the workforce crisis and the facility closures, the state has done little more than throw around token increases in funding—none of which come close to addressing the root of the problem.

What Texas Could Do (But Probably Won’t)

Let’s not pretend this problem doesn’t have solutions. The Time to Care coalition and other advocacy groups have been crystal clear: Texas needs to raise DSP wages to at least $15 an hour. It’s not a perfect fix, but it’s a start. Even then, $15 an hour is the floor, not the ceiling. DSPs should be paid in line with the crucial nature of their work, not as an afterthought in the state budget.

Another critical issue is Medicaid reimbursement rates, which are woefully inadequate. Providers can’t pay their staff or keep their doors open because the reimbursement rates for HCS services haven’t kept pace with inflation, let alone the actual cost of care. It’s not rocket science—if Texas wants to keep DSPs in the field and facilities open, it needs to invest in them.

But let’s not kid ourselves about what’s really going on here. Texas has consistently refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act, leaving billions of federal dollars on the table. Dollars that could have funded higher wages, better facilities, and shorter waitlists. Between 2014 and 2024, Texas forfeited over $36 billion in federal funding—money that could have gone directly to fixing this crisis. Instead, it went to other states, while Texas’s IDD community is left to rot.

The Real Cost: Lives Put on Hold or Wrecked Entirely

For the individuals with IDD caught up in this mess, the human cost is impossible to calculate. These aren’t just numbers on a ledger; these are real people, real families, facing real consequences. Take the story of Sean Yates, a 35-year-old resident of the Corpus Christi SSLC who tragically died after escaping from the facility. His family had placed their trust in the system to care for him, but the system was too broken to provide even the most basic safeguards. Sean’s death is a stark reminder of what happens when a state refuses to adequately fund and oversee its care systems.

For others, the consequences are less immediate but no less severe. Families are going bankrupt trying to cover the gaps in care, often forced to leave their jobs to care for loved ones full-time. The emotional toll is immense, as parents, siblings, and spouses watch their loved ones languish in a system that treats them as afterthoughts.

A State That Doesn't Care

What’s most galling about all of this is the state’s indifference. Texas is a wealthy state. It could fix this if it wanted to. But fixing it requires political will, and political will requires caring about the lives of people who don’t have lobbyists. The fact that the state continues to underfund IDD care, refuse Medicaid expansion, and ignore the plight of DSPs tells you everything you need to know. The state doesn’t care because it doesn’t have to. The people suffering don’t have a voice loud enough to make them care.

So here we are, in 2024, watching a system that was supposed to be a beacon of progress collapse under the weight of its own neglect. Facilities are closing. DSPs are quitting. Families are breaking under the strain. And all the while, Texas lawmakers sit on their hands, offering up “task forces” and “working groups” as the solution. But until Texas decides to prioritize its most vulnerable citizens, this crisis will continue to unfold. And the people who will suffer the most are those who are least equipped to advocate for themselves.

Conclusion: The Crisis Texas Won't Solve

The Texas IDD Caregiver Crisis is a perfect storm of bad policy, underfunding, and political indifference. The people who need help the most are being left behind, and the workers who care for them are abandoning the profession in droves. What’s left is a system on life support, propped up by temporary fixes and empty promises. The state has the resources to fix this, but so far, it’s shown no interest in doing so. For individuals with IDD, their families, and the DSPs still hanging on, the message from Texas is clear: Don’t expect help anytime soon.