As preparations for the 2025 legislative session begin, the Texas Public Policy Foundation has announced its priorities that include ending taxpayer-funded lobbying, expanding school choice, securing the Texas-Mexico border, and several additional policy issues for the next two years.
“Texas serves as a model and a beacon for the rest of the country to maximize individual liberty, promote a vibrant and growing economy, and ensure safe and secure communities,” said TPPF CEO Greg Sindelar in the announcement.
While recent legislative sessions have made tremendous progress, vigilance remains the price of freedom. From border security to low taxes, health care to education, Texans must not rest in making our state the freest and most prosperous place on Earth. TPPF’s legislative agenda again takes an aggressive approach to improving the lives of all Texans.
TPPF’s Priorities:
- End Taxpayer-Funded Lobbying: The Texas Legislature should no longer allow local governments to hire unaccountable lobbyists with taxpayer dollars.
- Empower Parents and Institute Education Savings Accounts: Every Texas parent must be given the freedom to choose the best education for their child by expanding the range of options open to all children, including education savings accounts, charter school expansion, and career development programs.
- Secure the Texas Border: Texas should protect its citizens and communities from the cartels and their drug- and human-smuggling operations by using whatever legal means necessary to gain operational control of and secure the border, including the creation of its own border force. Texas should not wait for the federal government to act; instead, using its constitutional authority to disrupt all cartel activity – including its coordination with the Mexican government and elites – and assert state sovereignty.
- Eliminate Property Taxes and Rein in Local Spending: By continuing to buy down our school district maintenance and operations property tax rates, policymakers can put Texas on a pathway to eliminate property taxes. Policymakers should extend the same responsible spending policies required of the state to cities and counties.
- Protect the Public and Solve Crimes: Texas must prioritize solving violent crimes to get dangerous offenders off the street and keep our communities safe.
- Make the Energy Grid More Reliable: Texas should require all electric generators, not just new ones, to guarantee a certain amount of power to the grid during periods of high demand.
- Make Affordable Healthcare More Accessible to Patients: Texas should ensure that nonprofit hospitals follow existing rules requiring them to use the tax savings they receive from the state to lower healthcare costs for certain patients.
- Restore the Proper Mission of Higher Education: Texas should ensure that public higher education institutions foster diversity of thought, encourage innovation, resist ideological conformity, and return to their proper role of widening the sphere of knowledge for students. Taxpayers should not fund programs that divide, exclude, and indoctrinate students, nor should the accreditation organizations be able to extort schools into promoting one ideological agenda.
- Pass a Conservative Texas Budget: The Texas budget should not grow beyond the average taxpayers’ ability to pay. Texas should use traditional metrics like inflation and population growth to determine a responsible spending limit.
- Promote Responsible Artificial Intelligence Reform: Texas should adopt sector-specific AI regulatory frameworks that promote transparency and maximize human dignity, ensuring Texas is the national model for balancing ethics and growth.
TPPF said these top ten priorities are part of a larger “Liberty Action Agenda” which includes more than 80 reforms that will be released in the coming months.
Before the 89th Legislative Session begins in January, TPPF “will conduct research, develop communications tools, educate the public, and build issue campaigns to ensure policymakers, experts and activists across the state join the fight for these solutions.”
Indeed, preparations for 2025 are only just beginning, as the Republican Party of Texas soon will be deciding its legislative priorities for next session during the upcoming GOP convention in May.
The 89th Legislative Session will begin January 14, 2025.
