James Quintero is the policy director for the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Government for the People campaign. Since joining the Foundation in 2008, Quintero has focused extensively on: state & local government spending, taxes, debt, public pension reform, annexation, and local regulations.
Every even-numbered year, the state’s Legislative Budget Board (LBB) publishes a helpful, user-friendly summation of the General Appropriations Act (GAA), otherwise known as the state’s two-year budget. On Wednesday, the LBB published the next iteration—its 2024-25 Fiscal Size-Up. From a 30,000 ft. level, this new report provides “a comprehensive review of how tax dollars were...
Part 3: How Texas Can Solve Its Winter Reliability Problem Five years after Winter Storm Uri, the ERCOT grid is still not ready for the next major winter storm. The first two installments of this series showed that demand has grown more than 20% since 2021 while firm generation capacity has barely budged, and the...
Recently, former President Trump floated the idea of creating “a government efficiency commission a federal commission to audit the entire federal government.” And even better, he suggested putting Elon Musk in charge of the commission, saying he is a great “cost-cutter.” Unleashing a commission of this nature on the federal government, led by a titan...