Greg Abbott Turns an Endless Emergency into a Shopping Spree
Down in Austin, Governor Greg Abbott has managed to pull off a political miracle: he has declared the exact same disaster sixty-nine separate times. According to a joint investigation published on October 15, 2026, by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, Abbott has spent the last five years signing rolling monthly disaster proclamations along the Rio Grande, treating the Texas border like a five-alarm kitchen fire that somehow never burns out and never gets put out.
Now, twenty-one of those renewals have landed on his desk since Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025. That creates an awkward bit of theater, considering the federal administration insists unauthorized crossings have dropped to historic lows. When Abbott renewed the proclamation again in September 2026, citing an “ongoing and imminent threat,” he made it plain that reality is not permitted to interfere with a perfectly good paperwork machine. As Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University, told reporters, “I think it’s unprecedented. I don’t think that there is a similar example, certainly not as to the length of the emergency, and certainly not after the emergency has seemed to pass.”
Why keep a five-year-old emergency on life support? Because under Chapter 418 of the Texas Government Code—otherwise known as the Texas Disaster Act of 1975—a disaster declaration turns the governor into a one-man spending committee. It allows him to shift state funds without legislative approval, suspend pesky regulatory statutes, and, sweetest of all for the folks hanging around state agency lobbies, hand out fat state contracts without competitive bidding.
Since January 2025 alone, while the rest of the country was told the frontier had been tamed, the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas Military Department handed out more than $5 million across at least six noncompetitive emergency contracts. The taxpayers bought active-duty personnel rifles and handguns, leased private apartments, and even picked up the tab for a Ford F-150. More than $2 million of that money went out the door in a single no-bid contract to CTC Gunworks LLC for rifles and pistols.
That $5 million is just loose pocket change in the grand scheme of Operation Lone Star, which has sucked up more than $14 billion in state tax dollars since Abbott launched it in March 2021. Lawmakers handed over $11 billion during the Biden years and tossed in another $3 billion in 2025, including nearly $230 million in pure discretionary grant funding parked right on Abbott’s desk to dole out to favored local prosecutors and sheriffs.
To be fair to the governor’s staff, they have an explanation. Abbott’s deputy press secretary, Madeline Waschak, maintained that the state cannot afford to let its guard down. “The damage caused by four years of failed border policies under Democrat rule did not disappear overnight, and the progress we have made will not sustain itself without continued vigilance,” Waschak said in a written statement. She added that Abbott will “ensure the tools remain in place to safeguard our state as we work alongside the Trump Administration to deter, arrest, detain, and deport illegal immigrants.” The Department of Public Safety echoed that, saying the agency “aims to select vendors offering the best value, determined by cost, quality, and ability to meet the specific disaster response requirements.”
That sounds responsible until you remember what competitive bidding is for: proving you got the best value instead of asking the public to take your word for it. When Abbott said at a press conference in early October 2026 that Texas must secure the border “not just for the next two years of the Trump administration, but we gotta do it forever,” he gave the whole game away. An emergency that lasts forever is not an emergency; it is an open tab.
When the framers of the Texas Constitution met in 1876, still furious over Reconstruction governor E. J. Davis running roughshod over local courts, they went out of their way to build the weakest executive office they could devise. They locked the purse strings inside the Legislature and made sure lawmakers met only once every two years for 140 days, figuring politicians could do less damage if they stayed home. Abbott has turned that historical design on its head by turning disaster law into a permanent bypass valve around the Capitol.
Lawmakers from both parties filed bills during the 2025 legislative session to require legislative approval before any disaster proclamation could stretch past thirty or sixty days. Legislative leaders quietly suffocated every single one of those bills before they could see the light of a floor vote. Meanwhile, working Texans face soaring property taxes and underfunded rural hospitals, while billions of their tax dollars vanish into razor wire, private ranches, and no-bid purchase orders for patrol pickups.
With Abbott on the ballot for a fourth term this November, and the ninetieth Texas Legislature convening in Austin in early 2027, ordinary folks have every right to ask why an emergency declaration has become the state’s primary procurement tool. If Texans do not raise enough hell to make lawmakers take the state credit card back, Austin will still be declaring an emergency long after the Rio Grande runs dry.