Ken Paxton Bills Texas Millions for His Vacation Guards

If you have ever wondered what it looks like when a public servant mistakes the state treasury for his personal frequent-flier account, look no further than Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. According to a barnburner of an investigation co-published by The Texas Tribune and ProPublica, our state’s top lawman has spent $3.3 million in public money since January 2015 shuttling himself across thirty-six states and nineteen foreign countries with armed Texas Department of Public Safety troopers in tow. The punchline, if you have the stomach for it, is that records could produce an official state business purpose for only 138 out of nearly 1,000 trips. That means for five out of every six jaunts, Texas taxpayers were footing the bill for an armed entourage while Paxton was, by all available evidence, just out living his best life.

Now, down here in Texas, folks are used to politicians treating the state Capitol like a private gentlemen’s club. But running through more than $2.7 million in public protection without leaving behind so much as a sticky note explaining what the public got out of it takes a rare kind of gall. Paxton’s security detail has averaged $24,300 every single month. To put that in perspective, his predecessor, Greg Abbott, ran up about $7,400 a month in inflation-adjusted dollars during his final three years as attorney general. In fact, Paxton has logged eighty-two more out-of-state trips with a security detail than Abbott has taken as governor, even though both men have held their respective offices for the exact same amount of time.

It turns out that a whole mess of this globe-trotting just happened to align with the Paxton family real estate portfolio, which spans fifteen properties worth around $11 million. The troopers were dispatched on fifty-three trips to Florida, where Paxton and his family trust happen to own two houses and a townhome. They tagged along on twenty-four trips to Utah, where the trust holds five properties, including retreats in ski and golf communities. In June 2021, the security detail accompanied him all the way to Lahaina on Maui; four months later, his family trust scooped up an ocean-view lot for $410,000 that is now assessed at $1.2 million. Throw in repeated journeys to an Oklahoma town where he owns a vacation lodge, and you start to get the picture. It looks less like state business and more like having the Highway Patrol double as bellhops and property managers.

Paxton’s office responded to the investigation by wrapping itself in the flag and declaring that the attorney general faces constant peril from dark forces. Throughout his career, Ken Paxton has faced numerous security threats stemming from his courageous work as Attorney General fighting on behalf of the people of Texas, his office said in a written statement. Those threats are a direct result of him taking on the cartels terrorizing Texans and some of the nation’s most dangerous violent criminals.

That sounds terrifying right up until you look at how Paxton behaves when actual official business calls. State records show he skipped his state police security detail entirely on at least two dozen occasions when he was genuinely traveling for state business. Apparently, the Mexican cartels are a grave menace when he is inspecting rental properties in Utah, but entirely manageable when he is attending routine administrative conferences. And then there is the summer of 2023. In May of that year, the Texas House voted 121–23 to impeach Paxton for bribery and abuse of office, suspending him from his post until September and barring him by law from conducting any official government business. Did Paxton stay home in Collin County? Not on your life. He took at least seventeen trips, including luxury jaunts to Park City, Utah, and Vail, Colorado, with armed state troopers guarding him around the clock on the public dime.

There’s no reason for the taxpayers to be paying for things that they would not be paying for if he had stayed home. That’s a misuse of public funds, Richard Briffault, a government ethics professor at Columbia Law School, pointed out to reporters. Chris Toth, who previously served as executive director of the National Association of Attorneys General, put the matter just as bluntly: If you’ve got all these extra trips, it becomes ethically and morally problematic. The ethical question is whether a legitimate security function has effectively become a taxpayer-funded subsidy.

In other states, when officials take personal vacations or campaign swings, they or their political committees reimburse the public coffers for excess security costs. In Texas, state records confirm that Paxton has reimbursed exactly zero dollars. Not a plugged nickel. Former Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum, who served twelve years without taking a security detail anywhere, asked the question that any working person would ask: Was he minding the store? There’s a lot of work to be done at the office.

Minding the store does not seem to be on the agenda. While ordinary working Texans are scraping together pennies to cover soaring property taxes, eye-watering utility bills, and insurance premiums that look like ransom notes, an official drawing a $153,750 public salary is billing twenty-four grand a month just to keep troopers standing guard outside his vacation condominiums. It is enough to make a dog laugh, or make a taxpayer holler. The only cure for this brand of arrogance is for regular citizens to remember it when early voting starts, make a racket, and refuse to let the foxes run the hen house undisturbed.