Texas cancer agency awards its last grants of the year with the money nearly gone

The board that runs Texas’s cancer research agency meets Wednesday to approve the final grants of the budget year, and there is not much left to give. Its own finance staff reported in May that about $24 million of this year’s $300 million pool remained.

The Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas has committed roughly $4.07 billion across 2,223 grants, according to the report its chief executive gave the board in the spring. The money comes from bonds Texans approved twice at the ballot box — $3 billion in 2007, another $3 billion in 2019 — and state law caps awards at $300 million a year. The agency’s chief scientific officer and chief product development officer each bring recommendations Wednesday. Neither the notice nor anything else the agency has posted says how much is on the table.

The larger question sits underneath the agenda. State law abolishes the institute on September 1, 2029 unless lawmakers vote to keep it, and one item asks the board to discuss an efficiency audit — a review of whether an agency spends its money well, which a 2025 law now requires in the years before any agency’s expiration date. The State Auditor has published three such audits so far. None of them is the cancer institute’s.

The board also takes a final vote on a rule that writes into regulation something the agency already does most of the time: hold back a tenth of every product development grant until the company finishes the work and closes it out. The agency says the change is close to current practice; what it fixes is a gap for companies paid by reimbursement rather than in advance. It proposed the rule in June and took public comment through July 6. A grantee could still write to the chief executive and ask her to withhold less, and her answer would be final.

Two items near the end are closed-door business: a compliance investigation, which a 2013 law lets the board discuss in private, and a conversation with its lawyer. The minutes of the board’s February meeting, as posted in its May board book, record a closed session on “ongoing compliance investigations.” Nothing the agency has published names a person or a company or describes what is alleged, and no findings have been made public. Watch whether the grant slate spends down what is left or holds some back for the fall.

Meeting at a glance

Oversight Committee members

• Cindy Barberio Payne, Spring Branch — presiding officer; certified public accountant.
• Donald “Dee” Margo, El Paso — vice presiding officer; former mayor.
• Thomas “Tommy” Taylor, Dallas — secretary; business and commercial lawyer.
• David A. Cummings, San Angelo — medical oncologist.
• Ambrosio Hernandez, Pharr — pediatric surgeon; mayor of Pharr.
• Will Montgomery, Dallas — commercial litigation lawyer.
• Mahendra C. Patel, San Antonio — pediatric blood and cancer specialist.
• William Rice, Austin — hospital system clinical innovation executive.
• Craig Rosenfeld, Dallas — physician and biotechnology entrepreneur.

The roster follows the agency’s own Oversight Committee page, which lists all nine seats filled. Four members — Hernandez, Montgomery, Rice and Rosenfeld — show term end dates that have already passed and appear to be serving as holdovers; nothing found in the appointing offices’ announcements confirms reappointment. State law puts the duty to fill an expired seat on the appointing authority, not on the member. Members serve staggered six-year terms, and at least one appointee of each appointing officer must be a physician or scientist. Staff contact for this meeting: John Ellis, P.O. Box 12097, Austin 78711, (512) 463-3190.