Everything is bigger in Texas, they say. And that goes for Texas think tanks and research organizations as well.
Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), which was founded almost 40 years ago, has positioned itself as a leading state-based think tank in the country. The non-partisan, although ideologically conservative, foundation promotes individual liberty, personal responsibility, and free enterprise, values that have become synonymous with Texas itself.
At the helm of the foundation’s communications team and strategies is Brian Phillips.
“Texas Public Policy Foundation is the largest state-based think tank in the country,” Phillips says. “We’re probably the second largest think tank in the country, outside of the Heritage Foundation.”
Prior to his stint at TPPF, Phillips, who was born in Texas, gained extensive experience and battle wounds in the political communications arena, working as Communications Director for U.S. Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah), Director of Rapid Response for U.S. Senator Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) 2016 presidential campaign, and various other roles in the House, Senate, think-tanks, and gubernatorial campaigns.
During the interview he shares what it was like to be in the trenches of political messaging warfare during the 2016 Republican primary cycle.
“We would have press meetings in the morning at 7 a.m. and we would talk about what we wanted to talk about that day,” Phillips says. “I’d have Fox News on and Trump would call in and just destroy our entire day because he would say something about us or about the world and everybody was responding to what he did.”
For years, maybe decades, conservatives have been on their heels when it came to the messaging battle in the U.S. However, with the ascension of Trump and “America First” in American political culture and recent changes in voting trends and dynamics across the country, that perception may be changing.
Just this month, the New York Times ran an article titled: How Conservatives are Winning Young Women.
By way of his position with TPPF and being in Texas, the second most populous in the country and a state held in high-esteem by both parties, Phillips is a key figure in the ongoing fight for American hearts and minds.
For Phillips, the Texas legislative session, which recently concluded, was a big success, delivering for Texans on a wide variety of policy issues, including one the foundation has been working on for awhile.
Founded in 1989, the foundation’s core mission initially focused on two issues: tort reform and education freedom. Over the decades TPPF has tried to help Texas advance school choice without success, until now.
“Our founding issue was education freedom,” says Phillips. “We have been working for 36 years to enable parents to have the right to be able to decide what is best for their children.”
That desire will now become a reality in Texas. Senate Bill 2, the Texas Education Freedom Act, a priority for Governor Greg Abbott and Lt. Governor Dan Patrick and led by Senator Brandon Creighton (R-Conroe) and Representative Brad Buckley (R-Salado), establishing a universal school choice program in Texas that will be available for up to 100,000 families.
“This was a historic legislative session that we finally got [school choice] through,” Phillips says. “It is the largest launch of a universal school choice program in the history of school choice throughout the country.”
And, while Texas was not the first, it was the 33rd state to adopt a school choice program, it was the largest initial program with $1 billion being available to Texas families for their children’s education.
“What it really means for parents and what it really means for students is their opportunities,” says Phillips.
Despite lagging behind other states on the issue, Phillips believes the impact will be significant, beyond just improving education outcomes for Texas kids.
“Texas is becoming the best state in the country for parents,” he says. In addition to school choice, “we passed our Parents Bill of Rights, SB-12, which opens up the right of parents to know exactly what’s going on with their kids at school.”
The bill also stipulated that “anything that a child checks out [from the library], that information can be given to a parent if they request it. The books are now part of what the parent gets to know.”
Another issue of great importance to Texas parents and maybe all Texans is their property tax bills.
“We probably do 5 or 6 polls a year at TPPF and we always ask the question of Texans – are property taxes a significant burden to you and your family,” says Phillips. “It always runs about 70% say yes. This year, for the first time, it got up over 80% saying property taxes are a significant burden.”
While Phillips believes the legislature has made some great strides on providing tax relief — efforts by the legislature to use surplus state revenues to buy down local property taxes — he also recognizes that more needs to be done to reform property taxes and spending.
“Over the last four or five sessions, the state has provided $51 billion in tax relief to Texas property owners but, of course, none of our tax bills are going down,” he says. “In fact, in most cases, they are going up and that’s because the local governments increase your taxes by the same amount or more so you don’t see the relief from year to year.”
Phillips explains that while the legislature did not get a lot accomplished to rein in local taxing authority or spending, he could see Governor Abbott making the tax reform part of the equation a bigger priority in future legislative sessions.
“At the end of the day, if the locals don’t respond to the constituents, the state legislators can’t just sit around,” says Phillips. “They are going to have to do something about what the locals are doing.”
Spending in general and not banning taxpayer money being used to hire lobbyists were two places where Phillips believes the legislature fell short.
“Ninety percent of Texans oppose their tax dollars going to lobbyists,” Phillips says. “Every time a school district hires a lobbyist, that’s money that could have gone into the classroom. And every time your local government sends a lobbyist up to the Capitol, that’s money that could go to public safety or to fix a pothole.”
“We probably spent more than we needed to,” he says. “And we need to have a reckoning on spending which is driving property taxes up.”
Looking ahead, Phillips sees health care, both in terms of transparency and creating a market with competition, as the next frontier for conservative policy in Texas.
“Surprise billing is a moral hazard,” says Phillips. He believes the market is already responding to Texans desires for price transparency in health care and hospitals and doctors are taking note.
“More importantly, not just empowering patients with more information but actually creating a real market for health care,” says Phillips. “Eighty-five to 90 percent of all health care [spending] is non-emergency procedures. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t have an exchange or interchange where people can go and bid for services instead of just doing what the insurance company tells them to do.”
“I am interested to see what we can do with health care. We need to change the culture so that the insurance companies and hospitals are not running and driving the policy and, instead, empowering patients to drive health care policy.”