Texas health agency takes comment on a batch of rules loosening day care regulation

The council that gathers public comment for Texas’s health and human services agency meets Thursday, and day care dominates its list. Anyone who wanted to speak by video had to sign up by 5 p.m. Tuesday; walk-ups can still register at the door.

The largest item is one the public cannot read yet. Agency staff describe it as a plan to ease or eliminate regulations on licensed child care centers, cutting what they call duplicate requirements and consolidating the rest. The agency’s own schedule puts the comment window at August 14 through September 14, which means the text should reach the Texas Register the week of the meeting. Nothing in the notice names a law behind it.

A second, already published proposal runs the other way. It would require every permit holder, owner and employee of a home day care to disclose any professional license the state has revoked — in any occupation, not only child care — and then make the home give written notice to the parents of every enrolled child and collect each parent’s signature. It also makes breaking the state’s child care subsidy rules a violation of day care minimum standards. Comment closes August 31. The law behind it passed in 2021.

A third child care item is harder to follow. The notice says its proposed rules were published with the meeting packet and points to the agency’s comment page, but the project — covering licensure, screenings and liability insurance — does not appear there, and nothing found in the Texas Register for the past month carries its text. The provisions its title tracks were rewritten by a 2025 law that cut the liability coverage a day care must carry from $300,000 to $100,000 per incident, doubled an initial license to twelve months and dropped the tuberculosis test for children.

Two items reach beyond child care. A new rule would let a hospital add an ambulance carrying a CT scanner and a stroke team to its own license instead of licensing it separately; comment closes August 24. Staff will also brief the council on Baylor Scott & White’s health plans leaving Texas Medicaid and children’s health insurance on August 31. The council cannot adopt any of it — state law says it exists to take comment and advise, and gives it no authority to make policy. Watch whether anyone speaks on the day care package before its text is public.

Meeting at a glance

Council members

• Stephanie Muth, Austin — executive commissioner and chair.
• Jordan Dixon — chief of behavioral health, disability and aging services.
• Sylvia Hernandez Kauffman — chief information officer.
• David Kostroun — chief of regulatory services.
• Molly Regan — chief of family resources and eligibility services.
• Trey Wood — chief financial and operations officer.
• Emily Zalkovsky — chief Medicaid and children’s health insurance officer.
• Audrey O’Neill — commissioner, Department of Family and Protective Services.
• Imelda Garcia — interim commissioner, Department of State Health Services.
• Raymond Charles Winter — inspector general.

The roster follows the agency’s own Executive Council page. No cities or terms are published, because these are ex officio seats held by sitting executives rather than gubernatorial appointments; the executive commissioner names the members. The council grew from seven to ten after an internal reorganization announced at its March 19 meeting. Two of the officials due to give updates are serving in acting roles: Garcia has been interim state health commissioner since June 9, after Jennifer Shuford left for the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the inspector general’s report has recently been delivered by a deputy. Meeting contact: the council liaison, (512) 960-5039.