Texas is moving to string a new backbone of ultra-high-voltage power lines across the state — and on Wednesday the people whose land sits in the path came to the Capitol in numbers rarely seen for an interim hearing.
The state agencies that keep the lights on told a Senate panel Wednesday that Texas is planning for a grid nearly double the size of today’s — and that the surge is being driven by an unfamiliar customer: the data center.
When storms opened over the Texas Hill Country last week — nearly a year to the day after floodwaters killed more than 130 people along the Guadalupe River — camp leaders across the region said they were watching the sky with new tools and a hard-earned sense of urgency.
The man who wrote Texas’ sweeping higher-education governance law came back to the committee that produced it Tuesday — this time as a witness, not a senator — to report that the campuses he now helps run are moving faster than the statute requires.
The federal government said it will stop propping up Medicare prescription-drug premiums after this year, a change that could raise 2027 drug-plan costs for the more than 1.7 million Texans who buy stand-alone Part D coverage.
For nearly five hours Tuesday, the Senate’s budget-writing committee tried to answer a question that grows harder the bigger the state budget gets: how much of it disappears to fraud, waste and abuse, and who is supposed to catch it.
Eight weeks into the first New World screwworm outbreak on U.S. soil in decades, the numbers have gone quiet.
The Texas Commission of Licensing and Regulation spent more of Tuesday morning on one contested case than on any of the other seven, and the reason had nothing to do with the size of the business involved.
The federal trial that could reshape how states pay for recycling is heading into its final written round, and the judge has signaled the case may turn on a narrower question than either side expected.
A sales tax break that cost Texas an estimated $14.6 million a decade ago is now on track to cost the state roughly $3.3 billion in a single two-year budget — and on Monday the Senate’s budget-writing committee spent the better part of a nine-hour hearing asking whether taxpayers are getting their money’s worth.