Capitol Insiders: Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick Is Letting The State's Budget Agency Fall Apart

[TexasTowelie]

The Texas Legislative Budget Board is hemorrhaging staff and has been without an executive director for a year.


Tucked away in a quiet corner of Texas state government, an arcane team of 100 or so budget nerds has led a private, if stressful, life — running financial models, ensuring state government and its private contractors aren’t spending beyond their means, and keeping lawmakers informed about each line item in the state’s 1,000-page, $250 billion two-year budget.

But these days, interviews with current and former budget agency staff indicate the emptying halls of their downtown Austin office feel more like the setting of an Agatha Christie novel.

The Texas Legislative Budget Board, created in 1949 to support full-time experts who track fiscal issues for the state’s part-time Legislature, provides the analysis on which the state bases its budget calculations — for example, how much money it costs to pay public school teachers or to fund hospital beds for people in mental health crisis.

It’s up to state lawmakers to set spending priorities, but legislators say their ability to make funding decisions is only as good as the information they receive from the experts.

Read more: https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/capitol-insiders-texas-lt-gov-dan-patrick-is-letting-the-states-budget-agency-fall-apart/

[KY_EnviroGuy]

1. Patrick and Trump follow the same rule: Don't need no stinkin' experts.

One way to achieve dictatorial power is to insure your underlings and co-equal powers are kept divided and in turmoil, ignorance and fear. That way, you just ride in like a White Knight with a solution and no one is knowledgeable enough to challenge you.

(snip from article)

Interviews with more than a dozen budget agency staff, Capitol staff and state lawmakers — who requested anonymity to discuss private board deliberations — indicate that the Senate’s presiding officer, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, has wielded a kind of veto power over the board to keep the agency undermanned and under fire.

They contend that his motive is to remake the agency to give the Senate more direct control over the number-crunchers; the current group of nonpartisan bureaucrats has produced analyses that at times conflicted with the lieutenant governor’s political messaging.

Works the same way with voters - particularly when you have the press on your side......