Issues

On AI, Abbott signed HB 149, the Texas Responsible Artificial Intelligence Governance Act (TRAIGA), on June 22, 2025, making Texas the third state with a comprehensive AI law; it bans behavioral-manipulation systems, social scoring, and unlawful deepfakes, creates a 36-month AI regulatory sandbox, and vests enforcement exclusively in the AG, with the law taking effect January 1, 2026. On data centers, Abbott has been notably hands-off as ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas warned lawmakers that incoming load could reach 410,000 MW — roughly seven times the new demand ERCOT accommodated in 2024 — and as Hill County in May 2026 became the first Texas county to impose a one-year construction pause; Hood County rejected a similar pause, and Abbott did not publicly intervene when Sen. Paul Bettencourt asked AG Paxton to declare county moratoriums illegal. On chips, Abbott announced Samsung's $17 billion Taylor fab in 2021 (since expanded toward $40 billion with CHIPS Act funds) and signed the Texas CHIPS Act creating the Texas Semiconductor Innovation Fund in 2023.

Abbott's record on long-term care is dominated by a decade-long federal lawsuit: when he took office in 2014 his administration declined to sign the 2013 settlement agreement on community placement for Texans with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and on June 20, 2025, a federal judge ruled Texas was illegally institutionalizing people with disabilities in nursing homes in violation of the ADA, the Medicaid Act, and the Nursing Home Reform Act. Disability-rights groups have publicly demanded he meet to discuss caregiver pay and Medicaid cuts in the federal 'Big Beautiful Bill.' On dedicated aging-services funding, Abbott's office points to HHSC community-based programs and assisted-living standards designed to support aging in place. He has not pushed expanded Medicaid or LTSS coverage expansion, and his post-partum Medicaid extension fight with the Biden administration produced no broader Medicaid expansion. Alzheimer's-specific funding initiatives have not been a public Abbott priority.

Abbott has cultivated a relationship with mega-donors — most prominently Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass, whose $6 million check Abbott's campaign called 'the largest single donation in Texas history' — and used that war chest to fund GOP primary challenges against House Republicans who crossed him on vouchers. During AG Ken Paxton's May 2023 impeachment, Abbott went conspicuously silent for the entire 121-23 House vote and the Senate acquittal that followed, drawing a Truth Social rebuke from Donald Trump that he was 'MISSING IN ACTION!' In August 2025, when more than 50 House Democrats fled the state to block Trump-pushed mid-decade congressional redistricting, Abbott ordered DPS to 'locate, arrest, and return' them, sought a quo warranto removal action, and threatened bribery charges — but the Texas Supreme Court, packed with his own appointees, refused to declare the seats vacated. Abbott has not pushed structural campaign-finance or lobbying reform.

Abbott has used the governorship as a foreign-policy platform, particularly on China, Israel, and the U.S.-Mexico border. He signed Texas's anti-BDS law (HB 89) on Israeli Independence Day, May 2, 2017, barring state contracts and pension investments with companies that boycott Israel — a U.S. district judge later struck down portions after Pflugerville speech pathologist Bahia Amawi was forced out for refusing the pledge. On June 20, 2025, he signed SB 17, prohibiting individuals and entities tied to China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea from buying Texas land, water, mineral, or commercial real-property interests; the Chinese American Legal Defense Alliance sued July 3, 2025. He has issued a series of executive orders targeting Chinese state influence, and on Ukraine he has publicly aligned with Trump's America-first posture, posting that 'Joe Biden needs to stop giving money to foreign countries like Ukraine.' On Mexico he has maintained working MOUs with the governors of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas while deploying the Texas Tactical Border Force alongside the Trump administration in 2025.

Abbott signed HB 1927 — Texas's permitless 'constitutional carry' law — on June 16, 2021, eliminating the license, training, and shooting-proficiency requirements that had governed handgun carry; it took effect September 1, 2021. After the May 2022 Uvalde shooting that killed 19 children and two teachers, Abbott declined to call a special session on guns and told Uvalde families that raising the minimum age to buy an AR-15-style rifle from 18 to 21 would be 'unconstitutional' under recent court rulings — a claim PolitiFact and gun-law experts disputed; HB 2744, backed by Robb Elementary families, died in 2023. He signed HB 3 in June 2023 requiring an armed officer at every Texas school and expanding active-shooter protocols, raising the safety allotment to $10 per student plus $15,000 per school. He has consistently opposed red flag laws, telling The Dallas Express in 2026 'I'm against red flag laws,' and the 2025 SB 1362 preemptively bars Texas judges from issuing extreme-risk protection orders.

Abbott has refused to expand Medicaid for the entirety of his governorship, calling it a 'broken and bloated' program and 'a tax increase waiting to happen,' leaving Texas with the nation's highest uninsured rate; as state AG he sued in 2010 to throw out the ACA and led a follow-up suit as governor. On abortion, he signed SB 8 — the six-week 'Heartbeat Act' enforced through private civil suits — on May 19, 2021, the legal architecture that effectively ended legal abortion in Texas after Dobbs triggered the state's near-total ban. After Alabama's IVF ruling in February 2024, Abbott said he supports IVF access and that Texas would 'address' the issue but admitted 'I simply don't know the answer' to key questions and has not called a special session on it. He has touted $1.4 billion in federal rural-health funding (Texas's $281 million annual share is the largest in the country) and, in March 2025, $239 million in HHSC construction grants for rural inpatient psychiatric beds, on top of $2.5 billion since 2017 for state mental-health capital projects.

Abbott launched Operation Lone Star in March 2021 and has spent more than $11 billion in state funds on it — roughly $4.75 billion for border barrier and arrests, $3.62 billion for National Guard personnel, $2.25 billion for DPS — and in 2024 asked Congress to reimburse the full $11.1 billion. On state enforcement, he signed Texas's 2017 anti-'sanctuary cities' SB 4 in a five-minute Facebook livestream on May 7, 2017, and in December 2023 signed the new SB 4 making illegal entry a state crime punishable by Texas police; the DOJ and ACLU sued, a district judge blocked it, and the en banc Fifth Circuit reversed that injunction. On legal pathways and Dreamers, Abbott went from calling the Texas DREAM Act's objective 'noble' in 2013 to presiding over its 2025 dismantling — agencies under his control ended in-state tuition for undocumented students (affecting up to 18,500 enrollees) and stopped issuing commercial driver's licenses to DACA recipients, refugees, and asylees, with his spokesperson saying benefits 'should not be used to incentivize unlawful presence.'

Abbott has signed every major restrictive LGBTQ measure to reach his desk. On June 2, 2023, he signed SB 14, banning puberty blockers, hormones, and gender-transition surgeries for minors and putting providers' licenses at risk; the Texas Supreme Court upheld it on June 28, 2024. He signed the 2023 'Save Women's Sports Act' (SB 15) barring transgender college athletes from women's teams, building on the 2021 K-12 version. On books, he signed HB 900 (the READER Act) on June 12, 2023, requiring vendors to rate library books for sexual content; the Fifth Circuit later affirmed an injunction against the rating mandate while leaving state library-standards portions intact. In June 2025 he signed SB 12, the 'Parental Bill of Rights,' which took effect September 1, 2025 and bans school staff from helping students 'socially transition' — including by using preferred pronouns — bans school DEI offices, and prohibits student clubs based on sexual orientation or gender identity. He also issued the February 2022 directive ordering DFPS to investigate parents of trans youth for child abuse.

On June 22, 2025 — less than an hour before his deadline — Abbott vetoed Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick's top priority, Senate Bill 3, which would have banned virtually all consumable hemp products containing THC including delta-8 and delta-9; in his veto statement he called the bill 'well-intentioned' but said 'litigation challenging the bill has already been filed, and the legal defects in the bill are undeniable,' citing a federal ruling that blocked a similar Arkansas ban under the 2018 farm bill. Instead he called a special session beginning July 21, 2025, asking lawmakers to ban THC sales to minors, mandate product-safety testing, and bar youth-targeted marketing; Patrick 'ripped' the veto and the Senate passed a full ban (SB 5) again. Abbott has continued to support Texas's narrow Compassionate Use medical-cannabis program but has never endorsed recreational legalization or broader decriminalization.

Abbott has signed the most aggressive church-state package in modern Texas history. On June 21, 2025, he signed SB 10, requiring every public school classroom to display a 16-by-20-inch poster of the Ten Commandments starting with the 2025-26 school year; the state pledged to defend districts in court and pay any judgments, and the Fifth Circuit ultimately upheld the law on April 21, 2026, after U.S. District Judge Fred Biery issued a preliminary injunction against eleven districts in August 2025. That same day he signed SB 11, authorizing school boards to set aside time for prayer and Bible reading. In 2023 he signed SB 763, allowing uncertified chaplains to serve as school counselors without state-mandated training. Abbott has not publicly objected to any of the constitutional challenges and has framed the laws as parental-rights protections.

Abbott's defining 2025 education legacy is the $1 billion Education Savings Account program he signed at the Governor's Mansion on May 3, 2025 — Senate Bill 2, which gives families roughly $10,000 per child (up to $30,000 for students with disabilities, $2,000 for homeschoolers) toward private-school tuition starting in 2026-27, making it the largest day-one voucher launch in the country. One month later, on June 4, 2025, he signed House Bill 2, an $8.5 billion public-school funding package that included $4.2 billion in permanent teacher and staff raises — the largest teacher-compensation increase in state history — plus money for special education, campus safety, and a $55 bump to the basic allotment. Critics argued the per-student baseline still trailed inflation. On pre-K, Abbott's 2019 HB 3 required full-day pre-K for eligible 4-year-olds and added roughly $835 million in early-education funding.

Abbott has consistently leaned on tax and regulatory cuts rather than direct lending as his small-business strategy. Texas's franchise-tax no-tax-due threshold sits at $2.47 million in revenue, exempting most small businesses outright, and Abbott signed an across-the-board 25% franchise-tax reduction earlier in his tenure; in 2025 he signed HB 346, which permanently exempts veteran-owned businesses from franchise tax and filing fees and creates an expedited filings track. HJR 1/HB 9 (Meyer/Bettencourt) raised the business personal-property tax exemption from $2,500 to $125,000 — an almost 5,000% increase — and the legislature overhauled the franchise-tax R&D credit to make it refundable for small filers and carry forward 20 years. On pandemic-era response, Abbott opposed federal vaccine mandates on businesses (Executive Order GA-40) and pushed early reopening through 2020-21. He has not pushed a state-funded small-business loan program.

Abbott has built his record on aggressive property-tax cutting while leaving Texas's no-income-tax structure intact and deferring to Washington on federal rates. In July 2023 he signed an $18 billion package — the largest property tax cut in Texas history — that raised the homestead exemption from $40,000 to $100,000, and in 2025 the state committed roughly $51 billion over the biennium to school-tax buy-downs and exemptions. Launching his 2026 reelection, Abbott proposed a constitutional amendment to abolish school-district property taxes for homeowners, cap appraisal growth, and tighten local revenue caps — a plan independent fiscal analysts at Every Texan called more 'messaging' than a realistic proposal. On Trump's tariffs, Abbott has been a public defender, framing them as leverage for border security and posting at Justin Trudeau, 'Careful Trudeau. The Texas economy is larger than Canada's. And we're not afraid to use it.' He has not publicly weighed in on the proposed 50-year mortgage.

Abbott's stump speech leans on the 'Texas Miracle': back-to-back top-state rankings for business relocations, including Tesla's gigafactory and headquarters move to Austin, Oracle's 2020 move (since reversed), and Samsung's $17 billion Taylor semiconductor fab announced under his watch in 2021. Energy and the grid remain his most exposed flank: Winter Storm Uri in February 2021 killed at least 246 Texans, knocked out power to more than 4.5 million homes, and exposed unwinterized natural-gas infrastructure; Abbott initially blamed frozen wind turbines before data contradicted him, and the PUC he had appointed was criticized for dismantling oversight. He responded by signing SB 2 and SB 3 in 2021 ordering weatherization and taking personal control of the search for a new ERCOT CEO in 2022. The state's job count has hit successive record highs under his tenure, per his office.