Exposed: How Texans' Tax Dollars Fund Political Agendas
When state Sen. Mayes Middleton sponsored a bill to ban taxpayer-funded lobbying, he hoped it would end the use of peoples' money against their own interests.
'For too long, taxpayers' and parents' own tax dollars have been used to lobby against them in Austin,' Middleton said in a statement to The Dallas Express.
Middleton, a Republican, introduced SB 19 in the state Senate in February, aiming to ban public bodies from hiring lobbyists.
'These taxpayer-funded lobbyists have squandered millions of dollars of your hard-earned dollars to lobby against border security, election integrity, parental choice in education, teacher pay raises, and even fought against property tax relief and reform,' Middleton said in the statement.
Tarrant County Judge Tim O'Hare endorsed Middleton's proposed ban on taxpayer-funded lobbying in February. 'It's time for Texas to put a stop to using our tax dollars for special interest lobbying,' he posted at the time.
Close to $100 million in public funds is spent each year on taxpayer-funded lobbying, according to Middleton.
Public bodies across Texas spent up to $98.6 million in 2023 – up from $75 million in 2021 – to hire 'contract lobbyists,' according to a report by the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
James Quintero, policy director of the group's Taxpayer Protection Project, wrote that these numbers fail to 'capture the full weight of taxpayer-funded lobbying.' He added that local governments also use tax dollars to hire 'in-house lobbyists' and pay membership dues to 'politically active groups that represent political subdivisions to the legislature.'
Quintero wrote that it is 'more difficult to quantify' these kinds of lobbying due to the large volume of information.
'The practice of T[axpayer] F[unded] L[obbying] is being utilized by local governments to lobby state government for more government – and in a decidedly leftwing direction,' Quintero wrote. 'It is tantamount to the weaponization of public money against the public interest, for the benefit of a select few.'
Groups like the Texas Association of School Boards used 'school tax dollars' to protect men going into girls' restrooms and locker rooms, and invited 'transgender advocates' to train school board members on pronouns, Middleton said. In the past, the TASB reportedly helped block school choice.
The TASB uses 'taxpayer-funded' lobbying, and it spent up to $1.89 million as of the '2024 election season,' according to Transparency USA. Since 2015, the group has spent up to $6.8 million. Its 'advocacy agenda' is off-limits to the public.
The TASB denounced efforts to ban lobbying with public money: 'Prohibiting Local Governments from Lobbying is Community Censorship.'
Dallas directed more than $1 million to its 'internal lobbyists,' which support legislation it says 'protect[s] the rights of all vulnerable communities, including LGBTQIA+ individuals, youth, seniors, and refugees.' Fort Worth supports legislation that would 'prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.'
Other large cities across Texas also fund lobbyists with public money. Austin uses its 'public-private team of lobbyists' to 'actively support legislation' backed by the city council, like 'pay-equity, education-equity, housing-equity, and health-equity.'
Houston supports measures 'strengthening local governments' regulatory authority over energy industry participants.' San Antonio's Government Affairs Department pushes legislation supporting 'health equity and social justice.'
Middleton's ban on taxpayer-funded lobbying – backed by Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick – passed the state Senate in March but ultimately died in the state House.
Before it passed the first chamber, Republican state Sen. Robert Nichols introduced an amendment that gutted the bill. This removed the ban on public dollars for nonprofits that hire lobbyists and created carve-outs for nonprofits. TASB is a nonprofit, so this would have exempted the group from the public lobbying ban.
'Time and time again, we have seen taxpayer-funded lobbyists advocate against Texans and against common sense,' Middleton said in a statement. 'We don't need an Austin lobbyist middleman between state and local elected officials. We are elected to represent our constituents directly.'
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Others would scoff that not everyone has access to stores with lentils, time to cook lentils, or even a kitchen to cook them in. The food movement also ran up against the body positivity and fat acceptance movements. Theoretically, these movements shouldn't be at odds. But promoting "real food" was often talked about as a way to counter obesity—and that could be cast as fat shaming. "Telling people that they can be healthy at any size is just a lie," says Wolf. As the left embraced the idea, he adds, it has seriously limited the ways progressive circles can talk about food. "That locavore, organic food scene used to be so much a part of the center-left, and, man, you'll get hung out to dry talking about that stuff these days," he says. Touting specialized diets—even for health conditions like autoimmune disorders—will yield accusations of privilege or promoting disordered eating. As they embraced bigger bodies, many liberals also fell in with Big Pharma and Big Medicine, thanks in large part to Barack Obama's signature law: the Affordable Care Act of 2010. Obama-care wed the Democrats to a very particular kind of thinking about health, one intimately tied to insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, and corporate health care systems. The relationship between those businesses and the government is often antagonistic, with politicians forcing private companies to cover more and more medicines and services or to cap out-of-pocket costs for certain drugs. But it seems to leave room for only two goals: insuring more people and mandating what insurance must cover. There's little room for proactive wellness efforts, nontraditional care, or imagining alternatives to a system that Americans of all stripes increasingly distrust. For decades, NORC at the University of Chicago has been asking people how much confidence they have in "the people running" medicine. In the mid 1970s, most people—between 54 percent and 61 percent—had a lot of confidence. In 2021, just 38 percent of surveyed Americans did. For most of this span, Republicans were more likely than Democrats to have confidence, even as trust on both sides declined. In the early 2010s, Republicans dropped below Democrats on this question for the first time. Answers really diverged around 2017, as GOP confidence continued to drop and Democrats' confidence spiked. Rising Republican populism brought with it a fresh skepticism of corporate power, fueled by the perception that corporations had joined with the extreme left. "We've seen a flip in who considers themselves the establishment," says Carney. "The left used to very much think of themselves as antiestablishment, and they were very suspicious of the medical establishment and they liked alternative medicine and homegrown health remedies. And that flipped. Maybe it originally started with Obama-care, but it definitely picked up speed during the COVID lockdowns." Meanwhile, "the right has gone the other way, where they see themselves as the antiestablishment." Another early radicalizing development—and not just among conservatives—was how much nutrition and health institutions got wrong about fat and cholesterol. After decades of demonization of eggs, butter, and fats, the message that this push was misguided—and may, indeed, have contributed to health issues—gained ground with the popularization of the Atkins, paleo, and keto diets. "People are far more aware today of the dangers of excessive carbohydrates and seed oils, the healthfulness of saturated fats and a higher-fat diet generally, as well as the role that the ketogenic diet can play in reversing chronic diseases," says Nina Teicholz, author of The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat & Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet, and founder of The Nutrition Coalition. She credits this in part to a grassroots movement spurred by observable positive effects in people who eschewed conventional dietary advice. "As people get healthier by eating a diet that is nearly the direct opposite from what the government recommends, they've come to realize that the government, top experts, and the media have not been providing reliable information on diet and health," Teicholz says. Independent media, powered by new technology, have filled that gap. Today there is a huge heterodox digital media ecosystem—podcasts, YouTube videos, social media, Substack newsletters—capable of raising the profile of crunchy cons, New Agers, biohackers, gym bros, crystal girlies, carnivore dieters, and various alternative wellness types. This has led to more mingling between worlds that were less likely to intersect in earlier eras—homeschooling rural Christian moms and big-city birth freedom advocates bonding over their shared skepticism around vaccines, lefty tech types aligning with the manosphere over nootropics. "Everyone is their own medical adviser these days, so it's not surprising how political things have become or that the loudest voices are the ones being heard," says Susan Allport, author of The Queen of Fats: Why Omega-3s Were Removed From the Western Diet and What We Can Do to Replace Them. As better and cheaper technology allowed for more direct-to-consumer health tests and services, the means to take prevention and wellness into one's own hands also opened up demand for health information, advice, and encouragement. Those using new communications tools have been all too happy to supply it, for better or worse. Call it the democratization of gurus. Health influencers proliferated, catering to every possible lifestyle niche and wellness concern. And within that health influencer space, there has been a proliferation of right-wing personalities taking up new careers. Men who in decades past promoted "pickup artistry" and men's rights have found new relevance hawking routines to optimize male health and virility. Women interested in promoting "traditional" femininity and ideas typically associated with social and religious conservatives could find broader audiences focusing on fertility maximizing, the benefits of breastfeeding, or the joys of natural living. Critics of promiscuity could minimize the movement's moralism and focus on birth control's unwelcome side effects. At a time when traditional religiosity has been in decline and the usual milestones of adulthood are being delayed or discarded for many, crunchy MAHA subcultures started serving as new vectors of connection and meaning. Protein-maxxing health bros, raw milk–drinking trad wives, toxin-fearing food babes, vaccine-critical Insta moms, tallow-promoting beauty vloggers, and all sorts of other body-as-temple types sell new solutions, provide new scapegoats, and offer conservatives, especially young ones, new ideas about what it means to live virtuously. The COVID era only accelerated these countercultural movements, technological trends, and political realignments that were percolating in the years leading up to it. Democrats grew more tied to health institutions and public health authorities. The sanctimonious set online found a new avenue for expressing moral superiority. Influencers gained more attention and power as people were stuck at home, seeking both escapism and new avatars of their discontent. Republicans grew more skeptical of government action around health and science, as public health bodies and government authorities closed schools and churches and gyms, made seemingly arbitrary decisions around what could be open, promoted vaccine mandates, and made missteps and misrepresentations around masks and the virus's origins. Of course, it wasn't just Republicans. It was all sorts of parents of school-age children, especially moms. It was yoga instructors and gym owners and anyone in the business of bodies. It was anyone already given to distrust the medical establishment or fear a growing surveillance state. A lot of people who thought of themselves as liberals or progressives suddenly found themselves making common cause with conservatives. Kiley Holliday, a yoga teacher and movement therapist based in San Francisco and New York, saw many people in her world become disillusioned with Democrats during the pandemic. "The Democratic Party didn't stand for bodily autonomy in the strictest sense anymore, and people could see that shift," she says. Combined with the closure of so many fitness businesses, this angered a lot of people in the industry who Holliday would have described as "leftists, or at least the Joe Rogan left, the gym bros that were into Bernie." Their livelihoods were wrecked, and they thought the authorities were "compelling people to be sedentary." But when those in the wellness world spoke up, Holliday says, they got dismissed as Trump supporters. Some of them just embraced it: "OK, if that makes me a right-winger, I guess I'll just be a right-winger." Holliday still considers herself a leftist, if a heterodox one, and she worries about what recent shifts mean for her side. 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Working outdoors and slow cooking and the DIY ethos were seen as an antidote to desk jobs, email, recession, anomie. It was all distinctly hipster-coded, which is to say left-leaning, yet there was nothing particularly left about it, except for the people who happened to be involved. During COVID, farm fantasies and domestic idylls, mediated through Instagram and TikTok, tended to take on a conservative valence, heavy with photogenic Mormon families. A lot of the activities (farming, gardening, slow cooking) and aesthetics (mason jars, wood beams) were identical to those of the hipsters and slow foodies of a decade or so earlier. So, too, were many motives: environmental sustainability, frustration with modern living and office work. But this time there were a lot more kids around, and a lot more captions touting the joys of motherhood and "traditional" femininity. It was content imbued, subtly or overtly, with a particular sort of meaning. To get sucked into it was to encounter not just pretty kitchens and home-butchered meat but messages about fertility, naturalness, women's place as keepers of home and health. If the idealized housewife of yore was a primped up suburban mom keen to show off cutesy cupcakes and Campbell's soup casseroles, the new ideal—the MAHA ideal—wore natural linen dresses and worried about BPA and phthalates. She's conservative, but not always obviously so at first glance, and not in a way that conservatives of decades past might recognize. Indeed, the MAHA movement stems in part from dissatisfaction with tired left/right categories. You can see that frustration at play in the work of wellness gurus like Nicole Daedone, co-founder of the orgasmic meditation company OneTaste and a major player in alternative wellness and sexual health circles. Daedone has written a "Purple Manifesto" detailing the ways she and many others grew disillusioned with Democrats. In it, she argues that there is "a coalition forming…the marriage of red and blue with a commitment to the shared benefit of all, even those we find challenging." You can see it in the frustration of health-conscious women—some now accepting the "MAHA Moms" label, some being lumped in simply because they're concerned about things like food dyes—who don't understand how these issues got so politically charged. Worry about things like food dyes is "not political," one mom of three told Reason, "and it seems deranged that so much of the country is so set on telling us that it is." When many of them look at the new health-conscious right, it's not the "right" part that matters. They're for whoever promises to make fertility treatments less expensive and grocery shopping less fraught, to validate their fears about microplastics and take autoimmune conditions seriously. But while their concerns may not stem from politics or partisan identification, these concerns are being harnessed into a very political movement, one with major influence and power in the Trump administration. The MAHA movement could do some good. If it does nothing but reverse the Republican habit of equating unhealthy diets with patriotism, anti-elitism, and masculinity, it will have done something valuable by making more space for people on the right to care about their personal health. Even better if it helps eliminate farm subsidies and burdensome regulations. But MAHA has hitched itself to a star figure with a long history of promoting dubious and unreliable health claims. While the movement sometimes characterizes itself as a decentralized, DIY project, its most visible figure is a politician turned bureaucrat who wields tremendous coercive power. Kennedy claims he's not against vaccines. But he chaired Children's Health Defense, a leading anti-vax group. That organization mixes worthy ideals, such as "health freedom," with toxic doses of misinformation—most prominently, the idea that vaccines are responsible for rising autism diagnoses. Before his recent political turn, Kennedy called autism a "holocaust" and accused federal officials of "work[ing] with the pharmaceutical industry to gin up" evidence that exculpates vaccines. He has continued to call autism a "preventable disease" with environmental causes, pledging in April that HHS would "look at all potential culprits" for this "epidemic" and rejecting the idea that the increase in cases stems from expanded diagnostic criteria and improved diagnoses. And HHS hired as a data analyst David Geier, who, according to The New York Times, "has published numerous articles in the medical literature attempting to tie mercury in vaccines to autism." Yes, in the midst of a measles outbreak that has caused two children's deaths, Kennedy posted, "The most effective way to prevent the spread of measles is the MMR vaccine." But Kennedy has also promoted dubious alternative measles therapies. Some fear Kennedy's power and influence could contribute to burgeoning rates of vaccine hesitancy, with dire consequences. Kennedy's controversies extend beyond vaccines. He has also crusaded against phones in schools by invoking discredited theories about cellphones causing cancer and floated unlikely ideas about endocrine-disrupting chemicals causing gender dysphoria. Some nutrition experts—including Allport, who is skeptical of mainstream dietary wisdom around fats—worry that Kennedy unfairly tars all seed oils as equally unhealthy or overstates the positive health case for beef tallow. Maybe those RFK fries aren't so healthy after all? There's a real risk that Kennedy will do exactly what he's long accused public health officials of doing—using questionable or unsettled science to promote policies that are harmful or unnecessary. MAHA activists and their avatars in Washington sometimes can't seem to decide between a libertarian approach, which would loosen the government's grasp on matters of medicine, food, and wellness, and a more top-down approach that uses their new power to get what they want, ostensibly for the greater good. Kennedy has said he is open to increasing liberty around psychedelics and that he doesn't want to take away people's choices when it comes to doughnuts and sodas. But Kennedy has also tried to influence corporate behavior through jawboning. In March, The New York Times described a meeting between Kennedy and food and drink company executives, in which Kennedy reportedly "said that it was an 'urgent priority' to eliminate artificial dyes from foods and drinks sold nationwide." Was this a request from a health advocate? Or a warning from a powerful bureaucrat? The next month, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced a plan to speed up an already-in-the-works phase-out of several synthetic dyes. Announcing the move, Kennedy described it not as a ban but as an "understanding" with food companies. When a member of a Cabinet asks the companies he regulates to do something, one suspects their compliance is not entirely voluntary. Kennedy also seems to envision an expanded role for the FDA, telling CBS in April that the agency "needs to start regulating food again." HHS also recently started mulling a rule to keep companies from self-affirming new ingredients as safe. To do the most good, MAHA must resist the urge to advance its goals through statist means. But is there political will to resist? Even Wolf, who generally thinks "a market-based, non-interventionist approach" is the way to go, suggests that market failures might make limiting certain ingredients in foods a reasonable place for intervention. "I'm a little more open to things like food colorings getting some legislation," he says, though he also worries that lawmakers won't make such decisions informed by science, or that they could be too easily influenced by business interests. Food dyes aside, thereseems to be less interest among MAHA proponents in the sorts of junk food taxes and Big Gulp bans that liberals advocated in decades past. "I don't think conservatives are becoming health nannies. I don't think they want to force this on people," says Carney. "Generally it's a pretty libertarian or individualistic moment, people deciding they should make their own health decisions." If the official health nannies do take a hands-off approach, we will end up left with the invisible hands of health influencers, wellness entrepreneurs, and countless individuals making decisions on their own. Critics worry that this would be a dangerous world of unregulated, uncredentialed health hucksterism. Yet after decades of public health expert failures and ever-increasing government control over health, nutrition, and the communication around it, a freer environment could be just what we need. At its best, which is not always what it achieves, the MAHA movement is about giving up on the idea that the government always knows best when it comes to our wellness. It's a reaction to negligence, error, arrogance, and overreach on the part of health experts and government authorities. But thanks to Trump and Kennedy, that movement has now amassed considerable political power—power to shape or flatly determine decisions on everything from vaccines to pharmaceuticals to food labels for hundreds of millions of Americans. The temptation to wield that power will be hard to resist. Neofascist breakfast aside, Carney says, "I'm not dreaming of imposing blueberries on everybody else." The question is whether politically powerful figures like Trump and Kennedy agree. The post Trad Wives and Tallow Fries: How the Wellness Wars Flipped Health and Food Politics Upside Down appeared first on
