Render Unto Greg

By James Moore

Every few days the governor of Texas opens his phone and shares a little scripture with the rest of us. Proverbs, mostly. Some Isaiah when he is feeling expansive. The verses arrive on X between announcements about invasions and border czars and whatever else is threatening the Republic this week, and they land with the unmistakable serenity of a man who believes he has the Almighty’s proxy vote.

He has been doing this a long time. He has been doing everything a long time. Greg Abbott has now been governor of Texas for eleven years, and he is asking for four more to fix what is broken and to become the longest serving governor in the state’s history. Nobody has yet asked him the obvious follow-up, which is who exactly broke it. There is no previous administration to blame. There is only the guy who has been holding the wheel since 2015, pointing at the ditch and promising he knows a guy who can pull us out. His political party has occupied every statewide office for 32 years and wants to retain control to fix that which they have broken.

I’ll start with the children, since he likes to.

Texas has about 1.1 million uninsured kids. That is nearly a quarter of every uninsured child in the United States, sitting inside one state’s borders. The uninsured rate for Texas children is 13.6 percent, more than double the national average, and it is the worst rate in the country. Texas is the only state where more than one in ten children lacks coverage. Alabama, which also declined Medicaid expansion, sits at 4.3 percent, which indicates this is not simply what happens to red states. This is what happens here.

Add the adults and you get roughly five million uninsured Texans, again the worst rate in America. Roughly half of the uninsured children are eligible for Medicaid or CHIP right now and are not enrolled, largely because the state runs the most obstructive eligibility system in the nation. When other states renew coverage automatically using data they already have, they clear about half their caseload without paperwork. Texas clears ten percent. Dead last. During the post-pandemic unwinding, Texas dropped 1.3 million children from Medicaid, better than thirty percent of its child enrollment, and did it mostly over paperwork rather than eligibility.

Suffer the little children to come unto me and bring a notarized income verification.

The Legislature has voted down Medicaid expansion again and again, most recently in 2025, while sitting on a surplus that has ranged from $24 billion to $33 billion depending on the session, plus a rainy-day fund pushing $28 billion. The money was never the problem. The money was sitting right there; in a fund the state literally could not deposit any more into because it had hit its constitutional cap. There is a word for a man who quotes Matthew while stepping over the sick, and it is not governor.

Now the data on his signature achievement has arrived, and it is worse than his critics predicted.

Abbott spent two legislative sessions and a primary purge campaign to pass Senate Bill 2, the billion-dollar education savings account program. He sold it as a lifeline for poor families trapped in failing schools. The comptroller’s office, which administers the program, released the numbers this month. About 70 percent of the students awarded vouchers were already in private school or homeschooled. Of the roughly 275,000 who applied, 75 percent had not set foot in a Texas public school the previous year. Forty-five percent of applicants are white in a state where only 24 percent of public school students are.

The lifeline, therefore, turned out to be a rebate. Texas taxpayers are now writing $10,500 checks to families who were already paying tuition, and up to $30,000 checks for students with disabilities whose private schools are under no obligation to provide the services a public school must provide by federal law.

Watch Arizona if you want to know how this ends. I have. Arizona is four years ahead of us on the same sad and troubled road. The fiscal note attached to Arizona’s universal expansion projected $33.4 million in year one. Actual cost blew past $500 million. Year two was projected at $65 million and came in near $950 million. The program now runs past $1 billion a year for fewer than 100,000 students, and the Grand Canyon Institute found that 82 percent of universal recipients had never attended a public or charter school in the first place. The state’s own auditor general flagged $654 million in transactions processed automatically with no review. Families have run up account balances they never spent, one topping $210,000, while the Legislature cut universities, community colleges, road projects, and water infrastructure to close a deficit that vouchers helped create.

Texas capped year one at a billion. The cap is the clue. Every state that has done this has watched the cap become a floor, because once you have handed a constituency a benefit you cannot take it back, and the constituency here is affluent families who vote. The Texas Senate’s own analysis put the five-year cost above $7 billion. That is the optimistic version, written by the people who wanted it.

And notice where the money is permitted to go. About two dozen Islamic schools have been excluded from the program, on the theory that their accreditor once hosted an event organized by an interest group the governor personally branded as terrorists. Christian schools, where Abbott did nearly all his voucher campaigning, are sailing through by the thousands.

Oh no! The Democrats are trying to take over Texas and run it much better!!

While this is happening, Texas is becoming the first state in the country to prescribe a literary canon for every public school student, and about a dozen of the roughly 200 required texts are Bible passages in the King James translation. Second graders get David and Goliath. Tenth graders get Job. The State Board of Education passed it 9 to 5. The rewritten social studies standards passed alongside it, with less world history and more Christian founding.

That sits on top of the Bluebonnet curriculum, which dangles $60 per student to districts that adopt Bible-infused elementary reading, and on top of Senate Bill 10, which requires a poster of the Protestant Ten Commandments in every classroom in the state. The Fifth Circuit upheld it 9 to 8 in April. Families are asking the Supreme Court to take it up. Ken Paxton has sued districts that did not comply. Your tax dollars are working to keep Christianity safe, even if it’s not your religion.

There is a lovely bit of history here. In 2005, then Attorney General Greg Abbott personally argued Van Orden v. Perry before the Supreme Court to keep a Ten Commandments monument on the Capitol grounds. He won. He has been building on that win ever since, and he is now within sight of the thing he has wanted for twenty years, which is a state that catechizes on the public dime.

We can always ask the teachers how things are going in Texas. TEA’s own data shows attrition at 12 percent, which the agency told lawmakers this summer is roughly half again the national rate of 7 to 8 percent. That is more than 44,600 teachers walking out of Texas classrooms in a single year. One analysis found Texas has lost about 35,000 teachers over five years beyond what its own pre-pandemic turnover would have predicted. Twenty-seven percent of new hires this year were uncertified. A Texas State Teachers Association survey this month found 63 percent are considering leaving.

Abbott did eventually sign $4 billion in teacher raises. What he does not mention is that he had the money in 2023 and killed it. The Legislature had set aside $4.5 billion for teacher pay, and Abbott tied it to vouchers. When the House rejected vouchers, the raises died with them. He then called special session after special session and campaigned against members of his own party in the primaries. Teachers got their raise two years late, as ransom paid after the hostage negotiation concluded.

The border, though, has stopped working as a campaign issue, so Texas conservatives went looking for another frightening thing to point at, and they found roughly a million Muslim Texans. In February 2025 an anti-Muslim activist in Nevada posted about a planned Muslim community northeast of Dallas. Abbott replied within days: Sharia law is not allowed in Texas, nor are Sharia cities. He then unleashed more than a dozen state agencies on the East Plano Islamic Center, including the Texas Rangers, the securities board, the workforce commission, and, memorably, the Funeral Service Commission. A Texas Monthly investigation this summer traced how the governor’s own advisers steered that funeral commission probe. Nobody has found significant wrongdoing. The Justice Department opened an investigation and closed it. The developers had not submitted a permit or broken ground.

He signed House Bill 4211 anyway, calling it a ban on Sharia compounds. He declared CAIR, an American civil rights organization run by American citizens, a foreign terrorist organization, a designation the U.S. State Department has never made. He wrote to North Texas sheriffs and district attorneys demanding investigations into Sharia courts, which do not exist. What exists are voluntary religious mediation panels of the exact kind Jewish and Christian communities have run for generations without a single executive order.

The consequences have arrived at the local level, where they always do. In McKinney this month, the city council voted 7 to 0 to approve a site plan for a mosque after hours of furious public comment. They approved it because the plan complied with the zoning code and because denying it would have exposed the city to federal litigation. For following the law, four of them, including the mayor, are now facing a recall petition. The congressman for that district announced he would sign it.

That is the machinery Abbott built. He supplies the permission and the vocabulary, and neighbors do the rest to each other.

Out in West Texas, meanwhile, the federal government waived 28 environmental and cultural preservation laws to run barriers and patrol roads through the Big Bend region, including inside the national park. Bulldozers went to work on the most beautiful, and to some of us, damned near sacred, ground in Texas.

Abbott said nothing. Not when the waivers were signed. Not when the maps changed. Not when the Land Commissioner sent a cease and desist over crews clearing state land in Presidio County. Not when five border sheriffs, a bipartisan group who have worked that terrain, wrote publicly that a continuous wall there made no operational sense. Not when 46 state representatives from both parties wrote him directly on August 14 asking him to call for a halt. Not when outgoing U.S. Senator John Cornyn (the best title he has ever held) wrote to Homeland Security two days before that. Months of silence while the desert got scraped.

Then CBP Commissioner Rodney Scott posted a video saying he had personally paused construction to go look at it himself, and Abbott appeared in Waco to explain that the pause “seems to be a consequence of my conversation with the secretary this weekend.”

Scott’s own announcement mentions no governor but it does mention lawsuits, local stakeholders, and a personal evaluation. Terlingua outfitters, Lipan Apache descendants, and a coalition of river rats and MAGA sheriffs spent six months fighting that project. Abbott spent six months not returning their calls, then showed up for the photograph.

If you think he could not be a bigger hypocrite, you are wrong. Last November the governor sat beside Sundar Pichai and declared Texas the epicenter of AI development, announcing $40 billion in Google data centers going into rural counties. Texas had spent a decade rolling out tax abatements and sales tax exemptions to make exactly that happen.

Then rural Texas found out what a data center is.

ERCOT is now holding roughly 474 gigawatts of interconnection requests, more than five times the state’s all-time peak demand, and about 90 percent of that is data centers. They also want water in a state where the drought never really left, and power from a grid that killed people in 2021 and has been patched rather than rebuilt. Counties tried moratoriums and got sued. Willie Nelson is campaigning against a project near his hometown, which happens to be named (geographic irony?) Abbott, Texas.

In June the governor discovered guardrails. In August he ordered a moratorium on grid connections pending an audit, which will take months, which is to say it will take us past November. Trump called the pause a mistake. Abbott is now running as the man protecting rural Texas from the industry he personally recruited.

It is not complicated. A Fox News poll has him up one point on Gina Hinojosa. He cannot win without rural Texas, and rural Texas is angry about the thing he sold them.

Which brings me back to the scripture on his feed. His use of Proverbs might be closer to bargaining than preaching. A man does not post that much about righteousness unless he has done the math on what he owes, and Greg Abbott has run up an account that no amount of morning devotional is going to settle. There are 1.1 million kids in this state who cannot see a doctor. He knows their number. He has known it for eleven years.

And he still thinks we are foolish enough to reelect him.

This article was originally published on Texas to the world.

James Moore is the New York Times bestselling author of “Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential,” three other books on Bush and former Texas Governor Rick Perry, as well as two novels, and a biography entitled, “Give Back the Light,” on a famed eye surgeon and inventor. Mr. Moore has been honored with an Emmy from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences for his documentary work and is a former TV news correspondent who has traveled extensively on every presidential campaign since 1976.

He has been a retained on-air political analyst for MSNBC and has appeared on Morning Edition on National Public Radio, NBC Nightly News, Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, CBS Evening News, CNN, Real Time with Bill Maher, and Hardball with Chris Matthews, among numerous other programs. Mr. Moore’s written political and media analyses have been published at CNN, Boston Globe, L.A. Times, Guardian of London, Sunday Independent of London, Salon, Financial Times of London, Huffington Post, and numerous other outlets. He also appeared as an expert on presidential politics in the highest-grossing documentary film of all time, Fahrenheit 911, (not related to the film’s producer Michael Moore).

His other honors include the Dartmouth College National Media Award for Economic Understanding, the Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio Television News Directors’ Association, the Individual Broadcast Achievement Award from the Texas Headliners Foundation, and a Gold Medal for Script Writing from the Houston International Film Festival. He was frequently named best reporter in Texas by the AP, UPI, and the Houston Press Club. The film produced from his book “Bush’s Brain” premiered at The Cannes Film Festival prior to a successful 30-city theater run in the U.S.

Mr. Moore has reported on the major stories and historical events of our time, which have ranged from Iran-Contra to the Waco standoff, the Oklahoma City bombing, the border immigration crisis, and other headlining events. His journalism has put him in Cuba, Central America, Mexico, Australia, Canada, the UK, and most of Europe, interviewing figures as diverse as Fidel Castro and Willie Nelson. He has been writing about Texas politics, culture, and history since 1975, and continues with political opinion pieces for CNN and regularly at his Substack newsletter: “Texas to the World.”