Gov. Greg Abbott will lay out his latest vision for Texas in a televised speech on Sunday, including telling lawmakers what he expects them to prioritize during the state’s legislative session, which kicked off earlier this month.
“Texas is the blueprint for America’s future,” Abbott said in a statement announcing his State of the State address. “This 89th Legislative Session brings new opportunities for the Texas Legislature and statewide leaders to strengthen our national and global position as the beacon of economic opportunity, prosperity, and individual liberty.”
Abbott’s State of the State address is key because it’s when he will declare his “emergency items” for the 2025 legislative session. According to the Texas Constitution, legislation related to the governor’s emergency items are the only things lawmakers can pass during the session’s first 60 days. That means what Abbott says on Sunday will have a big influence on what Texans see coming out of the Statehouse in the next month and a half.
While Abbott hasn’t yet made his priorities for the session explicit, it's expected he’ll prompt state lawmakers to pass a school voucher-like bill, as well as legislation around border security and decreasing property taxes for Texas home and business owners.
The State of the State address will be broadcast live at 5 p.m. CDT from Austin’s Arnold Oil Company, marking the third consecutive session where Abbott has not delivered the speech from the Texas Capitol.
This is also the last State of the State address Abbott will make before he is up for reelection in 2026, so it’s likely he’ll also use the speech to tout his — and Texas’ — accomplishments during his decade leading the state. “From becoming the eighth largest economy in the world to safeguarding the freedoms that make Texas great, we are working tirelessly to accomplish what seems impossible,” Abbott’s statement said.
School vouchers expected to take the lead
It’s all but certain that one of Abbott’s emergency items for this session will be a familiar one for anyone keeping up with state politics: creating a voucher-like program for Texas schools.
The issue has been one of the governor’s top priorities in recent years. Last session, in 2023, Abbott declared “creating education freedom for all” an emergency item, with an emphasis on creating education savings accounts (ESAs) for Texas. This voucher-like program would allow the state to give tax dollars to private schools to help subsidize the cost of a child's tuition.
Despite the energy Abbott and some of his Republican allies put behind ESA legislation last session, the proposal fell short. This was mainly due to opposition from rural Republicans and Texas Democrats. Without the votes to clear the Texas House, the voucher-like plan failed to pass during both the regular 2023 legislative session and several special sessions.
But now, Abbott has far more lawmakers behind the idea at the Capitol. That’s because the governor spent the 2024 primaries targeting members of his own party who voted against vouchers. And it worked: 11 of the Texas House candidates that Abbott endorsed won their elections in November, increasing the chamber’s support for a voucher plan.
This year, the Texas Senate has already moved quickly on its version of a voucher plan — Senate Bill 2 — passing it out of committee earlier this week.
If Abbott declares this as an emergency item on Sunday as anticipated, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has said SB 2 could be voted through his chamber, where it should easily pass, as early as next week.
How will Texas’ border priorities change under President Trump?
Texas is the U.S. state with the largest border with Mexico, and Abbott has long been focused on preventing unauthorized border crossings and other border-related issues, like human smuggling.
In fact, during 2023’s session, the governor made securing the border an emergency item for lawmakers, even calling a special session in May specifically focused on passing border proposals that didn’t make it past the finish line during Texas’ regular session.
During the Biden administration, Texas spent billions of dollars on state-led border security and enforcement measures under Abbott’s Operation Lone Star. (In fact, he recently asked the federal government to reimburse Texas for its efforts, to the tune of $11 billion.) Now with President Donald Trump — a friend of Abbott’s and a fellow Republican — in the White House, Texas has been walking in lockstep with the president's plans to crack down on border crossings and enforce immigration laws. Abbott has already sent 400 soldiers to the Texas-Mexico border to help Border Patrol agents enforce immigration laws, and offered over a thousand acres to the federal government for construction of detention facilities.
Given that recent history, it will be interesting to see how Abbott directs the Legislature around this topic on Sunday. What he says in his State of the State address could provide a preview of how much Texas will rely on federal enforcement efforts going forward — and how aggressive its state-led efforts will continue to be.
Other things to watch for in Abbott’s State of the State
While it’s not clear what else the governor might focus on, he’ll likely include some of the Texas Senate’s legislative priorities that Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick laid out earlier this week. Patrick’s top 25 priority bills for this legislative session include a ban on THC, raising the homestead exemption for Texas homeowners and improving the state’s electric and water infrastructure.
There is “a very good chance that we're going to hear a lot of conservative priorities,” said Joshua Blank, research director for the Texas Politics Project at UT Austin.
Blank, whose group conducts regular surveys of Texans, told The Texas Newsroom this week, “Texans are consistently telling us that they're worried about the cost of living, they're worried about the costs of housing, they're worried about the cost of health care.”
Blank said he doesn’t expect those issues to be a main focus in Abbott’s address. But, then again, he also said the majority of Texans he surveys don’t pay much attention to the Texas Legislature anyway.
“While that attention will increase from February to June, it [only] increases from about 12 to 15% of voters who say they're paying a lot of attention, to about 18 to 20% of voters by the end,” Blank said.
Blank added that, if Abbott was hoping to draw a wider audience to his televised speech, it taking place on a Sunday night doesn’t help.
The Texas Newsroom is a public radio journalism collaboration that includes NPR, KERA in North Texas, Houston Public Media, KUT in Austin, Texas Public Radio in San Antonio and other stations across the state.