By Cole Gee | Staff Writer
Last week, Gov. Greg Abbott and Texas Republicans passed Senate Bill 14, also known as the Texas DOGE bill, into law. The bill allows for the formation of the Texas Regulatory Efficiency Office, which looks to emulate the recent work by DOGE and Elon Musk at the federal level. The bill promises to “cut the red tape” and other regulations that might limit the prosperity of Texas businesses and the economy.
The bill passed both the Texas House and Senate with bi-partisan supermajorities. The new office had also been granted a budget of $22.8 million over the next five years. Abbott will select the 18 members of the panel that will run TREO.
House Speaker Dustin Burrows, alongside Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, was at the signing of the bill.
“The fewer regulations we have — the more efficient they are, the easier they are to understand — is going to help Texas business and economy continue to boom, which is why I’m excited this is the first bill that is being signed,” Burrows said.
Despite its main purpose to cut through red tape and make the federal government more efficient, a common criticism of DOGE is the haphazard way the department has cut certain regulations, without considering the broader consequences. It has been the subject of many federal lawsuits since its formation, and some policymakers claim the office’s continued cut of federal agencies and regulations is unconstitutional.
Dr. Patrick Flavin, a professor of political science at Baylor, studies public policy. When discussing the recently commissioned TREO, he gave slight praise to the structure of the 18 staff-led office when compared to its federal predecessor.
“I think the most common complaint about how Elon Musk and the DOGE office is operating is that it aims to move quickly, but by doing so doesn’t maybe consider all the different potential issues that are at play,” Flavin said. “Whereas if this commission here in Texas was to maybe move still at an efficient pace, but a little more methodically, a little more thoughtfully, then I think it would be viewed favorably, maybe by those who are concerned about the passage of the bills.”
Beyond the formation of a new office, a new law was also attached. The law states that Texas courts are no longer required to defer to an agency’s interpretation of the law in legal challenges of regulations.
This was able to pass due to the recent overturn of the Chevron Doctrine, which for 40 years set the standard that courts had to follow government agencies’ interpretation of ambiguous laws as long as the interpretations were reasonable.
A claim by many supporters of the TREO is how it will help create and support even more businesses in the Lone Star State.
Despite being ranked the 5th most-regulated state in the nation, according to the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Texas historically has always been an epicenter of business. The Texas Comptroller’s Office released a report in 2024 that estimates that Texas’s economy grew by 4.8% that year — that’s double the 2.4% national growth the same year.
But not everybody is completely sold on TREO. Gregory L. Phillips is a Houston business attorney and co-founder of the Phillips Kaiser law firm. Drawing on his decades of experience with business law and regulation in Texas, he believes the new office may cause more red tape than de-regulation.
“Texas has always been a business-friendly state,” Philips said. “When you scale back too much and it becomes too unregulated, you have problems. I’ll give you an example — I used to work for a company called Enron. When Texas de-regulated its power and gas infrastructure, Enron took advantage of that and Enron started gaming the system. So you do need some regulation, and when you go too far to one side with no regulation, it affects everybody.”
When it comes to the types of regulations that might be targeted by the new office, Phillips estimates it would more than likely be environmental laws.
“It may be pro-business, but it may cause some issues for us, environmentally,” Phillips said. “I think they’re gonna be some regs targeted when it comes to energy. I mentioned one thing that Enron took advantage of was the deregulation of the energy markets in Texas. I think you’re gonna see those loosening up even more so.”
