Texas Regulatory Review Finds Outdated Rules at TEA

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Texas's newly created Texas Regulatory Efficiency Office (TREO) has completed a regulatory efficiency review of the Texas Education Agency (TEA), providing an early look at how the state's new regulatory reform framework could work in practice.

Many of the individual findings are relatively mundane. Some involve regulations that have simply outlived the programs, statutes, testing systems, or administrative practices that originally justified them. Taken together, however, they illustrate something more consequential: government rarely cleans up after itself automatically.

That problem is not new at TEA. More than a decade ago, the Texas Sunset Advisory Commission reached a strikingly similar conclusion. Its previous review found that years of accumulated programs, reports, and statutory requirements could distract TEA from its core mission. Sunset recommended eliminating outdated requirements and narrowing the agency's focus, but many recommendations requiring legislative action never became law. The new review therefore arrives at an interesting moment. TEA recently released its 2025 Annual Report describing the breadth of an agency responsible for statewide public education policy and administration. During the 2025 legislative session, lawmakers were also presented with a proposal to abolish TEA entirely, though that legislation never received a committee hearing. Meanwhile, TEA is scheduled to undergo another Sunset review during the 2028-2029 review cycle.

Together, those developments create a larger opportunity to ask not only which regulations Texas should eliminate, but which responsibilities should belong to TEA in the first place and whether the state's statutory and regulatory framework has grown unnecessarily complicated over time.

Texas Regulatory Efficiency Office Reviews TEA Rules

The Texas Regulatory Efficiency Office was created through Senate Bill 14 (SB 14), the Regulatory Reform and Efficiency Act passed by lawmakers in the 89th Legislative Session (2025). The law established TREO within the Governor's Office and tasked it with identifying unnecessary and ineffective rules, examining regulatory costs, and finding opportunities to repeal or amend regulations while maintaining effective public protections at the least cost and inconvenience to regulated Texans.

That mandate is broader than simply counting regulations. Senate Bill 14 specifically directs TREO and state agencies to look for opportunities to eliminate unnecessary requirements, reduce required training hours, reduce forms and paperwork, eliminate or reduce fees, narrow regulated activities, and create appropriate waivers or exemptions.

The TEA review begins putting that framework into practice. TEA conducted its own evaluation while TREO performed an independent review, with the process also incorporating the Texas Regulatory Efficiency Advisory Panel, the Governor's Office, and stakeholder feedback. The result is not a wholesale dismantling of TEA's regulatory code. Instead, the review identifies specific places where the administrative state has accumulated requirements that no longer appear necessary, remain tied to programs that disappeared years ago, duplicate other processes, or cannot be eliminated without legislative action.

That is important because regulatory accumulation can have more than one source. Sometimes an agency has simply failed to repeal a rule it no longer needs. In other cases, the Legislature itself has left an obsolete mandate in statute.

Texas Education Agency Rules Show How Regulations Accumulate

Some of the clearest examples involve rules whose original purpose has simply disappeared.

TREO identified a TEA rule governing testing requirements for students who entered ninth grade before the 2011-2012 school year. The rule references the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS), Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS), and Texas Educational Assessment of Minimum Skills (TEAMS), testing regimes that have since been retired.

No current public school student falls within the population addressed by the rule, leading TREO to recommend its repeal.

Another recommendation concerns a science grant program connected to TAKS performance and an appropriations rider dating to 2003. The testing system has since changed, and the statutory provision underlying the rule was repurposed, leaving a regulation disconnected from the circumstances that created it.

These may sound like minor examples, and individually they are. Their significance comes from what they reveal about the regulatory process. A Legislature creates a program. An agency adopts rules implementing it. Years later, the program ends or the underlying policy changes. Unless someone affirmatively returns to the Administrative Code and removes what remains, those regulations can persist long after their usefulness has expired. That is precisely the kind of regulatory accumulation TREO was created to identify.

It also closely resembles the problem addressed by Texas Policy Research's (TPR) Texas Liberty Compact. We argue that Texas statutes have accumulated obsolete provisions, duplicative programs, and overlapping authorities over time and call for systematic review and repeal rather than allowing outdated laws to persist through inertia.

The TEA review offers a practical example of why that broader statutory cleanup matters.

Some Texas Education Regulations Require Legislative Repeal

Not every obsolete regulation identified in the review can simply be erased by TEA. In some cases, the agency says its hands are effectively tied because the Legislature has never removed the underlying statute.

One example is the Teacher Supply Reimbursement Grant Program. TEA's review notes that the program expired in 2007, yet its statutory foundation remains in the Education Code. Because the statute still exists, TEA cannot simply eliminate every corresponding regulatory requirement.

The same problem appears with the Intensive Reading or Language Intervention Pilot Program, which applied to the 2007-2008 and 2008-2009 school years. The pilot has long since ended, but the underlying statutory language remains.

This may be one of the most important policy lessons from the entire review. Regulatory reform cannot be reduced to instructing agencies to cut rules. Agencies administer laws enacted by the Legislature. When obsolete statutes remain on the books, obsolete regulations can remain with them.

TREO can identify those problems. It cannot substitute itself for the Legislature. Senate Bill 14 anticipated that limitation by requiring TREO's biennial report to include legislative recommendations alongside a description of the office's regulatory efficiency work. That creates an opportunity for lawmakers to treat future TREO reports as something closer to a regulatory cleanup agenda. It also reinforces the Compact's argument that structural discipline must apply to the statutory code itself, not merely to the rules agencies promulgate beneath it.

TEA Sunset Review Shows the Problem Is Not New

The findings become more significant when compared with TEA's previous Sunset review. In 2015, the Sunset Advisory Commission concluded that "outdated and unnecessary statutory provisions" were diverting TEA's attention from its core functions. Sunset identified redundant requirements, unnecessary reports, outdated programs, needless state involvement in local matters, and administrative responsibilities that no longer justified the resources required to perform them.

Among other things, Sunset recommended eliminating a completed High School Completion and Success Initiative Council, removing unnecessary reporting requirements, eliminating the Best Practices Clearinghouse, reducing TEA's involvement in certain local decisions, and replacing a prescriptive auditing requirement with a risk-based approach.

The comparison becomes more interesting when looking at what actually happened. The Legislature did not pass TEA's principal Sunset bill in 2015. Instead, lawmakers continued the agency for 10 years through separate legislation. Some Sunset recommendations were enacted through other bills, including transferring private driver training regulation to the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation (TDLR) and making changes involving educator certification and preparation programs. Many others were left untouched.

In fact, all 14 statutory recommendations in Sunset's section addressing outdated and unnecessary TEA requirements were ultimately listed as recommendations the Legislature did not adopt. That history provides useful context for TREO's work today. Identifying unnecessary government requirements is only the first step. Someone must ultimately repeal them.

Texas Education Agency Reform Debate Goes Beyond TREO

The TREO review is necessarily narrower than the larger debate surrounding TEA. The agency's 2025 Annual Report illustrates the breadth of modern TEA responsibilities. The agency is involved in school finance, assessment and accountability, special education, teacher recruitment and retention, literacy and mathematics initiatives, interventions in struggling schools, college and career readiness, and numerous other statewide education policies.

That breadth makes regulatory efficiency particularly important, but it also raises a larger question that TREO is not designed to answer: which responsibilities should belong to TEA in the first place? Some lawmakers attempted to force that debate during the 89th Legislature.

House Bill 2657 (HB 2657), filed by State Rep. Andy Hopper (R-Decatur), proposed abolishing the Texas Education Agency and the office of Commissioner of Education. The legislation would have transferred many existing responsibilities to the elected State Board of Education, moved public school finance and fiscal management responsibilities to the Comptroller, and eliminated the state's existing public school assessment and accountability systems.

The proposal went nowhere. HB 2657 was referred to the House Committee on Public Education but never received a public hearing.

Whether abolishing TEA is the appropriate answer is a much larger policy question than the one presented by TREO's review. But the proposal demonstrates that there remains an appetite among at least some lawmakers to reconsider the agency's structure, authority, and relationship with locally governed school districts. That debate should not necessarily be reduced to a binary choice between preserving TEA exactly as it exists or abolishing it altogether.

Regulatory reform provides another avenue. Texas can identify which functions genuinely require statewide administration, eliminate obsolete or duplicative mandates, return decisions to local communities where state involvement is unnecessary, and ensure that whatever authority remains with TEA is clearly delegated by the Legislature.

Texas Regulatory Reform Should Target Rules and Statutes

The TEA review illustrates why meaningful regulatory reform requires two tracks.

The first belongs primarily to agencies. When a regulation is obsolete, duplicative, unnecessarily costly, or unsupported by current circumstances and an agency has authority to repeal it, the agency should do so.

The second belongs to lawmakers. When an unnecessary rule exists because an obsolete statute still commands an agency to maintain a program or regulatory framework, the Legislature should remove the statutory foundation.

Confusing those categories can produce bad policy in either direction. Agencies should not preserve unnecessary rules simply because they have existed for years, but neither should executive agencies disregard statutes because they consider them outdated. Legislative supremacy requires the executive branch to administer the law as written until lawmakers change it. That principle is particularly important because SB 14 places TREO within the Governor's Office. The office can identify inefficiencies and recommend reforms, but major questions about the scope of government ultimately belong to the elected Legislature.

This is another point where TREO's work intersects with the Texas Liberty Compact. TPR argues that major policy decisions should belong to lawmakers rather than unelected regulators, while also calling for regulatory requirements and penalties to be clearly grounded in statute and narrowly tailored to legitimate public purposes. Used within those boundaries, TREO can give lawmakers better information without replacing their policymaking role.

Texas Regulatory Reform Should Measure More Than Rule Counts

There is another potential trap lawmakers should avoid as TREO's work expands: measuring success by the raw number of regulations eliminated. Ten trivial repeals are not necessarily more meaningful than one reform that removes a substantial barrier to entry, lowers compliance costs, eliminates an unnecessary license, or restores meaningful economic freedom.

Senate Bill 14 itself points toward a more substantive standard. TREO is supposed to examine regulatory costs and effects and identify opportunities to maintain legitimate public protections with the least cost and inconvenience to regulated persons. That standard also tracks closely with the Texas Liberty Compact's economic liberty principles. The Compact does not argue that all regulation is inherently illegitimate. Rather, it calls for regulation to be tied to legitimate health and safety purposes, clearly authorized by lawmakers, and structured so that government does not unnecessarily restrict Texans' ability to work or participate in the economy.

Cleaning obsolete references out of the Administrative Code is worthwhile. Preventing unnecessary regulations from being created in the first place is even more valuable. Senate Bill 14 attempts to address that side of the equation as well. Proposed rules must provide more information about their statutory authority, including certification that agency legal counsel has reviewed the proposal and determined that the agency possesses authority to adopt it. The law also expands requests for information concerning the costs, benefits, and effects of proposed rules.

Over time, that prospective scrutiny could matter more than periodic regulatory cleanup.

TEA Sunset Review Could Build on TREO Findings

The timing of the TREO review gives lawmakers another opportunity. TEA is scheduled for review by the Texas Sunset Advisory Commission during the 2028-2029 review cycle, its first Sunset review since the 2014-2015 cycle. The last process concluded that Texas continued to need a state education agency but also argued that TEA's statutory duties should be rewritten more clearly around its core functions.

Sunset found that TEA's enabling statute lacked a "clear, concise description" of the agency's major functions. Instead, its powers and duties were spread through lengthy statutory provisions containing duplicated and obsolete responsibilities. Sunset concluded that TEA should focus on functions that could not objectively be performed by local education agencies and that required its position as a statewide entity.

The Legislature continued TEA but did not adopt Sunset's recommendation to redefine the commissioner and agency's powers and duties. More than a decade later, that unfinished recommendation deserves renewed attention.

The next Sunset review should not start from scratch. TREO's work can help Sunset identify rules attached to obsolete statutes, while Sunset can examine the larger institutional questions that fall outside a rule-by-rule regulatory review. That includes whether particular TEA functions remain necessary, whether statutory authority is appropriately defined, whether responsibilities belong at the state or local level, whether boards or programs duplicate one another, and whether lawmakers themselves have contributed to administrative complexity through decades of accumulated mandates.

This is almost precisely the problem contemplated by the Texas Liberty Compact's call to Streamline and Modernize the Texas Code. The Compact argues that agency-by-agency Sunset review remains valuable but does not substitute for a broader effort to identify obsolete statutes, duplicative programs, overlapping authorities, and outdated regulatory frameworks across Texas law. The two processes can therefore complement rather than duplicate one another.

TREO can continually inspect the machinery of regulation. Sunset can periodically ask whether the machinery itself is necessary and properly designed. The Legislature can then address statutory problems neither process has the authority to resolve on its own.

Regulatory Efficiency Will Depend on Legislative Follow-Through

The TEA regulatory efficiency review offers evidence that Texas' new regulatory reform framework can identify real problems. It has uncovered regulations tied to obsolete testing systems and long-ended programs. TEA's own review has identified additional requirements that could be repealed or amended. Perhaps more importantly, the process has exposed statutes that remain in force years after the programs they created effectively disappeared. But the long-term test for TREO will not be how many recommendations it publishes.

It will be whether agencies actually repeal unnecessary rules, whether lawmakers act on statutory recommendations, whether meaningful regulatory burdens are reduced, and whether the state becomes better at preventing regulatory accumulation in the first place.

Texas has attempted regulatory cleanup before. The 2015 Sunset review of TEA explicitly warned that accumulated statutory requirements could divert the agency from its core mission, yet numerous recommendations requiring legislative action never became law.

The 2025 debate over HB 2657 went considerably further by asking whether the agency itself should continue to exist in its current form. The bill did not receive a hearing, but the questions underlying it remain relevant.

TREO now provides another tool for examining those questions from the regulatory side, and the coming Sunset review provides another opportunity for a broader institutional examination.

The goal should not be deregulation merely for the sake of producing a larger repeal count. Nor should Texas assume that every existing regulation or statutory mandate remains justified simply because it has survived this long. The better standard is structural discipline: clearly define what government needs to do, ensure agencies possess explicit authority to do it, remove rules and statutes that no longer serve a legitimate purpose, and periodically require government to justify what remains.

That is ultimately where the TREO review most closely aligns with the Texas Liberty Compact. Limited government requires more than restraint when new powers are proposed. It also requires the willingness to revisit powers government already possesses and repeal those it no longer needs.

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