Naming Them and Shaming Them
Texas Comptroller data shows 943 state-paid foreign trips across 48 agencies in FY2024-FY2025, totaling $3.22 million. Roughly half is General Revenue tax dollars; the rest comes from pension trust funds and university accounts not appropriated by the Legislature. Full breakdown by agency, fund source, and frequent traveler — plus a browsable, exportable dataset.
https://guestworkervisas.com/texas_foreign_travel_spending.php
A deep dive on four H-1B-heavy staffing vendors from our staff-augmentation report finds the same HHSC position numbers — and in two cases the same worker’s surname — recurring across separate fiscal-year contracts, each one re-labeled ‘Competitive.’ Along the way, correcting a subject-line filter that missed every ITSAC-labeled contract nearly doubles what we previously reported these four vendors were paid: from $32.1M to $62.8M.
https://guestworkervisas.com/tx_itsac_position_recycling.php
Told there’s no law stopping a Texas state contractor from staffing its work almost entirely with H-1B workers instead of Americans? We went through the actual statutes — IRCA’s citizenship-discrimination ban, the H-1B non-displacement attestation, the 2017 Buy American Hire American executive order, and Texas’s own contractor rules — to see what each really requires, who enforces it, and where each one’s reach stops.
https://guestworkervisas.com/h1b_displacement_legal_landscape.php
Six months after Gov. Abbott froze new H-1B filings at Texas state agencies and public universities unless the Texas Workforce Commission grants written permission, zero institutions had requested that permission as of July 17 — while DOL data shows 326 new-hire H-1B filings certified anyway. Reporters who asked TWC to explain were pointed at the state’s public records law instead of getting an answer.
https://guestworkervisas.com/tx_h1b_freeze_zero_enforcement.php
Governor Abbott ordered an immediate halt to new H-1B petitions on January 27, 2026. Federal records show the Texas A&M University System kept filing anyway — 61 applications in 58 days, 57 of them certified by the DOL.
The Texas Office of the Attorney General is not a single coherent agency — it is two very different workforces sharing an agency code. On one side: 757 Assistant Attorneys General who average $126,713 a year, backed by law enforcement investigators, legal support staff, and managers. On the other: 1,604 child support officers and technicians who average $55,457 — less than half the attorneys’ pay — and who make up the single largest job category in the agency at 39.6% of all employees.
The hire trend chart is one of the more interesting findings: Asian IT hiring at TWC nearly tripled between 2019 and 2022, peaking at 28 hires in 2022 and holding at 23–25 per year since. That acceleration coincides with the post-COVID period when H-1B processing backlogs cleared.
The salary finding cuts both ways — the $72k Asian average looks good until you see that Hispanic and Black employees, who together are 55% of the workforce, are earning $5,000–6,000 below the agency mean while doing the core public-facing work of the agency.
https://guestworkervisas.com/twc_asian_workforce_report.html
DFPS caseworkers are chronically underpaid, routinely overloaded, and among the highest-turnover state employees in Texas. The agency has struggled for years to keep enough workers on staff to handle its caseloads. The state legislature has held hearings on it. Children have died because of it.
And yet the agency’s IT budget runs through ten H-1B staffing firms at an average of $105,704 per worker. One vendor filed a petition listing Kentucky’s Cabinet for Health and Family Services as the worksite entity on what appears to be a Texas DFPS placement. Four petitions from a single vendor were all withdrawn after certification. Six case numbers appear in both Q1 and Q2. This is the largest agency in the series and its procurement data is the messiest.
The TDA serves Texas farmers, ranchers, rural communities, and the Future Farmers of America. Its 660 employees work on food safety, rural economic development, agriculture inspections, and the programs that support family farms across the state. Its IT operation, however, is staffed almost entirely through H-1B vendors — 11 visa workers from 5 outside firms, with 5 duplicate case numbers in just 11 petitions.
This is the agency that collects Texas taxes, issues state payments, and maintains fiscal oversight over every other state agency. Its IT systems hold some of the most sensitive financial data in Texas government. And the H-1B petitions filed against it include a vendor who submitted a job title as “Sr. Software Doveloper” — the same misspelled title filed in both Q1 and Q2 alongside the correctly spelled version.
Whether that typo was accidental or a mechanism to avoid duplicate petition detection, it raises a serious question: who is vetting these vendors before they get access to the Comptroller’s systems? Five duplicate case numbers across just 13 petitions is a rate that should not exist in a properly managed procurement process.