Pandemic, Inc. by J. David McSwane

Author:J. David McSwane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria/One Signal Publishers
Published: 2022-04-12T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15 “GREG ABBOTT CARES ABOUT GREG ABBOTT”

OUTSIDE OBSERVERS COULD BE FORGIVEN for thinking Greg Abbott leads Texas.

Many governors made mistakes when it came to balancing human lives versus keeping capitalist enterprises humming. These were—forgive the cliché—unprecedented times, and some deference should be afforded. But none were so blatantly self-serving as Abbott, who abandoned any pretense that he was working to protect anything but his own political career.

By design, Texas has a weak-governor system. The long-standing joke goes that the most powerful person in Texas is actually the lieutenant governor, who controls the Senate and therefore the legislative agenda and wields the power to quash or pass legislation that the governor may want.

That’s the system, but as both Abbott and his predecessor, Rick Perry, have shown, even a weak governor can consolidate immense power through personal relationships, moxie, and good old-fashioned nepotism, placing those indebted or loyal to him throughout the tentacles of the bureaucracy where they owe him, and he may call upon them. Abbott oversees the vast executive bureaucracy of a state that was once its own country, and sometimes still acts like one, with 29 million residents, the tenth-largest economy in the world, a place where one can drive fourteen hours straight and still be within its bounds, with state revenues of more than $250 billion a year.

With his seat, Abbott has the influence to pick, prod, pressure, and push out agency heads who palm the levers of government and command some half a million government workers. Those agencies include the enormous Health and Human Services Commission, the state’s equally troubled iteration of the federal HHS. Add to that education, the state police and Texas Rangers, insurance, public utilities, emergency management, the child welfare system, and more.

While Abbott is charged with directing this unwieldy bureaucracy, insiders often describe his disinterest in it, or how it works. His interest, I’d hear over and again, had to be spurred by an inconvenient headline. And when things go awry, he would blame whichever bureaucracy oversaw said cockup and push somebody out of a job.

In this way, he wears his crown without the weight.

As a former reporter for the Austin American-Statesman and the Dallas Morning News, I covered Abbott’s entire first term and some of his second, and while reporters in Austin shy away from this phrase, I came to refer to the apparatus as the “Abbott administration,” for he works his executive branch in much the same way as a president. Thus Abbott should be held accountable for how he wields this power, just as legions of D.C. press corps reporters hover around the machinations of the executive branch of the federal government.

But despite a robust and talented group of reporters in the state capital, Abbott expertly evades consequential scrutiny of his administration’s mistakes and failures, which are numerous. I marveled as many definitive and damning exposés from the state’s powerhouse newspapers bounced right off him—everything from government waste, political patronage and nepotism, systemic neglect of disabled and abused children, to purging Hispanic names from voter rolls, and more.

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