Receipts over rhetoric.

August 22, 2026

The Honorable Don Huffines Comptroller of Public Accounts State of Texas

Comptroller Huffines,

On August 19, 2026 you announced the Huffines Performance Review and said you would “document wasteful and inappropriate spending wherever we discover it and report our findings to the Legislature and the people of Texas.”[1]

I am writing to take you at your word, and to ask you to point that same review at a tax break your own agency hands out, certifies, and is supposed to be checking.

Your office certifies data centers for an exemption under Tax Code Sec. 151.359. To qualify, a facility must create twenty jobs against two hundred million dollars of investment. That is ten million dollars of capital per job, and it is not my number—it is the threshold written into the statute your office enforces.[3]

Here is what your own office told the Senate Finance Committee on July 27, 2026, five days before you were sworn in. Brad Reynolds of your Revenue Estimating Division testified that 138 data centers held the exemption, with five more applications pending, and that 59 of those certifications had come in that fiscal year alone. He told the committee your audit division had 20 compliance audits completed or in process. Twelve had produced an answer: six facilities met both the capital and the jobs requirement, and six did not. Of those six, one withdrew after losing a power contract and one missed the square-footage threshold. The other four missed the jobs requirement.[2]

Mr. Reynolds then drew the conclusion himself, and I would rather quote him than characterize him. Facilities unable “to justify employment of even 20 people on a permanent basis at one of these things,” he said, “tells you how little employment is really stemming from this, at least in terms of direct employment.”[2]

Asked later how many more centers could be certified before the next session, he answered that the office “could easily do another ten per month.”[2]

Every sentence in the three paragraphs above is on the official archived video of that hearing, at 00:41:32 to 00:44:20 and 01:59:43 to 02:00:07.

Your agency’s own Tax Exemptions and Tax Incidence report puts the exemption at 1.02 billion dollars in fiscal 2025 and projects it at 1.60 billion by 2027 and 1.75 billion by 2030. Across the six years in that one table it comes to 8.97 billion dollars.[4]

So the question I am asking is a narrow one, and I think it answers itself.

You told Texans that money should reach classrooms rather than fuel administrative growth. That is a fair standard. But it is a standard about whether a dollar bought what it was supposed to buy—and by your own agency’s testimony, on this exemption, Texas does not know. Four facilities failed the jobs test out of the twelve your own auditors have finished. One hundred eighteen have not been audited at all.

To review a school district’s spending, you needed the Governor to ask. For this you need no one’s permission. Your office already runs a five-year compliance audit on these facilities—it verifies the capital investment and the jobs, and it terminates the certification when a facility does not qualify. That program exists. By your own staff’s account to the Senate, it is behind.[3]

So this is not a request that you find new authority. It is a request that you catch up on work your agency already owes.

And that is why I am writing publicly rather than waiting. A review of somebody else’s spending is easy to order. A review of a program your own agency certifies is the harder one, and it is the one that would prove the doctrine is a doctrine and not a direction.

I have looked for any public statement from you on this exemption and found none. If you have made one, tell me and I will correct this letter publicly and say so plainly.

I have also filed a Public Information Act request with your Open Records Section for the underlying records—the certified facility list, the five-year audit results, and the workpapers behind the cost projection. I would rather not need it. Records requests are what citizens file when an agency has not published something it could have published. You can make mine unnecessary, and I would consider that a good outcome.

You said you would document waste wherever you discover it. This is a place to look, and your own staff has already told a Senate committee that nobody has.

Receipts over rhetoric.

Bradford Hall Write-In Candidate for United States Senate, Texas bradfordwinstonhall@gmail.com

Paid for by Hall for Senate