Five months before Texans were already scheduled to elect him, Gov. Greg Abbott put Don Huffines in charge of the state’s money anyway. Huffines built his campaign on property tax abolition, a border defense that does not wait on Washington, and a currency free of federal control. Now he gets to start early, unopposed, with no one left to answer to until November.
Gov. Greg Abbott appointed Don Huffines comptroller of public accounts on Thursday. Acting Comptroller Kelly Hancock submitted his resignation letter Wednesday and steps down at the end of the month. Huffines takes the office for the balance of the year.
Huffines did not need the appointment to get the job. He already effectively won it. In March, he defeated Hancock and Railroad Commissioner Christi Craddick for the Republican nomination for a full term as comptroller. He faces state Sen. Sarah Eckhardt, D-Austin, in November and is predicted to win handily. Abbott’s move simply hands him the office five months before Texas voters were already positioned to do the same.
Abbott said Huffines brings “the right mix of business experience and conservative principles” to the office.
The comptroller is the state’s chief tax collector and treasurer, the office that writes the checks and keeps the books for all of Texas government. By Huffines’s own count, that government spends more than $500 million a day. At the start of each legislative session, the comptroller publishes the Biennial Revenue Estimate, and under the Texas Constitution that estimate is a hard ceiling on everything the Legislature can spend. No budget becomes law until the comptroller certifies it against that number. The office also runs the Texas Bullion Depository, the state’s own gold and silver vault. It is the closest thing Texas has to a treasury of its own.
Huffines is a fifth-generation Texan and Dallas real estate developer who represented Senate District 16 from 2015 to 2019, losing his re-election bid in 2018. He spent the years afterward building a public case against property taxes and against a Republican establishment he considered too comfortable in Austin. In 2022, he ran against Abbott in the GOP primary for governor on a platform of closing the border without waiting on Washington and eliminating property taxes outright. He lost that race by a wide margin. Abbott spent the two years that followed adopting pieces of the platform anyway: a border “invasion” declaration, a special session on property tax relief, a ban on vaccine mandates. Huffines founded the Huffines Liberty Foundation in 2022 to keep the property tax fight alive from outside government. When Comptroller Glenn Hegar announced in March 2025 that he was leaving to become chancellor of the Texas A&M University System, Huffines went after the office that actually controls the money.
Huffines has spent four years arguing, correctly, that Texas holds constitutional authority it has been too timid to exercise. He has said the state does not need Washington’s permission to defend its own border. He has proposed running the Texas Bullion Depository as a working alternative to a federally controlled dollar he calls inflationary: gold and silver a Texan could spend with a debit card. That is no longer only a proposal. Texas has already begun issuing the Modern Texas Redback, gold in measured centigrams, and the Bullion Depository now under his authority sits at the heart of the effort. He wants to audit every agency and every contract and put the savings back into property owners’ pockets instead of banking them in Austin.
Huffines also signed the Texas First Pledge, and in March he became the second Pledge signer to win a statewide nomination. The man who will certify the Texas budget is on record that Texans deserve a direct say in their own future.
None of that requires independence to attempt. All of it requires independence to keep.
A comptroller is an elected accountant, not a sovereign. A future legislature, a future governor, or a single federal court can undo an audit finding, a currency pilot, or a border posture in an afternoon. Huffines is right about how much authority Texas already holds. He has never offered a way to make that authority permanent. TEXIT is the only proposal on the table that does.
Huffines takes the desk this month with no opponent, no session, and no one left to answer to until November. Texans should watch closely what he does with it. It will be a preview of his platform, not a guarantee of it, and the distance between those two things is the argument the Texas Nationalist Movement has been making for two decades.
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