Mayors who award Flock's contracts get its donations; the bill to cut its funding sits untouched in committee.

…(cont) On September 18, Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered the state's transportation department to stop issuing new permits for Flock cameras on state highways. The freeze left about 900 cameras already installed in place, untouched by the order.

On October 2, St. Lucie County, Florida, found cameras it had not approved. Local officials had believed 52 Flock cameras were operating in their jurisdiction. The cameras they found were not on that list.

That's the shape of the fix available right now: a bill drafted, introduced, and waiting for a committee vote — one that would end the federal subsidy for exactly the kind of camera St. Lucie County just discovered running without a permit. Abbott's freeze shows what happens when a state reaches for a lighter tool instead: new installs stop, old installs don't, and the question of who approved what gets no easier to answer.

Flock's business model runs through officials who can say yes to a contract — a mayor, a county commission, a state DOT. Its donations to the groups that represent those officials are rising at the same moment those officials are discovering they can't fully account for the cameras already running in their own jurisdictions. That's not an accusation; that's the invoice: a surveillance company funding the trade groups of the people deciding whether to buy more surveillance.

Congress has the tool. Massie's bill would cut the federal money that makes these purchases easy for cash-strapped local governments. It does not require a single county to find a camera it didn't know about; it stops the money before the camera goes up. Right now it's sitting in committee while St. Lucie County tries to figure out what's bolted to its poles.