Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) on Friday celebrated the arrival of a $7.5 billion reimbursement from the Department of Homeland Security for Texas’s role in securing the southern border during the Biden administration. Abbott received the giant check at the governor’s mansion while celebrating Law Enforcement Appreciation Month.
Page F2From§Eachthe supper edition — 2 October 2026
Abbott accepts giant $7.5 billion check for policing the border the federal government also polices
You will have seen the photograph: a giant check at the governor's mansion, seven and a half billion dollars written across the face of it. The sum is not the interesting part. What Washington bought is. It bought the patrolling of a border that the federal government was patrolling at the time, performed a second time by Texas, and billed. Settled in arrears — in arrears, you see: an old obligation, the work done under one administration, the money written out by the next. You will say the state spent and the state is owed. Quite so. Then consider the other number. On the third of September the governor was pressing Washington to restore nearly ten billion dollars in Medicaid funding, with Texas hospitals warning they expected to begin losing twenty-seven million dollars a day. The border money was announced in September and delivered on Friday ... during Law Enforcement Appreciation Month. One of those sums came on a check. The other is a demand.
“Texas hospitals said they were about to bleed twenty-seven million bucks a day in Medicaid, and the answer from Washington was: compliance questions, sit tight. Same month, the border bill gets paid in full, seven and a half billion, with a prop check and a ceremony. They never tell you there's no money. They tell you there's no money for you.”
“Look, Texas laid out its own funds and Texas gets them back — that is not a windfall, that is a refund. Did I say refund? Reimbursement. And the Medicaid money is a totally separate question, different agency, compliance review, nothing to do with — why is that the thing you want to talk about?”
The receipts
· Abbott demands Trump administration restore $10 billion in Medicaid funding from the morgue, 3 Sep 2026
· Trump’s foreign policy saves taxpayers $320 billion over 4 years: Report from the morgue, 9 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.