Various research typically points to the state of Texas as one of the largest economies in the United States; however, new data from the Texas Women’s Foundation amplifies a systematic gender pay gap that could have widespread economic implications across the state. 

The foundation’s new white paper, Texas Women and the Wage Gap: A Corporate Leader’s Guide to Driving Workforce Sustainability, notes that the wage gap has increased since 2019 to $60.1 billion annually in lost earnings and lost economic productivity for the state. 

Karen Hughes White, the President and CEO of the Texas Women’s Foundation, said the data was released intentionally on March 25, often recognized as Equal Pay Day. 

“The Equal Pay Act was passed in the 1970s, yet we are still discussing pay for equal work,” she said. “The urgency around this now is that women comprise 46% of the Texas workforce and that’s growing.” 

Read the full report here.   

“Over a lifetime, the average Texas woman stands to lose $750,000 in lifetime earnings. That’s game-changing for women,” Hughes White said. 

Hughes White said the designation for Equal Pay Day represents the amount of extra time women have to work in order to earn as much as men did in the previous year. 

“The most shocking part of the data is how the age gap widens based on women’s education. In Texas the more educated a woman is, the wider the wage gap is, [but] If we could just cut that wage gap the same as men with advanced degrees, it would actually cut the economic impact of the wage gap in half for equal work. We’ve been asking a long time.”

Hughes White said for the average Texas woman, the ever-widening gap can impact her ability to achieve long-term economic security, stability and success for herself and her family. 

According to Hughes White, that is not the only barrier for women to participate consistently and fully in the Texas economic landscape. 

While the equal pay date is tied specifically to white women, Black and Hispanic women typically work much longer to achieve equal pay. 

“The Texas economy which is [among] the largest and the strongest in the nation, is increasingly dependent on women to drive its success. The time is now for change and the time is now to act,” she said. 

Texas Women’s Foundation offers statewide research on the issues impacting Texas women and girls and provides corporate, state and local decision-makers and lawmakers with critical data to inform policies, practices and programs across the state.

Hughes White said one way the foundation works to raise awareness around the wage gap across North Texas is by offering practical tools for women to pursue pay equity. 

“When people know the issues, we can solve the issues, it’s going to take all of us to do it,” she said. 

The foundation will offer salary negotiation workshops on April 17 and May 15.    

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The findings were stark. In one investigation, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development concluded that a Texas state agency had steered $1 billion in disaster mitigation money away from Houston and nearby communities of color after Hurricane Harvey inundated the region in 2017. In another investigation, HUD found that a homeowners association outside of Dallas had created rules to kick poor Black people out of their neighborhood.

The episodes amounted to egregious violations of civil rights laws, officials at the housing agency believed — enough to warrant litigation against the alleged culprits. That, at least, was the view during the presidency of Joe Biden. After the Trump administration took over, HUD quietly took steps that will likely kill both cases, according to three officials familiar with the matter.

Those steps were extremely unusual. Current and former HUD officials said they could not recall the housing agency ever pulling back cases of this magnitude in which the agency had found evidence of discrimination. That leaves the yearslong, high-profile investigations in a state of limbo, with no likely path for the government to advance them, current and former officials said. As a result, the alleged perpetrators of the discrimination could face no government penalties, and the alleged victims could receive no compensation.

“I just think that’s a doggone shame,” said Doris Brown, a Houston resident and a co-founder of a community group that, together with a housing nonprofit, filed the Harvey complaint. Brown saw 3 feet of water flood her home in a predominantly Black neighborhood that still shows damage from the storm. “We might’ve been able to get some more money to help the people that are still suffering,” she said.

On Jan. 15, HUD referred the Houston case to the Department of Justice, a necessary step to a federal lawsuit after the housing agency finds evidence of discrimination. Less than a month later, on Feb. 13, the agency rescinded its referral without public explanation. HUD did the same with the Dallas case not long after.

The development has alarmed some about a rollback of civil rights enforcement at the agency under President Donald Trump and HUD Secretary Scott Turner, who is from Texas. “The new administration is systematically dismantling the fair housing enforcement and education system,” said Sara Pratt, a former HUD official and an attorney for complainants in both Texas cases. “The message is: The federal government no longer takes housing discrimination seriously.”

HUD spokesperson Kasey Lovett disagreed, saying there was precedent for the rescinded referrals, which were done to gather more facts and scrutinize the investigations. “We’re taking a fresh look at Biden Administration policies, regulations, and cases. These cases are no exception,” Lovett said in a statement. “HUD will uphold the Fair Housing Act and the Civil Rights Act as the department is strongly and wholeheartedly opposed to housing discrimination.”

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.

The Harvey case concerns a portion of a $4.3 billion grant that HUD gave to Texas after the hurricane inundated low-lying coastal areas, killing at least 89 people and causing more than $100 billion in damage. The money was meant to fund better drainage, flood control systems and other storm mitigation measures.

HUD sent the money to a state agency called the Texas General Land Office, which awarded the first $1 billion in funding to communities affected by Harvey through a grant competition. But the state agency excluded Houston and many of the most exposed coastal areas from eligibility for half of that money, according to HUD’s investigation. And, for the other half, it created award criteria that benefited rural areas at the expense of more populous applicants like Houston.

The result: Of that initial $1 billion, Houston — where nearly half of all homes were damaged by the hurricane — received nothing. Neither did Harris County, where Houston is located, or other coastal areas with large minority populations. Instead, the Texas agency, according to HUD, awarded a disproportionate amount of the aid to more rural, white areas that had suffered less damage in the hurricane. After an outcry, GLO asked HUD a few days later to send $750 million to Harris County, but HUD found that allocation still fell far short of the county’s mitigation needs. And none of that money went directly to Houston.

HUD launched an investigation into the competition in 2021, ultimately finding that GLO had discriminated on the basis of race and national origin, thereby violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and possibly the Fair Housing Act as well.

“GLO knowingly developed and operated a competition for the purpose of allocating funds to mitigate storm and flood risk that steered money away from urban Black and Hispanic communities that had the highest storm and flood risk into Whiter, more rural areas with less risk,” the agency wrote. “Despite awareness that its course of action would result in disparate harm for Black and Hispanic individuals, GLO still knowingly and disparately denied these communities critical mitigation funding.”

GLO has consistently disputed the allegations. It contends that many people of color benefited from its allocations. The Texas agency has also argued that the evidence in the case was weak, citing the fact that, in 2023, the Justice Department returned the case to HUD. At the time, the DOJ said it wanted HUD to investigate further. The housing agency then spent more than a year digging deeper into the facts and assembling more evidence before making its short-lived referral in January.

Asked about the rescinded referral, GLO spokesperson Brittany Eck told ProPublica: “Liberal political appointees and advocates spent years spinning false narratives without the facts to build a case. Four years of sensationalized, clickbait rhetoric without evidence is long enough.”

The other HUD case involved Providence Village, a largely white community north of Dallas of around 9,000 people. Purported concerns about crime and property values led the Providence Homeowners Association to adopt a rule in 2022 prohibiting property owners from renting to holders of Section 8 Housing Choice Vouchers, through which HUD subsidizes the housing costs of poor, elderly and disabled people. There were at least 157 households in Providence Village supported by vouchers, nearly all of them Black families. After the HOA action, some of them began leaving.

The rule attracted national attention, leading the Texas Legislature to prohibit HOAs from banning Section 8 tenants. Undeterred, the Providence HOA adopted amended rules in 2024 that placed restrictions on rental properties, which HUD found would have a similar effect as the previous ban.

Throughout the HOA’s efforts, people peppered community social media groups with racist vitriol about voucher holders, describing them as “wild animals,” “ghetto poverty crime ridden mentality people” and “lazy entitled leeching TR@SH.” One person wrote that “they might just leave in a coroner’s wagon.”

The discord attracted a white nationalist group, which twice protested just outside Providence Village. “The federal government views safe White communities as a problem,” flyers distributed by the group read. “The Section 8 Housing Voucher is a tool used to bring diversity to these neighborhoods.”

In January, HUD formally accused the HOA, its board president, a property management company and one of its property managers of violating the Fair Housing Act. The respondents have disputed the allegation. The HOA has argued its rules were meant to protect property values, support well-maintained homes and address crime concerns. The property management company, FirstService Residential Texas, said it was not responsible for the actions of the HOA.

The HOA and FirstService did not respond to requests for comment. The property manager declined to comment. Mitch Little, a lawyer for the HOA board president, said: “HUD didn’t pursue this case because there’s nothing to pursue. The claims are baseless and unsubstantiated.”

The Providence Village and Houston cases stretched on for years. All it took was two terse emails to undo them. “HUD’s Office of General Counsel withdrew the referral of the above-captioned case to the Department of Justice,” HUD wrote to Pratt this month regarding one of the cases. “We have no further information at this time.” That was the entirety of the message; neither email explained the reasoning behind the decisions.

The cases may have fallen victim to a broader roll-back of civil rights enforcement at the Justice Department, where memos circulated in January ordering a freeze of civil rights cases and investigations.

The development is the latest sign that the Trump administration may dramatically curtail HUD’s housing discrimination work. The agency canceled 78 grants to local fair housing groups last month, sparking a lawsuit by some of them. HUD justified the cancellations by saying each grant “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.” (Pratt’s firm, Relman Colfax, is representing the plaintiffs in that suit.) And projections circulating within HUD last month indicated the agency’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity could see its staff cut by 76% under the new administration.

If HUD does not pursue the cases, the complainants could file their own lawsuits. But they may not soon forget the government’s about-face on the issue. “If there is a major flood in Houston, which there almost certainly will be, and people die, and homes get destroyed, the people who made this decision are in large part responsible,” said Ben Hirsch, a member of one of the groups that brought the Harvey complaint. “People will die because of this.”

Disclosure: Texas General Land Office has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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Texas lawmakers are considering a bill to resuscitate the state’s nuclear power industry through a taxpayer-funded incentives program. State Rep. Cody Harris, a Republican from Palestine in East Texas, proposed allocating $2 billion toward a fund to create the Texas Advanced Nuclear Deployment Office. 

The bill proposes using public dollars to help fund nuclear construction, provide grants for reactors and fund development research. HB 14 would also create a state coordinator to assist in the state and federal permitting processes. 

Harris told members of the Texas House’s Committee on State Affairs last week that Texas needs long-term energy solutions as the strain on the state’s electric grid increases from the expansion of data centers and other energy-intensive industries. 

Texas has become too reliant on intermittent energy sources like wind and solar, he said. Harris called investing in nuclear energy a strategic imperative for the U.S. A global race for energy dominance is underway with immense national security implications, he said.

“By passing this bill, Texas will become the epicenter of a national nuclear renaissance,” Harris said. “Texas will attract billions in private capital investments and create tens of thousands of high-wage jobs for Texans up and down the nuclear value chain.” 

A week earlier, at the annual energy conference CERAWeek in Houston, nuclear power was being highly touted by both U.S. government officials and Big Tech. 

Throughout the conference, nuclear reactors were described as an answer for the increasing power demands from data centers and artificial intelligence—if the technology can scale. 

Texas’ electric grid has four large nuclear power units at two sites, including two at Comanche Peak, located some 60 miles southwest of Fort Worth. On a typical day, they produce enough electricity to power more than 1 million homes, according to the plant’s owner, Vistra Corp. 

Comanche Peak’s second unit, completed in 1993, is the most recent large nuclear reactor to come online in Texas.

A small, one megawatt molten salt test reactor is under construction beneath a newly completed laboratory at Abilene Christian University, in an underground trench. Abilene-based Natura Resources is one of just two companies with permits from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to construct a so-called “advanced” reactor that is set to be completed in 2027. 

The other company, California-based Kairos Power, is building its 35-megawatt test reactor in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the 80-year capital of American nuclear power science. 

Gov. Greg Abbott has been bullish in recent years about making Texas a leader in nuclear power. In August 2023, Abbott directed the Public Utility Commission of Texas to form a working group to study and plan for the use of advanced nuclear reactors across the state. 

That task force recommended in November 2024 the state put aside $5 billion toward a nuclear fund. Former Public Utility Commission of Texas member Jimmy Glotfelty testified in support of the new bill at last week’s hearing after spending 14 months on the task force. 

He said the bill would put Texas on the path to being a leader of a renewed nuclear industry. If done right, long-term, Texas could see an addition of more than 100,000 jobs and more than $50 billion to the state economy, Glotfelty said, based on an economic study the task force commissioned from the Bureau of Business Research at the University of Texas at Austin. 

“Everybody in the nuclear space would like to build plants here in Texas,” Glotfelty said. “We are the low regulatory, low cost state. We have the supply chain. We have the labor. And what this bill will do will put us a leg up on every other state.” 

NextEra Energy Resources, a Florida-based clean energy power company, is considering bringing its shuttered nuclear plant in Iowa back online. It’s a move that a few years ago, NextEra wouldn’t have even thought about, said Michele Wheeler, the company’s vice president of regulatory and political affairs. 

The company is also working with Dow and X-energy as the two companies develop an advanced small nuclear reactor technology at a Seadrift, Texas, site. It’s based on high-temperature gas-cooled reactor technology, whereas Natura Resources’ project in Abilene uses liquid-fueled and molten salt-cooled technology.

In order for American production of nuclear power to be affordable and successful, someone has to be first, Wheeler said. “Everyone’s like, ‘Yeah, I’ll be second,’ right? So how do you make the right incentives for those that go first to have the upside and the benefit of taking the risk?” Wheeler said at a breakfast session at CERAWeek about Texas power. 

“Everybody in the nuclear space would like to build plants here in Texas.”

— Jimmy Glotfelty, former Public Utility Commission of Texas member

That’s where Texas can step in, said Thomas Gleeson, chairman of the Texas Public Utility Commission. With a $23 billion surplus, the state has the ability to partner with private industry to ensure Texas leads the way with nuclear power, Gleeson said. 

Gleeson sees nuclear as a solution to the massive new power demands in the state’s forecasts. As he travels the country, he’s been telling people that Texas is not in an energy transition but an energy expansion. 

“I need more of pretty much everything,” Gleeson said. “If you care about the environment, if you care about clean air, I’m glad that you love batteries and I’m glad that you love wind, I’m glad that you love solar. Fall in love with nuclear—it has to be a part of the solution.” 

Despite some of the energy sector’s efforts to bring low-carbon power online, the development of nuclear power has been thwarted by worries of disaster, radioactive waste, a history of projects far exceeding budget and its infamously laborious regulatory requirements. 

But nuclear is seemingly having its moment with bipartisan support. Texas Republicans laud the power source’s reliability as they express concern about more of the state’s daily energy demand being met by less expensive but intermittent wind and solar. State Democrats, meanwhile, support adding more low-carbon energy to the grid.

Opponents of the bill called the incentive program a taxpayer handout and urged the power sector to compete in the state’s open energy market. 

Cyrus Reed, the conservation and legislative director of the Sierra Club’s Lone Star Chapter, said unlike the Texas Energy Fund, a piece of legislation that passed in 2023 that awards grants and loans to finance dispatchable, or on demand, generation facilities in Texas, the proposed nuclear fund consists only of grants. 

“That’s a very different proposal,” Reed said. 

John Umphress, a retired Austin Energy program specialist who is evaluating the nuclear efforts on contract for the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, also expressed his concern about funding developers of small modular reactors with public dollars. 

The bill outlines three tiers for the funding program. The first tier provides a reimbursement grant for the costs associated with the initial development of an advanced nuclear reactor. It includes expenses like technology development, site planning, design and early permit work for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. 

The second tier includes grants of up to $200 million for construction costs for projects with permits under review by the NRC. The third tier awards grants for operating costs once projects are finished. 

Both Reed and Umphress warned that companies could see money solely for securing a permit. Such grants, they believe, go beyond a fair incentive. 

“They may never, ever operate on the actual grid and they could have up to $200 million of taxpayer funds,” Reed said. “That seems wrong to us.”