Why Is Texas Sending People Around the World? Two Years, $3.22 Million in State-Paid Foreign Travel

Methodology

Data comes directly from the Texas Comptroller's public Travel Payments tool, part of the state's official transparency reporting. We pulled every payment record tagged with Comptroller Object 7121 – "Travel – Foreign" — the state's own catch-all classification for international travel expenses, as opposed to the separate "Travel In-State" and "Travel Out-of-State" (domestic) categories — across two consecutive Texas fiscal years: FY2024 (September 1, 2023 – August 31, 2024) and FY2025 (September 1, 2024 – August 31, 2025). That's 470 line items in FY2024 and 473 in FY2025, 943 total, spanning 48 distinct state agencies. Two limitations worth naming plainly: (1) the state's disclosure does not include a destination country field, so we can describe that money went overseas and how much, but not where; and (2) a meaningful share of line items are processed as aggregate travel-card statement charges (payee "Citibank N A") rather than itemized per traveler, so some of the largest single entries below represent a batch of charges for multiple people and dates rather than one person's trip — we've flagged those explicitly wherever they appear in a table.

Correction, August 22, 2026: an earlier version of this report used 972 line items and a $3.29 million total. While building the companion browsable database, we found 29 rows in our FY2025 production-mirror pull that were exact duplicates — identical payee, agency, date, amount, and comptroller object recorded twice. We removed them and recalculated every figure in this report accordingly; the numbers below are the corrected ones. FY2024's totals, pulled separately from the Comptroller's own export tool, had no such duplicates and are unchanged.

The Big Picture

Foreign travel spending dipped modestly year over year — down 3.1%, not a spike, not a dramatic cutback either. This is a steady-state budget line, not a one-time anomaly:

Where the Money Actually Comes From

This is the distinction most coverage of "government travel spending" skips, and it matters. Texas's accounting system tags every payment with an "Appropriated Fund" code. Splitting the two years' worth of foreign-travel payments by fund source produces a near even split — but the two halves are fundamentally different kinds of money:

In plain terms: $1.56 million of the two-year total is money the Legislature appropriates from general tax revenue — sales tax, franchise tax, the funds that also pay for schools, roads, and health and human services. The other $1.65 million comes from the Teacher Retirement System and Employees Retirement System pension trust funds (money contributed by and invested on behalf of teachers and state employees, not appropriated by the Legislature) and from university-specific accounts funded by tuition, research grants, and endowments. Both are public money and both deserve scrutiny — a pension fund flying staff to due-diligence meetings with the outside managers it invests billions with is a different question than a state agency's general-revenue travel budget — but conflating them overstates the "tax dollars sent overseas" framing by about half.

Five Categories, One Number Each

Grouping the 48 agencies into five functional buckets makes the shape of the spending clearer than the raw agency list does:

"Public Safety / Corrections / Military" is overwhelmingly the Texas Department of Public Safety ($706,550 of the $724,987), which runs its own protective, extradition, training, and international-liaison operations as a normal part of state law enforcement — a different kind of justification than a pension fund's manager visits or an agency head's conference travel, and one this report doesn't second-guess wholesale. The Governor's Office bucket, by contrast, is 100% General Revenue and the most purely discretionary of the five — there's no pension trust, no tuition account, and no law-enforcement mandate standing behind it.

By Agency, Largest to Smallest

All 48 agencies with at least one foreign-travel charge in FY2024 or FY2025, ranked by two-year total:

Which Agencies Spend General-Revenue Tax Dollars on Foreign Travel

Re-running the ranking using only General Revenue Fund (0001) payments — stripping out pension trust and university-account spending entirely — changes the picture. This is the list to look at if the question is specifically "what is the Legislature's appropriated budget paying for":

Top 15 by General Revenue total shown; 33 additional agencies had smaller GR-funded foreign travel. TRS and ERS drop out of this list entirely — every dollar they spent came from their trust accounts, not General Revenue.

The Frequent Flyers

Most of the 943 line items are single trips by different people. But a smaller group of named state employees traveled internationally on the state's dime repeatedly — three or more separate trips across the two years. Institutional aggregate payees (where a university or agency is its own listed payee rather than an individual employee) are excluded from this table:

Two clusters stand out: Employees Retirement System investment staff, who make repeated overseas trips consistent with due-diligence visits to the outside fund managers ERS's trust invests with — a common practice at large institutional pension funds, funded by the trust rather than General Revenue; and Governor's Office staff, whose travel is entirely General Revenue-funded and the most squarely "appropriated tax dollars" of any cluster in this table. Dawn C Buckingham is the elected Commissioner of the General Land Office; her name appears here exactly as the Comptroller's own payment data records it.

The Single Biggest Checks

The largest individual line items are dominated by "Citibank N A" — the state's travel-card processor. These are aggregate statement charges, not one person's trip: each represents a batch of card charges for foreign travel by potentially several travelers, billed to the agency on a single processing date. We're showing them because they're the actual largest entries in the data, but they should be read as "the agency's travel card was charged this much for foreign travel that billing period," not "one employee spent this much on one trip."

Investigative Assessment

💬 Comments