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Representative Johnson pulls bill to trim routine agency reports after committee questions
Summary
Representative Lee Johnson introduced a bill to create a process that would let recurring agency reports fall off a committee’s regular agenda after the third iteration; after extensive questioning about statutory reports and implementation details he withdrew the bill to revise it.
Representative Lee Johnson (District 47) asked the committee to consider a proposal to reduce what he described as "alarm fatigue" from recurring agency reports by creating a process to pause reports that committees no longer want to receive.
Nut graf: Johnson said state agencies currently submit dozens of required and requested reports; his draft would prompt a committee to decide after a third regularly scheduled report whether it still wants to continue receiving the item. He described the proposal as a tool to force a pause and re-evaluation, not to remove a committee’s power to request reports.
Johnson told the committee that the Bureau of Legislative Research (BLR) identified 64 recurring reports required at various cadences. Under his draft, when a given report has been offered three times at its stated cadence, the agency would notify the committee and the committee could either continue or decline further routine presentations unless statute specifically required them.
Committee members raised several operational concerns: clarity about how statutory reporting requirements would be handled, how notice would be delivered to stakeholders, what would happen when committee membership changes across years, and whether agencies might simply let statutorily required reports lapse. Representative Ray, Representative Collins and Representative Clowney asked whether the legislature should instead have BLR list and then repeal specific statutory reports rather than adopt an automatic winding-down process. Representative Wardlaw and others said the bill’s intent aligned with a similar measure (Senate Bill 63) and could reduce unnecessary work for agencies.
Johnson said he was not seeking a vote; he asked to pull the bill, gather drafting fixes and return it with clearer language that distinguishes statutory reporting obligations from recurring requests and provides a safer notification mechanism.
Ending: The sponsor withdrew the bill for revision and invited committee members and staff to provide suggested amendments before he refiled it.
