Every number, checkable
Check our work
We do not ask you to trust the Texas Nationalist Movement. We ask you to trust the IRS, the Treasury, and the Federal Reserve, and to check every number yourself. Here is how the report was built, and where every figure comes from.
How the report was built
The debate usually blurs two. Balance of payments asks whether more federal money flowed into Texas in a year than Texans paid in federal taxes. Fiscal capacity asks whether Texans, taxed as they are now, could pay for the government an independent Texas would actually need. We answer the second, and meet the first head-on.
Six most recent fiscal years with complete data, 2019 through 2024, averaged. A six-year average cannot be accused of cherry-picking a good year, and it absorbs the pandemic rather than hiding it. Where a newer figure is published and material, we note it.
The cost of governing Texas is what an independent Texas would run and pay for. It excludes the portable benefits that follow a person wherever she lives, Social Security, Medicare, veterans' cash, and federal pensions. And it excludes them from both sides at once: where a benefit comes off the cost side, the payroll tax that funds it comes off the revenue side too. That symmetry is the whole reason the honest finding is self-sufficiency and not a surplus.
One-time pandemic relief, about 50 billion a year concentrated in 2020 and 2021, is stripped out as the emergency spending it was. We show the result with it out and with it in. The conclusion holds either way.
Federal grants that pass through the state budget are counted once, on the federal side, and state spending means state-funded spending with the pass-through removed. The waste and regulatory figures are never added on top of spending already counted.
Every number that decides the direction of the conclusion is published, primary data. Where Washington has stopped publishing a Texas figure, we built an estimate, showed the method, and labeled it.
This is a snapshot, not a forecast. It measures today's tax flows against today's cost of government and rests on no prediction about the post-independence economy. Where a figure is a model rather than a government tally, we say so and do not lean on it. Anyone who claims to forecast a post-independence economy to the decimal is selling something.
Before release we put the draft in front of hostile reviewers, an economist, a fact-checker, and a lawyer, and told them to break it, then verified every figure a second time. What that changed, and what it could not, is disclosed in the report.
Every source
Every load-bearing figure traces to one of these. Most are downloadable in an afternoon.
- IRS Data Book, Table 5, gross collections by state (FY2024 and FY2025): irs.gov
- Texas Comptroller, Annual Cash Report: comptroller.texas.gov. Texas LBB Fiscal Size-Up: lbb.texas.gov
- Rockefeller Institute, Balance of Payments, 2025 report covering federal fiscal year 2023: rockinst.org
- USAFacts, state federal revenue and spending: usafacts.org
- U.S. Treasury Fiscal Data, Monthly Treasury Statement and Debt to the Penny: fiscaldata.treasury.gov. OMB Historical Tables: whitehouse.gov/omb
- U.S. Treasury and Peterson Foundation interest tracker, net interest on the federal debt: fiscaldata.treasury.gov
- Department of Defense / OLDCC, Defense Spending by State (FY2023 and FY2024): oldcc.gov
- SIPRI Military Expenditure Database, countries' defense budgets and rankings: sipri.org
- Social Security Administration: OASDI Beneficiaries by State and County, Payments Outside the U.S., Totalization Agreements, and the 2026 OASDI Trustees Report: ssa.gov
- CMS, National Health Expenditures by State of Residence: cms.gov
- VA, Geographic Distribution of Expenditures: va.gov/vetdata
- BEA Regional GDP: bea.gov. BLS, QCEW and CPI: bls.gov. Census, ACS and population estimates: data.census.gov
- OPM, federal civilian employment by state and agency, Federal Workforce Data: opm.gov
- FDIC, Summary of Deposits, Texas deposit base: banks.data.fdic.gov
- Federal Reserve and St. Louis Fed (M2, inflation wealth transfer). CRFB (deficit, interest, Fed debt purchases)
- The "unsustainable" verdict: U.S. Treasury and GAO, Financial Report of the U.S. Government, FY2025, Executive Summary "An Unsustainable Fiscal Path": fiscal.treasury.gov. GAO, The Nation's Fiscal Health series: gao.gov. Moody's (May 16, 2025), Fitch (2023), and S&P (2011) U.S. sovereign rating actions. Penn Wharton Budget Model, "When Does Federal Debt Reach Unsustainable Levels?" (October 2023): budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu
- Blum, D., "The Apportionment of Public Debt and Assets During State Secession," Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law (1997)
- Qvortrup, M., "I Want to Break Free: A Practical Guide to Making a New Country" (Manchester University Press, 2022), and his remarks on Texas debt liability in a Q&A interview on the Texas Nationalist Movement's YouTube channel: youtube.com/watch?v=YEggPKoVoAQ
- Texas HB 1056 (89th Leg., 2025, enacted) and HB 4857 (89th Leg., 2025): capitol.texas.gov
- U.S. Treasury, Financial Report of the U.S. Government, Statements of Social Insurance (75-year Social Security and Medicare unfunded obligation, 88.4 trillion dollars, FY2025): fiscal.treasury.gov
- Comparative benchmarks and precedents: OECD and IMF (government spending by country). The budget offices of Australia, Canada, Ireland, and Israel. UK Office for Budget Responsibility (Brexit). Flemming v. Nestor, 363 U.S. 603 (1960)
The full report also carries the year-by-year ledgers, a note on exactly what we estimated and why, and an account of how we red-teamed ourselves against a panel of hostile reviewers.
648,478 Texans, in all 254 counties, have already added their names. Read the case, then be counted.