AUSTIN (KXAN) — A committee of Texas lawmakers will consider prohibiting state contractors and vendors from conducting “unauthorized surveillance” of lawmakers, state employees or anyone raising concerns or complaints about state operations.
House Bill 5061 also aims to prevent contractors from engaging in “intimidation, coercion, extortion, undue influence, or other similar conduct intended to influence, silence, or retaliate against” those people. The proposal explicitly prohibits the use of private or confidential information to “manipulate or influence a state contracting decision or proceeding.”
The bill’s author, Rep. Jeff Leach, R-Plano, said he hopes to curb any illegal data collection and the unlawful sale of private data, too.
“It must stop,” he told the Texas House Committee on the Delivery of Government Efficiency (DOGE) on Wednesday.
While he did not mention the company by name, Leach said the bill was directly related to allegations made by the DOGE committee in March against a state Medicaid contractor, Superior HealthPlan. At that hearing and in the days that followed, state lawmakers and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton accused the company of hiring private investigators to gather information and reports on lawmakers, who influence Medicaid policy, as well as on health care providers and private citizens.
“All of you did an incredible job of shining a light on a dark place and on some dark things happening,” Leach said. “This bill is meant to come alongside the work you have already done, and to put some safeguards in place so that this doesn’t happen again – and if it does, to crack down in a really real way on the wrongdoers.”
Leach laid out his bill one day after DOGE lawmakers publicized letters they sent to Texas Health and Human Services, asking for sanctions against Superior HealthPlan, and to the State Auditor’s Office, asking for a review of the company’s financial records.
Superior HealthPlan is one of several private companies that operate Texas’ various Medicaid programs, under a system known as “managed care.” The state funnels public dollars to the private sector to manage healthcare for many low-income, elderly or disabled Texans and foster children.
At the DOGE hearing on March 26, lawmakers grilled the former CEO of Superior HealthPlan, Mark Sanders, about emails where he asks for “in-depth” reports about certain lawmakers and various health care providers from a personnel group known for background investigations.
KXAN investigators reviewed copies of these emails sent between 2017 and 2019, including one that references records about a lawmaker’s divorce proceedings. Another document obtained and reviewed by KXAN investigators shows a copy of a fraud, waste and abuse report prepared for Superior HealthPlan in 2018 that detailed personal information of some healthcare workers and private citizens featured in a Dallas Morning News investigation into concerns about the state’s managed care system — including social security numbers, personal histories and even aerial photos of the property of a mother featured in the series, whose foster child had been denied care and suffered.
Sanders told DOGE lawmakers in March all of the information discussed was “publicly available” and “general.”
In the weeks since that hearing, Superior’s parent company Centene Corporation has reiterated that sentiment in two written statements to KXAN. One of these reads, in part, “The actions in question amounted to a limited number of remote, desk-based research projects using publicly available information and occurred more than five years ago. None of the research was used for unlawful or unethical purposes.”
The statement also said the company looks forward to sharing information with state officials to “correct the numerous false accusations that have stemmed from the March 26th DOGE committee hearing.”
In a previous statement to KXAN, the company said, in part, “Background research has many business uses, including meeting preparation as well as helping to identify conflicts of interest and potential fraud, waste, and abuse, which is part of our duty as a government-sponsored healthcare organization. The research in question included irrelevant and unnecessary personal information. That was inappropriate and never should have happened. This occurred prior to 2019 and does not reflect the values or standards of our current leadership. For that, we offer our sincere and unequivocal apology.
We have found no evidence of any legal violations, and no individual was ever followed or photographed. Suggestions that these materials were used for leverage or blackmail are completely false.” Superior’s full statement is featured in this story.
According to the text of HB 5061, “surveillance” means “monitoring, investigating, tracking, or collecting information about an individual without the individual’s express authorization, including physical surveillance, electronic tracking, data mining, and social media monitoring.”
No one appeared to testify on the bill during its public hearing on Wednesday, and DOGE committee chairman Rep. Giovanni Capriglione, R-Southlake, was met with laughs when he joked that he’d “love to know if anyone was against it.”
He is one of the lawmakers mentioned in the emails reviewed by KXAN, and he originally raised the allegations against Superior during the committee hearing in March.
On Wednesday, he called this kind of action by a state contractor “unfathomable.”
“This is one of those bills that, you find out toward the end of session you didn’t think you had to do, but then realize that we have to maintain a level of ethics – not only for ourselves, of course, but also for our vendors and contractors,” he said.
Leach wrapped up the hearing by telling lawmakers his office was working on a committee substitute to tweak some of the language and to strengthen protections for whistleblowers.
