Nathan Johnson pledges to review Deloitte's $2.02 billion in Texas contracts if elected attorney general

According to the timeline CNBC reported, the fault ran for at least eight months before anyone flagged it ^[1]. Texans can register to vote through the DPS online driver's license portal ^[12]. Paul Bettencourt, a Republican state senator from the Houston area, described what broke in a post on X: "the DPS vendor Deloitte updated the voter registration system, and those automatic transfers stopped coming thru," he wrote ^[13]. Johnson and a Republican lawmaker put the number of Texans affected at no fewer than 178,000 ^[1]. Both counts in circulation are minimums, and they sit 22,000 apart ^[4].

Deloitte's DPS work is about 4% of the $2.02 billion it holds in 30 active contracts across 16 Texas agencies, according to the Legislative Budget Board ^[9][2]. Johnson said he wants to review the process for outsourcing state functions as well as the individual contracts ^[4]. His pledge names other state vendors alongside Deloitte ^[1].

Johnson's case is about outsourcing as a policy. He blamed Texas Republicans for trying to shrink state government and hand essential duties to contractors ^[2]. "I think the voter registration issue is absolutely not the whole story," he said. "It's just the leading edge that really ought to cause people to look hard at this larger phenomenon of outsourcing core state functions that really a major government like Texas ought to be able to handle." ^[5] He also has an earlier Deloitte engagement to point to. The firm was asked in 2023 to administer the Texas Energy Fund, and its contracts came under fire a year later after it chose a company whose CEO had been convicted of an "embezzlement scheme" as a finalist for a loan program ^[16].

For now the state is paying for the cleanup. Secretary of State spokesperson Alicia Pierce said the office "is providing grant funding to help offset the cost of additional personnel as counties process these delayed registrations" ^[14]. CNBC's report does not give the size of the grants, and it does not report any claim by the state against Deloitte or any agency review of its contracts. Deloitte did not immediately respond to requests for comment ^[8].

The outcomes split on the attorney general race. If Mayes Middleton, the Republican nominee and also a state senator, wins the seat Ken Paxton is leaving ^[6], the review Johnson describes does not happen through that office. Middleton led by 5 points in an August Texas Politics Project poll, a lead larger than its stated margin of error of plus or minus 2.83 points ^[7][5]. If Johnson wins, he gets the $2.02 billion book and the outsourcing process to examine ^[9][4]. A third route runs through Republicans, since Bettencourt has already named Deloitte in public ^[13]. On the August polling I'd expect the first outcome, and the $2.02 billion attached to Johnson's pledge overstates what Deloitte has at risk from it. That view is wrong if Middleton or other Republican leaders commit to the same review before the Nov. 3 election ^[15].