Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Harris County on Tuesday to block a new guaranteed income pilot program that would provide financial assistance to families in the county’s poorest neighborhoods.

Under the federally funded program, roughly 1,900 Harris County households would receive monthly cash payments of $500 for 18 months. The county put $20.5 million in federal COVID-19 relief funds to launch the program, known as Uplift Harris, which is intended to help households in the county’s 10 poorest ZIP codes who are living 200% below the federal poverty line with no strings attached. Those families had already been selected and payments were slated to begin this month.

Conservatives balked at the program after Harris County commissioners approved it in June and have since tried to stop it. State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, a Houston-area Republican who frequently has sought to undercut the county’s Democratic leadership, asked Paxton earlier this year to declare the law unconstitutional.

Paxton blasted the program in a legal filing Tuesday, calling it an “illegal and illegitimate government overreach” and dubbing it the “Harris Handout.” Paxton argues the pilot program violates a section of the Texas Constitution that says no local government can “lend its credit or to grant public money or thing of value” to individuals.

“This scheme is plainly unconstitutional,” Paxton said in a statement. “Taxpayer money must be spent lawfully and used to advance the public interest, not merely redistributed with no accountability or reasonable expectation of a general benefit. I am suing to stop officials in Harris County from abusing public funds for political gain.”

Harris County officials dismissed Paxton’s move as the latest effort by the state’s Republican leadership to curtail the county’s authority.

“This lawsuit is nothing more than another attack on Harris County government by Republican state leaders looking to make headlines,” Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee said in a statement. “This program is about helping people in a real way by giving them direct cash assistance — something governments have always done. I cannot for the life of me understand why any public servant would be opposed to that.”

Harris County is the latest Texas locality to experiment with guaranteed income programs, following efforts in Austin, San Antonio and El Paso County. Local officials across the country turned to such efforts in recent years to help needy families weather high housing and food costs and bounce back from the pandemic’s economic fallout. Beneficiaries of a guaranteed income pilot program in Austin, which ended last year, received $1,000 a month and mostly used that money to help them stay housed as the city faced exorbitant increases in home prices and rents, an Urban Institute survey found.

Houston residents broadly support the idea of guaranteed income, according to polling from the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University. More than 75% of respondents to a 2023 Kinder poll said they support a “universal basic income for low-income, working adults.”

Disclosure: Rice University has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

We can’t wait to welcome you to downtown Austin Sept. 5-7 for the 2024 Texas Tribune Festival! Join us at Texas’ breakout politics and policy event as we dig into the 2024 elections, state and national politics, the state of democracy, and so much more. When tickets go on sale this spring, Tribune members will save big. Donate to join or renew today.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/04/09/texas-harris-county-guaranteed-income/.

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.