BONUS: Who Is Getting Paid to Run Texas School Vouchers?
This is an unplanned addition to the series.
We intended to move straight into the rural access gap this week. But the more we looked at the company running the voucher program's back end, the more it became clear that Odyssey deserved its own post. The connections are too direct, and the Idaho record is too relevant, to fold into a footnote somewhere else.
So. A detour.
When Texas built its school voucher program, it needed someone to run the machine.
The machine is substantial. More than 274,000 applications were received for TEFA accounts in the first cycle. The program's first-year budget is $1 billion.
Someone has to build the application portal, manage the family accounts, operate the vendor marketplace, and process the payments.
That is not a small job, and it is not a cheap one.
Texas law allows the state to pay its program administrator up to five percent of program funding.
Applied to a $1 billion appropriation, that is up to $50 million. If the program expands, as comparable programs in Arizona and Indiana have, the administrative fee grows with it.
The company Texas selected for this role is called Odyssey. And you have probably never heard of it.
Who is Odyssey?
Odyssey is a small, privately held company founded by Joseph Connor. At the time it was building its case for the Texas contract, it had roughly 40 employees. It had received investor backing from Andreessen Horowitz and Tusk Venture Partners and had positioned itself nationally as a specialist in managing education savings account programs across multiple states.
According to the Texas Tribune, Odyssey appears to have been the only company selected to handle the TEFA platform and its administration.
The question worth asking is: of all the companies that could have managed a $1 billion public program, how did a 40-person startup with a complicated record end up as the sole vendor?
The answer is in the relationships.
The Network
Before Odyssey won the Texas contract, it had done some very specific hiring.
According to the Texas Tribune, Odyssey retained Luis Saenz, Governor Abbott's former chief of staff, to lobby for its interests during the 2023 and 2025 Texas legislative sessions.
That is the same stretch that Abbott was pushing vouchers through the Capitol with everything he had, including mounting primary challenges against House members who voted against vouchers.
The Texas Observer reported that Odyssey's bid proposal also relied on personnel from the PR firm Vianovo, including John Wittman, Abbott's former communications director, and Matthew Hirsch, Abbott's former deputy chief of staff.
To summarize the team Odyssey assembled to win the Texas contract:
The governor's former chief of staff
His former communications director
His former deputy chief of staff
That is not a coincidence. That is a strategy.
Chief of Staff
hired to lobby for Odyssey
Comms Director
Odyssey PR bid team
Deputy Chief
Odyssey PR bid team
The financial thread runs one level deeper.
In 2023, Odyssey won a $500,000 award from a competition founded by Janine and Jeff Yass. Jeff Yass is the billionaire school-choice donor who gave a record $6 million to Governor Abbott's campaign, money Abbott used in part to fund primary challenges against the rural Republicans who had been blocking his voucher legislation.
Yass's money helped build the legislative majority that created TEFA. Odyssey collected a $500,000 prize from a Yass-founded contest, then landed the contract to run the program that Yass's money helped create.
None of this is secret. All of it is documented in reporting by the Texas Tribune and the Texas Observer. None of it was treated as a disqualifying concern before the contract was awarded.
What Happened in Idaho?
Here is what Texas knew, or could have known, before handing Odyssey a contract worth up to $50 million.
Odyssey had managed Idaho's Empowering Parents education microgrant program, a state-funded initiative that let families purchase approved educational goods and services. It was, in structure, a smaller version of exactly what Texas was now building.
Idaho Education News reported that the State Board of Education reviewed purchases made through the Odyssey platform and identified approximately $180,000 in ineligible expenses. The items flagged in public records reporting included:
Clothes
Televisions
Smartwatches
Household cleaning supplies
A gun holster
A pickleball set
Gaming equipment
A camera-equipped drone
These were not close calls. These were the kinds of purchases that should never have cleared a platform designed to fund education.
Separately, Idaho officials found that Odyssey had collected $478,656.22 in interest earned on the program's accounts, which had been funded with federal COVID relief money. The Department of Administration viewed this as a breach of Odyssey's contract and ordered the company to repay the interest.
Odyssey repaid it.
Idaho then replaced Odyssey with a different vendor in 2024. State officials said the switch was unrelated to performance. The switch came after two reviews, documented ineligible purchases, and a repayment order for nearly half a million dollars in improperly held interest.
Odyssey's explanation was that it lost the Idaho contract because a competitor undercut it on price.
The Texas Comptroller's office proceeded with the contract award.
What It Adds Up To
The record is clear on what happened here.
Abbott spent years and a massive amount of political capital creating the program that Odyssey now runs. The company staffed its Texas push with Abbott's closest former aides. It collected a prize from the donor whose money helped build Abbott's voucher majority. And it won the contract to administer the program as the apparent sole vendor, according to the Texas Tribune, carrying a recent track record that included a repayment order, a platform that approved drones and gun holsters as educational expenses, and a contract loss in the prior state where it operated.
Texas families were told this program was built for them.
The $50 million administrative contract went to a company that hired the governor's former chief of staff to lobby for it.
I have spent fourteen years in a Texas classroom. I know what it looks like when the rules are written for the people already in the room.
This program was not built in a vacuum. It was built by specific people, for specific reasons, and the company running it was chosen in a way that deserves far more scrutiny than it has received.
The public is paying for this machine.
It is worth asking who built it, and why.
Next in the series: the rural access gap. More than 150 of Texas's 254 counties have no school enrolled in TEFA. Universal eligibility is not the same as universal access.
