2025 Texas sessionsRegular and both called sessions have ended. This index covers House and Senate bills, not resolutions. Statuses come from official reports.

2025 · Regular session · House bill

HB5154

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Official caption: Relating to the Joint Admission Medical Program Council.

Signed by governorSource-checked explanation published

Official report lists House author(s): Wilson. This does not identify sponsors or amendment drafters.

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Bill explanation published · Version and amendment review scope is stated below · Individual amendment records may not be separately annotated.

Bill highlights

Selected points from the published explanation. Follow each point to its source-linked context; conditions and limits may matter.

HB5154 strengthens oversight, student communication and financial reporting for the Joint Admission Medical Program (JAMP), which supports highly qualified, economically disadvantaged students pursuing medical education.
Program and council: The law expressly emphasizes mentoring, academic services, degree completion, medical workforce needs and reducing barriers for disadvantaged communities.
Meeting notice: At least 72 hours before every council meeting, a sufficiently detailed agenda notice must be continuously available to the general public, including on the program website, and sent directly to each participating student through email or other electronic notification.
Scholarships and support: The council must pursue opportunities to increase scholarship allocations to at least 30% of the total amount appropriated for the program, without impeding other program functions and goals.
More detailed reports: The existing report due to the governor, lieutenant governor and House speaker by December 31 of each even-numbered year must now cover program problems and proposed solutions; public/private receipts, spending, balances and unused money; admissions and enrollment; dismissals, probation and voluntary withdrawals; graduate scholarship awards/disbursements and reasons eligible money remains unused; plans and constraints for reallocating it; projected needs and supplemental-funding requests for the next state budget cycle; donations; and meeting records, notices and student participation.
Student feedback portal: The council must maintain a secure, mobile-accessible, usable portal accepting anonymous or identified complaints and recommendations.

Read the full explanation ↓

What does it do?

HB5154 strengthens oversight, student communication and financial reporting for the Joint Admission Medical Program (JAMP), which supports highly qualified, economically disadvantaged students pursuing medical education. It took effect June 20, 2025. It does not create an unconditional new entitlement to medical-school admission or a guaranteed scholarship increase.

Program and council. The law expressly emphasizes mentoring, academic services, degree completion, medical workforce needs and reducing barriers for disadvantaged communities. The council still consists of one faculty member from each participating medical school, with a member chosen as chair for two years. New chair duties cover facilitating meetings, compliance with goals and representing the council to stakeholders. The council must adopt communication policies for meetings, agendas/reports, feedback and student awareness.

Meeting notice. At least 72 hours before every council meeting, a sufficiently detailed agenda notice must be continuously available to the general public, including on the program website, and sent directly to each participating student through email or other electronic notification. The law also requires reporting on student participation opportunities and policies to comply with the Open Meetings Act.

Scholarships and support. The council must pursue opportunities to increase scholarship allocations to at least 30% of the total amount appropriated for the program, without impeding other program functions and goals. Methods include seeking legislative appropriations with the coordinating board, soliciting gifts/grants/donations and collaborating with private funders. It must prioritize increases in graduate medical scholarships over other scholarships and ensure students know about available counseling and relief services. This is a duty to pursue funding opportunities, not an immediate appropriation or a fixed payment promised to each student.

More detailed reports. The existing report due to the governor, lieutenant governor and House speaker by December 31 of each even-numbered year must now cover program problems and proposed solutions; public/private receipts, spending, balances and unused money; admissions and enrollment; dismissals, probation and voluntary withdrawals; graduate scholarship awards/disbursements and reasons eligible money remains unused; plans and constraints for reallocating it; projected needs and supplemental-funding requests for the next state budget cycle; donations; and meeting records, notices and student participation. Data must be broken down by institution type and academic year and reported consistently with federal student-record privacy law.

Student feedback portal. The council must maintain a secure, mobile-accessible, usable portal accepting anonymous or identified complaints and recommendations. Anonymous submissions must remain anonymous through encryption and other safeguards. The council must review feedback regularly, track and prioritize its resolution, and notify students of action without violating privacy. Feedback must be shared with the medical-school application service and other stakeholders as authorized by law and compiled in a report for the council’s statutory report, website, participating students and relevant legislative committees. Students must be told about the portal at orientation, by email and on the website.

The existing conditional medical-school admission guarantee and continuing-participation requirements remain. This review does not verify that the council has launched a compliant portal or delivered a particular scholarship.

Sources: final law, Sections 1–7; official history; continuing-participation conditions; report and retained deadline.

What changed along the way?

The introduced bill mainly expanded reporting on student departures/probation and graduate scholarships. The House committee substitute broadened it into the program-goals, governance, meeting-notice, funding-pursuit and feedback-portal package. The House committee, engrossed and Senate committee operative text match.

Senator Lois Kolkhorst’s sole indexed amendment, adopted May 25, changed the direct counseling/relief-service wording to mentoring and academic services, while adding a duty to make students aware of available counseling/relief services. It added website posting and direct electronic meeting notices to students, prioritized graduate scholarship increases, and required accounting for money both spent and received. Every instruction appears in the final law.

The Senate packet’s first ten pages are the earlier bill body, followed by the two-page amendment and fiscal notes; the earlier body alone is not the final law. The House concurred May 28. The required votes were achieved for immediate effect, including 100 House votes on concurrence, and the bill became effective when signed June 20.

Sources: all versions; amendment index; adopted Senate amendment; Senate packet.

For the full amendment record, open the official amendment index.

Official bill versions

Compare the published text versions in the official text index. A change is not attributed to a specific amendment here without a verified record.

Who could benefit—and who could bear the costs?

Participating students may gain clearer meeting notices, a protected feedback channel and more visibility into scholarship decisions and unused funds. Greater graduate-scholarship support is a funding priority, not a guaranteed outcome. The council and its administrators must perform additional reporting, outreach, fundraising and portal work.

The final May 26, 2025 fiscal note estimates a $1,334,989 cost to general-revenue-related funds for fiscal years 2026–27: $652,603 in 2026 and $682,386 in 2027. Annual estimated costs rise to $714,756 by 2030. These are projected costs, not money appropriated by HB5154.

The estimate assumes two additional full-time positions for compliance and development/fundraising. For 2026 it includes $276,103 in salaries/benefits, $30,000 for an online hotline/reporting portal, $110,000 for outsourced mental-health services, and $236,500 for mentoring stipends and the Canvas platform. The final fiscal note retains those mental-health assumptions even though the adopted amendment changed the statutory duty to awareness of available counseling/relief services; the estimate should not be mistaken for a separate enacted mandate to purchase those services.

Other identified work was assumed absorbable within existing resources; no local-government fiscal implication was anticipated. The introduced, reporting-focused bill had a no-significant-impact estimate, but the broader committee and later versions carried the roughly $1.335 million two-year estimate.

Review boundary: all enacted sections, versions, the complete Senate amendment/packet, all indexed fiscal notes and prior program/governance/reporting provisions were checked. This does not audit actual spending, prove new appropriations or a working portal, measure workforce effects, or authorize release of identifiable student records.

Source: final fiscal note and assumptions.

Official sources

Catalog report retrieved 2026-10-25. Check the official record for corrections or later changes.