Michael Cloud has represented Texas's 27th District — Victoria, part of Corpus Christi, and the Coastal Bend — since 2018. Eight years in, he sits on the Appropriations Committee, which controls federal spending, and on the Oversight Committee's DOGE subcommittee. Here are three things his constituents should know.

1. He joined a caucus that a civil rights group calls an anti-Muslim hate group

In January 2026, Cloud signed on to the "Sharia Free America Caucus," founded by his fellow Texans Keith Self and Chip Roy. In the caucus's own press release, Cloud said the rise of Sharia law is "an assault on our Constitution, our freedoms, and the Christian foundations of our nation."

This is not a debating society. Fox News reported that the caucus is pushing a ban on foreign nationals who "adhere to Sharia" from entering the U.S., along with a bill designating the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country's largest Muslim civil rights group, designated the caucus an anti-Muslim hate group — the first time in the organization's 32-year history it has applied that label to a congressional caucus. CAIR's analysis found the bills the caucus backs would, if enacted, "effectively render the practice of Islam illegal in the United States."

Texas is home to people of every faith and no faith. The Constitution Cloud says he's defending is the same document that says the government does not get to pick which religions are allowed here.

2. He's on the DOGE subcommittee — and wants to make DOGE permanent

Cloud didn't just go along with DOGE. He helped run it.

On January 22, 2025 he was appointed to the House Oversight DOGE subcommittee chaired by Marjorie Taylor Greene. On June 4, 2025 he signed on as an original cosponsor of the "Make DOGE Permanent Act." And when the bill arrived to lock in $9 billion of those cuts, he voted for it in June and again in July.

Even after Elon Musk walked away, Cloud told The Daily Signal that Musk had built "a process that will outlast him."

Here's what that process did to Texas:

• Texas has more than 249,000 federal employees — 8% of the entire federal workforce — which made Texans unusually exposed to the layoffs.
• DOGE terminated more than $118 million in EPA environmental grants already awarded to Texas organizations.
• Across the state, DOGE claimed $1.8 billion in cuts to Texas grants and leases.

And the savings? DOGE promised $2 trillion a year. Analysts who went through the books found it disrupted an enormous amount while saving very little, and that federal spending actually went up. Cloud is one of the few members who could have stopped it from the inside. He tried to make it permanent instead.

3. He signed on to a bill that would ban abortion nationwide

On January 24, 2025, Cloud became an original cosponsor of the "Life at Conception Act" — a bill extending full legal personhood and 14th Amendment protection to every "preborn" human being from the moment of fertilization. Read the text: there is no exception in it for rape, for incest, or for the life of the mother. The only carve-out written into the bill says a woman herself can't be prosecuted.

He is pushing that in a state that already shows what happens next. ProPublica found that after Texas's near-total ban took effect, the rate of sepsis in second-trimester pregnancy-loss hospitalizations jumped more than 50%, and identified at least 120 in-hospital deaths of pregnant and postpartum women in 2022 and 2023. The danger was undeniable enough that Texas's own Republican-led legislature passed a bill clarifying the ban's medical exceptions.

Meanwhile about two-thirds of Americans say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, according to Pew. Cloud's answer is to take the Texas policy national.

What kind of representative is this?

A caucus organized around one religion, a permanent version of the agency that cut $1.8 billion out of his own state, and a federal abortion ban modeled on a law Texas doctors say is killing patients. Three different issues, one instinct — the more government power there is to point at people, the more he wants it pointed.

Eight years is long enough to call that a record rather than a phase. The Coastal Bend votes on it in 2026.