The House Ethics Committee announced on July 27, 2026 that it is reviewing Lance Gooden, the Republican congressman from Texas's 5th District. The matter was handed to the committee by the Office of Congressional Conduct — the independent watchdog that investigates members of Congress — on June 10, 2026. The committee said it will announce what it decides to do on or before November 9.

The committee didn't say what the case is about. Gooden did. He said it's about spending.

He would not say whether that means his campaign money or the taxpayer money that pays for his congressional office.

His first move was to attack the investigators

Most people, when a watchdog looks at their books, say some version of "I'll cooperate and the facts will speak for themselves." That is not what Gooden did. Here is his full statement:

"These are bogus spending allegations perpetrated by dishonest unelected OCC bureaucrats, and as the fifth Texas GOP ally of the President to endure one of these attacks, I am confident the House Ethics Committee will confirm their baseless nature."

Read that again. Before any finding, before any hearing, before the public even knows what the allegations are, Gooden's answer was to call the people investigating him "dishonest unelected bureaucrats."

The Office of Congressional Conduct is not some outside political group. It's the House's own independent ethics office. It was created because Congress policing itself behind closed doors wasn't working. Its whole job is to look at a complaint, do a review, and decide whether there's enough there to hand to the Ethics Committee. In Gooden's case, it decided there was.

Gooden's framing — that this is an "attack" on "allies of the President" — is the same move we see over and over from politicians in trouble. It asks us to stop asking about the facts and start picking a team.

We don't have to take that deal. We can just look at the record.

This isn't the first time Gooden's money has drawn attention

The stock trades. In September 2021, the watchdog group Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint with the same congressional ethics office, saying Gooden "may have failed to disclose up to $376,000 worth of stock transactions." The group said this could violate House rules and the STOCK Act — the law that requires members of Congress to promptly report their stock trades so the public can see whether they're trading on information the rest of us don't have.

Gooden's response then was a version of his response now: nothing to see here. He said there were no transactions above the reporting threshold, so no reports were required.

The reimbursements. A year earlier, in November 2020, CQ Roll Call went through Gooden's Federal Election Commission filings and found that he had paid himself more than $280,000 out of his own campaign account since 2018 — 68 separate transactions, for things like travel, phone bills, and meals. Forty of them were labeled simply "expense reimbursement."

Paying yourself back for real campaign costs is legal. Federal law and House rules draw a hard line at personal use — campaign donations are not a second paycheck. The reason that Roll Call review mattered is that a member who routinely pays costs out of pocket and then writes himself checks from the campaign is harder to audit than one who just pays the vendor directly. A government watchdog quoted in that story called Gooden's level of self-reimbursement unusual.

None of that older reporting is the same as the current case. The Ethics Committee has not said what it's looking at, and Gooden has not been found to have broken any rule. But when a congressman tells us the new investigation is about "spending," his spending history is exactly the context that matters.

Who Gooden actually works for

Gooden has been in Congress since 2019 — seven years. In that time, the pattern on his report card is not one of a man fighting for the people of Terrell and the rest of Texas's 5th District.

• He has a 0% score from the League of Conservation Voters for 2025, and a 2% lifetime score — meaning he has voted against clean air and clean water protections almost every single chance he's had. You can see his environmental voting record here.
• His biggest backers are corporate donors — auto dealer groups, Dell Technologies, energy companies, Home Depot, Comcast. You can look up who funds him at Who Bought My Rep.

That's the trade a lot of us have gotten used to and shouldn't be: our representative's time and attention go to the people writing checks, and the people back home get a press release.

Why this matters for TX-05

An ethics review isn't a conviction. It's a question. And the question here is simple: did Lance Gooden spend money he wasn't supposed to spend, and whose money was it?

If it was campaign money, that's money donors gave him to win an election. If it was his official office budget, that's our money — taxpayer dollars meant to run a congressional office that serves the district.

Either way, the people of the 5th District are entitled to an answer, not a press release calling the investigators names. And they're entitled to it before Election Day, not after.

The committee says it will announce its next step by November 9. We'll be watching.

Source

This post is based on reporting from The Texas Tribune, with additional documentation from the Campaign Legal Center and CQ Roll Call. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Sipa USA via REUTERS.