What happens to U.S. federal law inside Texas?

Federal law stops being the supreme law in Texas and Texas law takes its place. The change is real, but it is far less disruptive than it sounds, because Texas already has its own full body of law governing nearly everything Texans do day to day.

Most of the law you live under is already Texas law

The rules that shape ordinary life in Texas are overwhelmingly state law already. Your criminal code, your traffic laws, your property and contract law, your family law, your business law, your professional licenses, your schools, your courts: all of it is Texas law, made in Austin, enforced by Texas authorities. Federal law sits on top of that as a separate layer covering a defined set of subjects. When independence comes, the Texas layer does not change at all. It simply becomes the whole structure instead of the bottom of a two-story building.

What actually changes is which layer is supreme

Today the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution makes valid federal law override conflicting state law. Independence removes that ceiling. Texas law becomes the highest law in Texas, answerable to the Texas Constitution and to no government outside Texas. That is the entire point of self-government: the decisions that bind Texans are made by Texans, and there is no higher authority in Washington that can countermand them.

The federal rulebook does not vanish, it gets sorted

This is the honest part, and it is also the reassuring part. An independent Texas does not wake up with empty law books in every area Washington used to regulate. The orderly approach, the one every separating nation uses, is to carry existing federal rules forward as Texas law on day one and then revise them deliberately over time. The United Kingdom did exactly this when it left the European Union, converting the entire body of EU law into domestic law with a single act so that nothing fell through the cracks, then amending it at leisure. Texas can do the same: keep what works, change what does not, repeal what only ever existed because Washington imposed it. Nothing is left to chance, and nothing is left to a vacuum.

Texas already has an agency for almost every federal function

The reason the transition is manageable is that Texas is not starting from scratch. For nearly every cabinet-level federal department there is already a Texas counterpart performing the same kind of work at the state level. The administrative machinery to run banking, environmental, transportation, health, agriculture, and public-safety law already exists in Austin. Independence shifts authority from the federal version to the Texas version, not from something to nothing.

The standard for what stays is simple: does it serve Texas?

Once Texas writes its own rules, every regulation faces one test instead of two. Not "does Washington require this," but "does this serve the people of Texas." A great deal of federal law exists for reasons that have nothing to do with Texas and impose costs Texans never chose. Independence lets Texas keep the protections Texans actually want and shed the weight Texans never agreed to carry. That is a feature of self-government, not a gap in it.

The bottom line

Federal law stops being supreme, and Texas law becomes the law of the land in Texas. Most of what governs daily life is already Texas law and does not change. The federal layer is carried forward, sorted, and revised in an orderly transition, judged from then on by a single standard: whether it serves Texas.