On July 4, 2026, as the United States marked the 250th anniversary of its independence, Bill Archer died at his farm in Stanley, Virginia. He was 98: a Houston Republican who spent three decades in the House of Representatives, ran its powerful tax-writing committee for his final six years, and never stopped trying to tear the federal income tax out by its roots. The Archer Center, the fellowship program that bears his name, announced his death and called its timing "a fitting final tribute to a lifelong patriot."

Few politicians of his generation went to war with the tax code as openly as the man assigned to write it. As chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Archer argued that the income tax was beyond repair and should give way to a broad tax on what Americans spend rather than what they earn. He wanted, he said in 1995, to "tear the income tax out by its roots and throw it aside so it can never grow back again," and to "get the IRS completely out of our individual lives," remarks carried by the Deseret News. He put numbers on the idea, estimating that a consumption tax of 15 to 20 percent could replace the revenue while sparing taxpayers billions of hours a year spent on their forms. The talk was bold enough that Speaker Newt Gingrich asked him to hold the subject until the Contract with America's first hundred days had run their course.

He came to that conviction the long way. William Reynolds Archer Jr. was born in Houston on March 22, 1928, finished St. Thomas High School, spent a year at Rice University and completed his education at the University of Texas, earning a business degree and then a law degree with honors in 1951, according to the Congressional Directory. He served in the U.S. Air Force from 1951 to 1953, during the years of the Korean War, and remained a captain in the Air Force Reserves. Back in Houston he worked as an attorney and businessman, leading a company called Uncle Johnny Mills, Inc. as its president from 1953 to 1961, and he held his first elected offices close to home, as a councilman and mayor pro tempore of Hunters Creek Village. The Archers, his memorialists noted, descended from some of Germany's earliest settlers in Texas, and public service ran deep in the family.

Houston voters sent him to the Texas House of Representatives in 1966 as a Democrat. In December 1967, during his first term, he crossed to the Republican Party, and his district returned him for a second term anyway. In Austin he earned a reputation as a reformer who championed transparency and good government.

The bigger seat opened in 1970, when George H.W. Bush vacated the west Houston congressional district. Archer won it, and the voters of Texas's 7th District kept him for thirty years and fifteen terms, reelecting him by landslide margins every time; some years he ran unopposed. Within the state's delegation he lived by a standard colleagues came to call the Archer Rule: no member of the Texas delegation should speak ill of another.

The Republican majority elected in 1994 handed him the Ways and Means gavel, and he held it from 1995 until he left Congress in 2001, serving also on the Joint Committee on Taxation. The wholesale uprooting he wanted never arrived, but narrower victories accumulated. He helped negotiate the balanced budget agreement of 1997, a goal he had pursued for two decades. He shepherded middle-class tax relief that created a $500 per child tax credit, expanded individual retirement accounts and eased the estate tax, and he worked with President Bill Clinton on welfare reform and Medicare measures. He even wrote himself into the statute books, almost literally, through the Archer Medical Savings Accounts, a forerunner of today's health savings accounts.

His eldest son, William "Reyn" Archer III, said his father kept a different ledger. "My dad would often tell me that while it was rewarding to pass major legislation, he felt his greatest accomplishment was in helping individual people," he said in the family's announcement.

That instinct had a permanent address. In January 2001, as he retired from Congress, Archer partnered with the University of Texas System to create the Archer Center, expanding a high school internship program he had started in 1971 into a full Washington fellowship. More than 2,200 undergraduate, graduate, law and medical students have since spent a term living and working in the capital, and alumni have gone on to Rhodes, Marshall, Truman, Fulbright and Schwarzman scholarships, The Texas Tribune reported. Katie Romano, the center's executive director, said Archer "believed profoundly in the power of public service and invested in students long before they recognized their own potential." In the spring of 2026, at 98, he joined the fellows a final time to celebrate the program's 25th anniversary at the Library of Congress, his last public appearance.

Archer married the former Sharon Sawyer, and by his last years in office the Congressional Directory counted five children, two stepchildren and seven grandchildren in their family. The family has asked that memorial gifts go to the Archer Center in lieu of flowers, with funeral arrangements pending.

The code Bill Archer wanted pulled out by the roots is still on the books, and so is the evidence of what he did inside it: a child tax credit that surfaces every filing season, health savings accounts descended from the accounts that carried his name, the 1997 budget agreement he had chased for twenty years. The fuller measure of him is younger, and it keeps arriving in Washington by the semester. Every new class of Archer Fellows makes the move from Texas to the capital that Archer made in 1971, and each one extends the wager beneath his half century of public life: that the surest way to better a government is to keep sending it people determined to be useful.