It relates to Texas' successful effort to lure this large national scientific project to the state. Quickly afterwards, the project was terminated due to concerns over costs and the looming deficit. This didn't take into consideration the future benefits than could result due to the basic research that would occur in the facility - all that is happening in Europe now.
A writer reminds us of what could have happened here:
Five-thousand miles southwest of Geneva, just outside Waxahachie, Texas, are the remnants of a super collider whose energy and circumference—true to American sensibility—would have dwarfed those of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. Nobody doubts that the 40 TeV Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) in Texas would have discovered the Higgs boson a decade before CERN. The collider’s tunnel would have entrenched Waxahachie in a topographical oval that curved east before the southern Dallas County line, then running southwest under Bardwell Lake and curving north at Onion Creek. Since Congress canceled the project twenty years ago, on October 21, 1993, Waxahachie has witnessed the bizarre and disquieting history of its failure.
