Where I Stand

The median household income in San Mateo County is $159,000 and people still can't afford to live here. That sounds like a high number until you look at what a one-bedroom actually costs. Teachers, nurses, firefighters, the people who keep this place running, are getting pushed out because we let housing turn into an investment vehicle instead of something people actually live in.

My family knows what this feels like. I called out fraud at a major defense contractor and the retaliation cost me my career. We were (and still are) staring down the real possibility of losing everything. This is not some unique sob story; it is a reality for thousands of families in our district who are one bad month away from being gone.

We need federal incentives that actually build affordable housing, not luxury developments with a few affordable units slapped on so they can call it "mixed-income." We need real renter protections, including federal support for just-cause eviction standards and rent stabilization. And we need to go after the corporate landlords and institutional investors who are buying up housing stock to squeeze every dollar out of communities they will never set foot in.

This is not a market problem. It is a policy failure. And policy failures have policy solutions, if the people writing the policy actually know what it feels like to worry about keeping a roof over their kids' heads.

Right now, we are watching the most brazen looting of the American government in modern history.

The President launched a memecoin days before taking office. His family has collected hundreds of millions in trading fees while over 800,000 investors lost billions. He hosted a private dinner for the top buyers of that coin, many of them anonymous foreign nationals, while simultaneously directing the regulatory policy that governs the crypto market.

The so-called DOGE cost taxpayers at least $21.7 billion through botched mass layoffs and reckless contract terminations, according to a Senate investigation. At the same time, inspectors general investigating Musk's own companies were fired. That is not rooting out corruption. That IS corruption. They fired the watchdogs, pardoned donors, and dropped enforcement actions against companies that invested in the President's businesses. This is dogshit governance and everyone knows it.

We need stronger whistleblower protections. We need mandatory financial disclosure for officials with business interests that intersect with the policies they control. We need real transparency in federal contracting and restored independence for inspectors general. We need REAL punishments for people and corporations who bribe and cheat their way into power.

When you fire the people whose job it is to find fraud, you are not saving money. You are hiding something.

My dad is a Vietnam War refugee who fled authoritarian violence to build a life here. My family exists in this country because America kept its promise to people who had nowhere else to go. That promise is being broken right now.

In a district where roughly 25% of the population is Hispanic and over 30% is Asian, ICE operations and the weaponization of federal agencies against our communities are not abstract policy debates. They are threats to our neighbors, our coworkers, our friends, and in plenty of cases, our own families.

We need to stop using federal agencies as instruments of intimidation against our communities. We need a real pathway to citizenship for undocumented residents who have built lives and contributed to this country. We need protections for DACA recipients and TPS holders who have been stuck in legal limbo for years. We need to reject any policy that uses cruelty as a deterrent, because that is not border security. That is state violence.

I will not be quiet on this. The time for decorum, hands clasped, and mouths agape when atrocities happen is over. The people in our district who are afraid right now deserve a representative who will fight for them, not one who puts out carefully worded statements and moves on.

This district consistently votes to fund its schools. Bond measures and parcel taxes pass here because people understand that investing in education is not optional. But local funding can't make up for decades of federal underinvestment, and it shouldn't have to.

Teachers in CA-15 can't afford to live in the communities where they teach. Childcare costs rival mortgage payments. Special education services are stretched thin. And the kids who need the most support, kids with disabilities, kids from low-income families, kids whose first language isn't English, are the ones most likely to fall through the cracks.

Families in our district fight to get the special education services their kids are legally entitled to. The system is designed to wear parents down until they give up. That should not require a battle. Federal law promises a free appropriate public education to every child with a disability. The federal government has been quietly underfunding that promise for decades.

We need increased federal investment in public education, especially in special education and Title I funding for high-need schools. We need universal pre-K and affordable childcare, because forcing families to choose between a parent's career and a child's early development is a policy failure with generational consequences. We need teacher pay and housing assistance programs that allow educators to actually live where they work.

Our kids deserve better than a system where the quality of their education depends entirely on whether their parents can afford to supplement it. That is not equal opportunity. It is the opposite.

Healthcare in this country is designed to extract maximum profit from people at their most vulnerable. The insurance industry spends billions lobbying Congress to keep it that way. And it works, because the people writing health policy are funded by the people profiting from it.

Nobody should go bankrupt because they got sick. Nobody should ration insulin. Nobody should skip a doctor visit because the copay is a week's groceries. And nobody should have to stay in a job they hate because losing employer-sponsored insurance means losing access to care.

I know what it's like to fight the VA for basic care. I know what it's like to navigate a system that's designed to wear you down until you give up. And I know that the families in our district, even in one of the wealthiest counties in the country, are one serious diagnosis away from financial ruin because of deductibles, out-of-network charges, and the endless maze of prior authorizations.

We need Medicare for All. Single-payer. Same coverage for everyone, paid for the same way we pay for fire departments and roads. Every other developed country figured this out decades ago. We pay roughly twice what they pay and get worse outcomes. The arguments against it come from people who profit from the current system.

Until we get there, Medicare needs to negotiate drug prices across the board, not just a handful of medications. Mental health parity needs real enforcement and real access to providers. Pharmaceutical companies that jack up prices on drugs that cost pennies to manufacture need to face consequences. And health insurance executives who systematically deny medically necessary care to drive shareholder returns need to face legal accountability.

Healthcare is a right, not a revenue stream. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either making money off the current system or taking money from the people who are.

Read the full healthcare plank→

We got here because corporations spent decades hiding what they knew about climate change while lobbying Congress to block every meaningful regulation. The fossil fuel industry had internal research in the 1970s showing exactly what was coming. They buried it, funded disinformation campaigns, and bought enough politicians to make sure nobody did anything about it. That is not a market failure. That is a crime that has been treated as a business strategy.

We need to stop pretending that voluntary corporate commitments and incremental policy adjustments are going to fix this. They are not. We need aggressive federal investment in renewable energy infrastructure and a real transition plan that does not leave workers and communities behind. The goal is straightforward: move from an economy built on extracting energy from the ground to one built on harvesting it from the sun, wind, and water. The technology exists. The economics already favor it in most cases. What is missing is the political will to take on the industries that profit from the status quo.

We also need real accountability. When a company causes an environmental disaster, the executives who made the decisions should face criminal liability, not just corporate fines that get written off as a cost of doing business. When fossil fuel companies hide evidence of their contributions to climate change, that should be treated the same way we treat fraud in any other industry. Because that is exactly what it is.

CA-15 is a district full of people who work in tech, biotech, and clean energy. The talent and the innovation are already here. What we need is a representative who will fight for the federal policy to match, not one who takes money from the same industries that are making the problem worse.

Wages have been stagnant for decades while corporate profits have hit record highs every single year. Productivity has gone up. Executive compensation has gone up. Shareholder returns have gone up. The only thing that hasn't gone up is what the people doing the actual work get paid. That is not an accident. That is the result of decades of policy designed to weaken the bargaining power of workers while concentrating wealth at the top.

We need a living wage. Not a minimum wage that was set years ago and has been eroded by inflation ever since, but a wage that actually reflects what it costs to live in places like CA-15 where a one-bedroom apartment can eat half your paycheck. If a company's business model depends on paying people less than they need to survive, that is not a business model worth protecting.

We need the right to organize without retaliation. Corporations spend millions on union-busting lawyers and consultants every year, and the penalties for violating labor law are so weak that companies treat them as a cost of doing business. Workers who try to unionize get fired, intimidated, or forced into mandatory anti-union meetings on company time. That has to stop. We need stronger protections for organizers, faster union election timelines, and penalties that actually hurt when companies break the law.

Strong unions are how working people stand up against monopolies and corporate consolidation. They are how you negotiate for better wages, better benefits, and safer working conditions when the people across the table have all the money and all the lawyers. Every right that workers have today, from the eight-hour day to workplace safety standards, exists because unions fought for it. Weakening unions was never about efficiency or freedom. It was about making sure workers couldn't fight back.

I have seen what happens when the people in power face no accountability. I blew the whistle on fraud in the defense industry and it cost me my career. The system is built to protect the people at the top and punish the people who speak up. That is true in the defense industry, and it is true in every industry where workers are treated as expendable. We need to change that.

The country is not broke. It is being looted. Every year I have been alive, the share of national wealth held by the top 1% has gone up, and the share held by the bottom 50% has gone down. The richest 400 families now hold more wealth than the bottom half of the country combined. This is not a market outcome. It is the result of a half century of policy choices, written by lobbyists and rubber-stamped by both political parties.

Raise the floor. The federal minimum wage has not been raised since 2009. In real terms, it has lost over 30% of its value. We need a living-wage federal minimum tied to a regional cost-of-living index that updates automatically. We need to end the subminimum wage for tipped workers, for workers with disabilities, and for agricultural workers who have been excluded from labor protections since the 1930s.

Close the ceiling. The pay ratio between CEOs and median workers at S&P 500 companies is now over 270 to 1. In the 1960s it was around 20 to 1. Most executive compensation is paid in stock and options that get taxed at lower capital gains rates than the wages of the workers underneath them. We need to tax executive stock and option compensation at the same rate as wages. We need to close the carried-interest loophole. We need a hard cap on the deductibility of executive pay so corporations stop being able to write off seven-figure CEO bonuses against their taxes.

Drain the dynastic trusts. The American economy is being increasingly shaped by inherited wealth rather than earned wealth. Dynasty trusts let billionaire families compound wealth across generations without paying meaningful tax. We need to end the federal tax preference for these vehicles, close the alphabet soup of grantor-retained annuity trusts and intentionally defective grantor trusts that estate-planning lawyers use to move billions across generations untouched, and lower the estate tax exemption back to a level that reflects the original intent of the tax.

Tax the wealth, not just the wages. A wage worker pays federal income tax every two weeks. A billionaire shareholder can avoid federal income tax for years by holding appreciated assets and borrowing against them. We need a wealth tax above a high threshold, a true minimum tax on the highest earners that includes unrealized capital gains, and an end to the step-up basis at death, which is the single largest loophole in the federal tax code.

Read the full economic justice plank→

Most members of Congress writing AI policy have never built or audited an AI system. They are getting briefed by the same companies that profit from the absence of regulation. The result is policy written by lobbyists for the people who hired them.

I run a civic tech company called ProConcordia. We use AI to track and analyze federal legislation, executive orders, and Supreme Court rulings. AI is a tool we use, not the product we sell. I have hands-on experience with what these systems can and cannot do, and I know where the marketing diverges from the reality. I am also trained on the NIST AI Risk Management Framework, the federal standard for evaluating AI risk.

When AI is deployed in a workplace, it is almost always deployed against the workers, not for them. AI screens resumes, sets schedules, monitors productivity, and recommends who gets fired, with no notice and no recourse. We need mandatory disclosure when AI is used in hiring, firing, scheduling, evaluation, or compensation decisions. We need real worker rights to notice and severance when AI is deployed at scale. And we need protected union bargaining over how AI gets deployed in workplaces.

Federal agencies are deploying AI in benefits eligibility, fraud detection, immigration enforcement, and criminal sentencing recommendations, often with no public review. Any AI used by the federal government to make consequential decisions about citizens should be auditable, documented in plain language, and reversible through real human review. The framework to do this exists. The political will to enforce it does not. That is the gap I will work to close.

I am also a whistleblower. The same playbook the defense industry uses to silence employees who tell the truth is being used by AI companies right now, with worse non-disclosure agreements. We need strong federal whistleblower protections for AI safety researchers and engineers, mandatory safety incident reporting to a regulator with real enforcement authority, and a funded independent body to investigate AI safety failures.

Read the full AI plank→

On April 29, 2026, the Supreme Court gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. In Louisiana v. Callais, the conservative majority struck down a congressional map that had produced the first election of two Black representatives from Louisiana in the state's history. Within an hour of the ruling, the Florida House approved an aggressively gerrymandered map that could give Republicans four more seats. Republican senators in multiple states immediately called for their legislatures to redraw districts.

The Voting Rights Act was the most important piece of civil rights legislation in American history. The Supreme Court has been dismantling it for over a decade, starting with Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 and now finishing the job with Callais. The result is that the protections Black Americans and communities of color fought and died for in the 1960s are being stripped away by a Court that has decided racial gerrymandering is only unconstitutional when it helps minority voters, not when it silences them.

In 2025 alone, 16 states enacted 31 restrictive voting laws, the second highest total since the Brennan Center started tracking this in 2011. States are purging voter rolls, closing polling places in minority communities, tightening ID requirements to exclude people who don't have passports or current driver's licenses, and limiting mail-in and early voting. At the federal level, the SAVE Act and executive orders targeting election administration are designed to make voting harder while claiming to address a voter fraud problem that does not exist. Non-citizen voting in federal elections is already illegal. The point of these laws is not to prevent fraud. It is to prevent people from voting.

Gerrymandering is the foundation of minority rule in this country. Politicians are choosing their voters instead of voters choosing their politicians. We need federal legislation to establish independent redistricting commissions, restore the preclearance requirements that were gutted in Shelby, and codify the protections of the Voting Rights Act so that no Supreme Court ruling can strip them away again. We need automatic voter registration, expanded early voting, and protections against the kinds of voter roll purges that disproportionately remove eligible voters of color.

CA-15 is one of the most diverse districts in the country. Over 30% of the population is Asian, roughly 25% is Hispanic. The people in this district know what it means when the government decides that some voters matter less than others. This is our era to do the right thing and demand that American democracy actually works for everyone, not just the people who are already in power.

Most members of Congress who vote on wars have never fought in one. My brother Andrew was killed in Ramadi, Iraq in 2004. Two years later I deployed to Iraq myself. I came home with a permanent disability. I studied national security at Harvard's Kennedy School. I am not new to this material.

What is happening in Gaza is a genocide and the United States is funding it. I support an immediate and permanent ceasefire, recognition of a Palestinian state, restoration of UNRWA funding, and an arms embargo on any government under active investigation by the International Court of Justice. The same applies to the Saudi-led war in Yemen, which the United States has enabled for nearly a decade through refueling, intelligence sharing, and a steady flow of US-made bombs hitting hospitals, weddings, and refugee camps. We need to end lethal support to that coalition and back the bipartisan war powers framework that Sanders and Lee built years ago.

I take no money from defense contractors and no money from AIPAC. The only way to end the wars is to end the money that funds the people voting for them. We need to repeal the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs, end open-ended war powers, and force every member of Congress to vote on every conflict by name. If a member is not willing to vote for a war by name, they should not be sending soldiers to fight it.

Read the full foreign policy plank→

I came home from Iraq disabled, mentally broken, and cast aside. That is not a metaphor. The VA rated me 100% permanent and total disability. I have a traumatic brain injury. I have PTSD. I lost my brother, I lost friends, and I lost years of my life to a war that the people who started it will never have to answer for.

The VA system is overwhelmed. Benefits processing takes months or years. Mental health wait times are a national disgrace. The PACT Act was a step in the right direction, but implementation has been uneven and the backlog is still enormous. Meanwhile, veteran homelessness persists, veteran suicide rates remain catastrophic, and military families are quietly struggling with food insecurity, inadequate housing, and a benefits system that treats them as an afterthought.

We owe veterans more than a bumper sticker and a thank-you-for-your-service. We owe them a system that actually works. That means fully funding the VA, cutting processing times, expanding access to mental health care, and holding the defense industry accountable for the money it extracts from taxpayers while the people who actually served get left behind.

I am not going to be one of those members of Congress who puts on a flag pin, votes for the defense budget, and calls it supporting the troops. Supporting the troops means funding the VA. Supporting the troops means protecting whistleblowers who expose fraud in defense contracting. Supporting the troops means making sure that when someone comes home broken, the country that sent them actually takes care of them.

I have been through this system as a veteran, as a caregiver, as a family member who lost someone, and as an analyst who saw where the money goes. I know exactly where it's broken and I know exactly who is profiting from it staying that way.