About this response & our editorial approach
About this candidate response
DutyStation contacts candidates to ask whether and how they support service members, military families and veterans, and invites them to share their thoughts and priorities. We share their replies here in the candidate’s or campaign’s own words, with minor formatting for readability and correction of obvious spelling mistakes.
No endorsement in either direction. Publishing a reply does not mean DutyStation endorses the candidate. Replying does not mean the candidate or campaign endorses DutyStation.
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Organized by topic. Email greetings and sign-offs are omitted; campaign contact details appear alongside.
Government shutdown and cooperation
- I oppose it. A shutdown is not a negotiating tactic. It's a failure to do the one job the Constitution gives Congress without question: fund the government. The 2025 shutdown lasted 42 days, and troops got paid only because the Pentagon moved about $8 billion out of research accounts. That's a workaround, not a plan.
- I won't belong to either party's majority, so I won't owe a vote to either leadership. Whichever party holds the gavel, I'll work with the administration and anyone in either chamber on the same terms: pass the twelve appropriations bills on time, put real tradeoffs on the table, and keep a clean stopgap ready so a funding fight never becomes a funding lapse. Congress should not leave town while a deadline is open.
- If a shutdown happens anyway, troop pay should never depend on a workaround. I'll support a permanent law that keeps pay flowing automatically to active duty, Guard and Reserve, and the DoD civilians who support them. It should also protect family programs like childcare and commissaries. VA medical care is already funded a year in advance, which is why VA hospitals stayed open in 2025. Benefits deserve the same certainty. Members of Congress should not be paid while the troops aren't.
Quality of life
- Readiness is my first priority, and families are part of readiness. A Sailor worried about a sick child, a spouse who can't work, or a move the family can't afford is not focused on the mission. People leave the service over these problems.
- Pay: junior enlisted pay should keep pace with what it costs to live where we station them. BAH should reflect real local rents. GAO has found it falls short in tight markets.
- Healthcare: TRICARE has to deliver timely appointments, especially specialty and behavioral health. When a military treatment facility can't see a family, the referral should be fast and simple, not a fight.
- Childcare: waitlists at base child development centers are a readiness problem. I'll back staffing and pay for providers, and fee assistance that actually covers off-base care when the base can't.
- Spouse employment: professional licenses should transfer across state lines without delay, and federal hiring should treat the military spouse as an asset, not a risk.
- Moves: fewer moves where the mission allows. When a move is necessary, reimbursements should be on time and accurate, and household goods should arrive intact. Families shouldn't have to finance the government's orders.
Veterans’ care
- I commanded 1,200 Marines and Sailors in Helmand Province. I know what we owe the people who come home, and what we owe the families of those who don't.
- Timely care: veterans should get care on the timelines the law already promises. When the VA can't meet them, community care should be a phone call, not a paperwork battle. I'll press for honest wait-time reporting, so problems surface instead of being managed out of sight.
- Mental health: The battalion I led in Afghanistan lost five Marines, and a civilian reporter was killed in one of our convoys. Everyone was eventually reassigned, but that team stayed together in my memory, as it did for all of us. We have lost more Marines and Sailors to suicide since that deployment than we lost in combat. Seventeen veteran suicides a day. That number just doesn't seem real until it's your brother or sister in arms, and by then it's too late for them.
- I'd like to see resiliency training fully embraced during service and as part of TAP. I'm for lethality. But the time spent on mandatory speeches and testosterone testing could and should be invested in the troops. Eight sailors across the Lincoln carrier strike group attempted suicide during an extended deployment, and the response from the top was that conditions had been 'completely misrepresented.' Ignoring reality puts active-duty members at risk, and I've no doubt it will contribute to mental health problems once they are out.
- Post-service is equally important. Same-day mental health access, peer support, and outreach to veterans who never enroll in the VA must be funded and measured by outcomes, not by press releases.
- Disability benefits: I support the Major Richard Star Act and the Combat Veterans Retirement Restoration Act. A service member medically retired because of combat injuries shouldn't have to give up retirement pay to receive disability pay.
- I do not support the offset being suggested to pay for it, which limits which illnesses count as disabilities, starting with tinnitus and sleep apnea, for future veterans. You don't fund one veteran's benefit by cutting another's. CBO puts the cost at under $10 billion over ten years. I have no doubt you can find that in defense programs running years late and billions over budget.
- The claims backlog has come down substantially, and that progress should be protected. I want accuracy measured as hard as speed, so veterans aren't forced into appeals to get a right answer.
- Transition: Transition is tough, and veterans need to be trained for it like any other important mission. But treating it as something veterans need help to do, and publicizing the difficulties, often backfires on both the veteran and the employer. Veterans have a skill set any employer would be lucky to hire, but each of us still has to move out and take the battle space on our own. Some transition training has done more harm than good. Classes that taught unemployment as an entitlement rather than a last-resort safety net drove up unemployment claims, and the press that followed left employers thinking something was wrong with veterans.
- Much has been made of translating military skills into civilian jargon. But for many of us, civilian job titles and roles are just as hard to sort out, and no one but the veteran is responsible for figuring out the fit.
- I'll push to measure transition programs by one result: whether veterans are working a year later.
Family housing
- Accountability first, because the rest depends on it. In 2021, one of the largest privatized housing companies pleaded guilty to federal fraud and paid more than $65 million. It had falsified maintenance records to collect performance bonuses while families lived with the repairs it never made. That should never have been possible, and it should never be profitable.
- Maintenance: enforce the Tenant Bill of Rights as written. That means independent inspections, published response times, and work-order data families can see. Mold, water, and gas problems should be fixed on a deadline, not a promise. When a contractor fails, incentive fees should be withheld automatically, and repeat failure should cost them the contract.
- Availability and affordability: most service members live off base. GAO found that DoD lacks current data on where housing is short, and that some families pay hundreds of dollars a month above their BAH. Fix the data, update BAH to real local rents, and work with communities here in Hampton Roads to build housing near the installations.
- As an engineer, I'd treat this as a systems problem: measure the condition of every unit, publish it, and hold someone accountable by name.
ELECTION REFLECTIONS · IN THEIR OWN WORDS
Looking ahead to Election Day
Brief answers to DutyStation’s questions about hope, America’s future, unity, the next generation and a closing message. The earlier policy answers and their received date remain above.
Hope heading into the election
- The people. Whenever I’ve interacted directly, its clear people want things to be better.
Vision for America
- Unified, resilient, optimistic
Bringing Americans together
- Duty and caring about the future.
The next generation
- Optimism and a sense of humor.
Closing message to voters
- VOTE. If you don’t participate, you have no one to blame for what bothers you.