Congressman Jared Huffman goes big picture

From nuts-and-bolts problem solving to fighting for democracy, Huffman talks about what he's done in Congress and what he's working on now

Jared Huffman represents California’s 2nd Congressional District, which spans the north coast of the state, from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Oregon border, including Sebastopol and west county. A Democrat, he was first elected to Congress in 2012, and he’s running to keep his seat again this year.

Huffman serves on the congressional Committee on Natural Resources and the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. In addition, he’s the ranking member of the Natural Resources Subcommittee on Water, Wildlife, and Fisheries.

Before serving in Congress, Jared represented the North Bay for six years in the California Assembly, where he chaired the Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee. Prior to his legislative service, Jared worked as a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). He graduated from UC Santa Barbara and Boston College of Law.

Though he’s best known for his environmental policy work, he also founded the Congressional Freethought Caucus to, as his website says, “promote sound public policy based on reason, science and moral values, while protecting the secular character of government and championing the value of freedom of thought worldwide.”

In June of this year, Huffman created a congressional taskforce investigating Project 2025, a political initiative by the Heritage Foundation that aims to promote conservative and right-wing policies to reshape the United States federal government—and the lives of ordinary Americans. In fact, as you’ll see in the discussion below, Huffman views his work for the future of democracy as the most important thing he’s doing in Congress right now.

So what have you been doing in Congress in this last term?

This has been an interesting Congress, because, on the one hand, it is the most dysfunctional and least productive Congress in American history. By a long shot. It makes the Do Nothing Congress of 1948 look like a paragon of productivity.

But on the other hand, I continue to deliver big wins for my district because of the incredible productivity of the previous Congress, working with the Biden Harris administration to pass all kinds of transformative legislation.

We are making historic investments in infrastructure up and down my district. We’re delivering grants of all kinds for community health clinics, for coastal restoration and resilience. We’re making historic investments in healthy forests and fire preparedness. So across the spectrum of needs, there are a lot of good things happening because of that and in spite of the political dysfunction in Washington right now.

Can you give me some specific examples, say, of infrastructure work in the district?

Sure. Take a look at the new Community Health Clinic in Guerneville. Also, just about every major road and bridge project in the district on the highway system is happening because of federal dollars. Just to take you from south to north: we’re talking about $360 million for the seismic retrofit of the Golden Gate Bridge; moving up to the middle of my district, SMART is on its way to Healdsburg and eventually to Cloverdale. It’s going to take a few years, but we have the funding for the design and construction of a bridge across the Russian River and for other enhancements of SMART. In the far north of my district, there is all kinds of other transportation infrastructure; we’re going to finally solve the problem of the Last Chance Grade, which is a failing part of Highway 101, heading into Crescent City. That’ll be more than a decade to finish, but we are beginning that process. Then, you know, you get beyond transportation to all of the clean energy and broadband investments rolling out. We’ve been talking about these things for years. In terms of community water systems and wastewater systems in Sonoma County, I’ve delivered a grant for a two-basin solution on the Russian and Eel rivers that is critical to maintaining water supply reliability, while also restoring salmon habitat on the Eel River. I could spend the entire time with you talking about various projects, these awesome federal investments that are rolling out up and down my district.

The big legislative wins were in the previous Congress, with the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act. I was able to write significant portions of those laws when it comes to the environment and climate resilience. So, for example, in the bipartisan infrastructure law, there is an unprecedented $8 billion investment in western water resilience.

Is there any opportunity for working with representatives across the aisle in the current Congress, or is that just not possible?

It’s just complicated. So yeah, I can find a Republican partner to work on, for example, my rural hospital bill to try to get rural hospitals reimbursed at a higher rate from Medicare, because the economics of rural healthcare are just dismal. Sam Graves of Missouri is an arch conservative. We don’t agree on much, but we both have this problem in common, and we want to solve it, so we have a bill. Now, that bill hasn’t advanced in this Congress, but it’s an example of how you can find bipartisan partners on a lot of things. But the system is just kind of stuck though in terms of moving those type of solutions forward.

Tell me about that. Use that bill as an example of why it’s difficult moving things forward. So what happens that it just stays stuck?

It doesn’t get a hearing, and it doesn’t make it to the floor, because the house majority decides which bills advance, and in this Congress, bipartisan problem solving is just out of favor. And it’s not just my rural hospital bill. I mean, take a look at an issue that Republicans themselves say they care a lot about— border security. We had a bipartisan bill come out of the Senate that would have been the biggest step forward in terms of border security and immigration reform, and for completely political reasons, House Republicans declared it dead on arrival because Donald Trump didn’t want it to pass.

This is just a time when partisan politics has crowded out bipartisan problem solving, and that needs to stop.

Do you see any hope for that in the future?

Yes, but we’ve got to win elections. We need new people. I mean, honestly, that’s what it comes to. We have too many people in Congress that are there to be hyper-partisan warriors and ideologues instead of problem solvers.

Several of your colleagues have decided to retire from Congress, citing that very reason, but you’re going for another term.

Well, I continue to get things done, and it’s not easy, but I think that’s the job of a member of Congress. You can’t always choose the political climate you get to serve in, but your job is to always keep working to deliver results. It would be much easier if we were in a time of at least some bipartisan harmony. We’re not. We just have to work a little harder and be a little more creative in a moment like this.

So looking forward to the next term, what things do you see yourself working on?

You know much of this will depend on how the election goes, but I hope to soon be chairing the House Natural Resources Committee, and in that capacity, I’ve got a number of priorities from federal Marine Fisheries legislation, which is sorely needed to bring climate science and sustainability into our fisheries management, to get to the bottom of all of the illegal fishing and forced labor and human rights violations that are at the heart of our seafood supply chain. Most people don’t even know about that, but when you buy most of your seafood, you really don’t know where it’s coming from, and oftentimes it’s coming to you from really shadowy sources that use slave labor and engage in terrible practices on the high seas. It’s really bad, and the more we learn about it, the more alarming it is. So that’s been a project of mine. I have legislation—bipartisan legislation actually—with a congressman from Louisiana, Garret Graves. We’ve made some progress, but there’s a lot more work to do.

A lot of these things just take years, and sometimes you’ve got to keep coming at it and coming at it, and then the political window opens, and you can enact something that makes a big difference.

I’m sure you see the possible election of a Democrat as president as perhaps one of those windows.

Exactly.

Was there something else you wanted to talk about in terms of what you’ll be working on?

Oh, I have dozens of bills I will try to move in the next Congress from forest restoration to more investment in community wildfire resilience. Also veterans’ health care—we have struggled to recruit and retain health care providers in rural parts of my district for the VA clinics, and I’ve got a bill to enhance incentives for that. There are so many different things, but these elections really have huge consequences in terms of our ability to move things.

Tell me more about that.

This is the big thing, really. Because you started out asking me what my priorities have been, what I’ve been working on. You know, in a simpler time, I would just deal with the nuts-and-bolts problem solving for the different needs up and down my district, but we’re in a moment right now where democracy itself is threatened in an enormous way, and so I have taken the lead in Congress in creating a task force to really highlight the threat of Project 2025.

Project 2025 is nominally a product of the Heritage Foundation and 110 other conservative groups, but it is very much the blueprint for a second Trump presidency, yes, and parts of it are already being pushed by Republicans in Congress. It’s really extreme, and it’s a 920-page document that they actually put in print. It is probably the most extreme takeover plan we’ve ever seen from a major party in our country: eliminating the Department of Education, enacting a nationwide abortion ban, rounding up millions of immigrants into detention camps for the largest mass deportation in American history. It’s just remarkable in its extremism. I think it’s important that Americans understand that that’s the agenda, so that they can go out and make an informed decision in this election year.

That’s something I’m spending a huge amount of time on, because I think the stakes are so very high. When it comes to the environment and climate, you know, we’ve known this agenda for some time, but it’s right there in Project 2025, basically gutting all of the climate progress that we’ve made and doubling down on a fossil fuel economy that will probably run out the clock on the climate crisis.

So when you say you’ve created a task force to work on this, what does it do?

So I’ve got now 30 colleagues with me on this task force, and we are engaging in deep, substantive briefings on every part of Project 2025, bringing in experts from academia and from outside advocacy groups. And then each of us trying to do as much messaging as we can through town halls, through events of various kinds, through media appearances. When we get back from the August recess, we will start having hearings on Project 2025—very high profile, public-facing hearings to make sure that the American people understand that this thing is real and that it’s not just us saying so—it’s their own blueprint in their own words.

Trump has supposedly disavowed Project 2025. Like he always says, “I’ve never heard of this.”

It’s fantastical for him to try to suggest that. This thing is written by his inner circle and has been promoted as a day-one action plan for the last year and a half by all the people closest to Donald Trump, including JD Vance. In fact, JD Vance is so deeply involved in Project 2025 that he wrote the forward for the President of the Heritage Foundation [Kevin Robert]’s new book. They are extremely close, and Trump’s choosing of JD Vance affirms that this Project 2025 agenda is indeed the game plan.

You know that obviously you can’t believe Donald Trump. He’s an incredible liar, and there’s just a long list of receipts and evidence, including the private plane trip that he took with Kevin Roberts. That plane trip was in order for Trump to go and give a keynote at a Heritage event where he praised Project 2025 and said it was going to point the way for the next steps in their movement. So he really can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. It’s something everybody needs to understand.

When you published an interview with my Republican opponent, I was disappointed to see that questions like this were not presented—Do you agree with the specifics of the Republican agenda in Project 2025—because he was all over the place without really saying what he’s for and what he’s against.

Everybody knows what I’m for and what I’m against. I’m out there leading the fight against Project 2025, fighting to save our democracy, fighting to protect our fundamental rights that are at stake right now, and as much as I like nuts-and-bolts problem solving and delivering infrastructure projects and health clinics and other things, I’m engaged on this existential big picture fight as well.

Speaking of big picture, do you want to comment on Biden’s stepping down and Kamala stepping forward?

Sure, because I’m really proud of the role that I played. After that debate performance, I think many of us realized that we had a very big problem. In an election that has so much at stake and that should be winnable, we were—because of President Biden’s physical decline and challenges with aging—we were on a path to losing. Yeah, so it was awkward, it was difficult, but I was one of those who stood up and pushed very hard and very publicly for change.

And the change we seem to have is Kamala.

The change is Kamala, and it wouldn’t have happened if we had not in mid-July, stopped the Democratic National Committee from forcing an early virtual roll call that would have locked down the nomination. I actually led a group of 30 members of Congress in a letter that we were going to send to the DNC, and it enabled our democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer and others to back them down, and so the DNC did not push that early roll call. Had they done that, we would not have been able to make the change. So I’m incredibly proud to have played a significant part in putting us on this course, and you see the result, right? I mean, it’s an entirely new election, and people are energized. The enthusiasm is unlike anything we’ve seen in many, many years. It’s still going to be a close and difficult election, but we’re in such a better place because we made a tough but necessary decision.