Ken Vaz for Washington

Economy and Affordability

• Reduce deficits, federal borrowing, and interest costs through disciplined budgeting and targeted spending reform.
• Lower taxes on working- and middle-class Americans.
• End preferential carried-interest treatment that allows some investment managers to pay capital-gains rates on compensation tied to investment profits. No special treatment.
• Restrict large institutional investors and foreign-controlled entities from purchasing existing single-family homes in bulk and crowding families out of the housing market, while preserving investment that builds new housing.
• Support voluntary federal infrastructure incentives that help local governments increase housing supply and reduce unnecessary barriers to starter homes and workforce housing while preserving local decision-making.
• Preserve meaningful SALT relief for middle-class homeowners and ensure that deductions for property and sales taxes do not disproportionately exclude families in high-cost communities.
• Oppose unfunded mandates and federal policies that unnecessarily raise household energy, fuel, transportation, or commuting costs.
• Reserve federal SNAP benefits for eligible U.S. citizens, strengthen anti-fraud protections, and oppose additional work requirements or benefit time limits that make it harder for struggling Americans to afford food.

Social Security Reform

Social Security is an earned retirement promise to workers who contribute and remain eligible under U.S. law. Ken will protect scheduled benefits, strengthen the program's long-term finances, and pursue reform without placing the full burden on younger workers already struggling with housing and other living costs.

• Protect scheduled Social Security benefits for current and future retirees.
• Offset any necessary general-fund support through verifiable government-wide spending reductions rather than additional borrowing.
• Oppose solving the shortfall primarily through benefit cuts or disproportionate payroll-tax increases on younger workers.
• Preserve a clear relationship between contributions and benefits rather than imposing taxes above the taxable wage cap without corresponding benefit credit.
• Establish an independent reserve fund that gradually diversifies a limited share of long-term reserves under professional management and strict safeguards to improve the opportunity for stronger long-term returns.

Social Security should remain an earned and protected benefit, while its long-term reserves are managed with the discipline, diversification, independence, and safeguards expected of a responsible pension fund.

Infrastructure, Transportation and Rural Connectivity

• Reduce traffic congestion and commuting costs with targeted transportation investments.
• Improve reliability for roads, bridges, freight rail, ports, transit, water, sewer, and grid infrastructure.
• Expand reliable rural broadband and cellular connectivity where private investment has left communities behind.
• Support strategic transportation projects, including transit where it improves mobility and is fiscally responsible.
• Compete for Washington's fair share of federal infrastructure funding while requiring transparent budgets, measurable benefits, and consequences for cost overruns.

AI, Technology and Data Centers

America should lead the world in artificial intelligence while ensuring that technological growth benefits workers, families, and the communities hosting new development.

• Support American AI research, startups, manufacturing, cybersecurity, and responsible innovation.
• Help workers and students adapt through technical education, apprenticeships, retraining, and partnerships with local employers.
• Require appropriate large-load utility rates, connection agreements, developer-funded upgrades, and impact mitigation so residents and small businesses do not subsidize major data centers.
• Condition major federal subsidies on enforceable host-community agreements, transparent infrastructure plans, local workforce and apprenticeship goals where lawful, and clawbacks when companies fail to deliver promised benefits.
• Protect local water supplies through transparent reporting, efficient cooling, reclaimed-water systems, and independent monitoring.
• Preserve local authority to address noise, lighting, pollution, and backup-generator impacts.
• Protect Americans from opaque or discriminatory automated decisions in employment, housing, lending, health care, insurance, and government benefits, while preventing government misuse of facial recognition and AI-powered surveillance.

Agriculture and Water

• Use H-2A to address documented seasonal agricultural labor shortages when sufficient domestic workers are unavailable, while enforcing wages, housing standards, and protections against exploitation.
• Protect reliable Columbia Basin water deliveries and existing lawful agricultural water rights while investing in long-term water security.
• Invest in irrigation, drought resilience, and water infrastructure.
• Streamline duplicative permitting, reporting, and compliance requirements that impose costs without delivering meaningful safety or environmental benefits.
• Support reliable hydro and nuclear power to keep farm and food production costs down.

Government Accountability

Taxpayers deserve a government that can account for how every public dollar is used. Ken supports stronger audits, measurable results, transparent spending, and consequences when agencies, contractors, or grant recipients misuse taxpayer funds.

• Audit and cut waste, fraud, abuse, improper payments, and duplicative spending across federal programs.
• Require transparent accounting and performance reporting for federal funds distributed to states, local governments, contractors, nonprofits, and grant recipients.
• Require federal programs to publish clear objectives, performance measures, costs, and results.
• Require the Pentagon to pass a clean financial audit, meet public annual corrective-action milestones, and face consequences for repeated failures—while protecting military readiness, service-member compensation, and veterans' benefits.
• Strengthen inspectors general, whistleblower protections, and Government Accountability Office oversight.

Essential services and national defense should be protected, but no agency, contractor, grant recipient, or special interest should receive a blank check.

Privacy, Surveillance and Government Overreach

Ken opposes the creation of a surveillance state. Technology should help police solve crimes, not create a permanent record of every law-abiding American's movements.

• Require a warrant based on probable cause before government agencies search extensive historical location information or other highly sensitive personal data belonging to Americans.
• Allow narrowly defined emergency access when lives are in immediate danger, followed by prompt judicial review.
• Prevent federal agencies from purchasing sensitive personal data from brokers in order to bypass warrant requirements.
• Reform FISA to require stronger protections and judicial approval for searches targeting Americans' communications, with independent oversight and public reporting.
• Require public disclosure of surveillance contracts, policies, retention periods, data-sharing arrangements, and general deployment information, while allowing narrowly tailored protection of operational details when necessary for public safety.

Border Security, Immigration Reform, and American Workers

Secure the border, enforce immigration law, protect American workers, preserve lawful family unity, and require immigration agencies to operate constitutionally and accountably.

• Secure the border, strengthen ports of entry, resolve immigration cases more promptly, and enforce final lawful removal orders.
• Prioritize the removal of violent criminals, gang members, human traffickers, drug traffickers, repeat offenders, and national-security threats.
• Use clearly defined, program-specific eligibility rules: reserve federal SNAP benefits for qualifying U.S. citizens while limiting other comprehensive federal benefits to eligible U.S. citizens and qualified lawful residents.
• Preserve legal pathways for spouses and immediate family members of U.S. citizens, subject to background checks, fraud prevention, and eligibility requirements.
• Require meaningful case review before an enforcement action separates a U.S. citizen from an otherwise law-abiding spouse, parent, or dependent child who is actively pursuing lawful status and does not pose a public-safety or national-security threat.

Ken supports secure borders and firm enforcement, but enforcement must remain targeted, constitutional, humane, and accountable.

Affordable and Accessible Health Care

• Protect Medicare and Medicaid for eligible U.S. citizens and qualified lawful residents under clearly defined federal eligibility rules.
• Create affordable bridge coverage and faster eligibility reassessments for workers who lose employer-sponsored insurance and cannot reasonably afford COBRA.
• Preserve rural hospitals, maternity care, emergency rooms, mental-health treatment, and community clinics.
• Expand telehealth, mobile clinics, and loan-repayment programs that bring medical professionals to underserved communities.
• Require meaningful price transparency for hospitals, prescription drugs, and medical equipment.
• Expand and strengthen Medicare drug-price negotiation and competitive purchasing for high-cost drugs and medical equipment while protecting access and medical innovation.
• Require pharmacy benefit managers to disclose rebates and fees, prevent abusive spread pricing, and pass negotiated savings through to patients and health plans.
• Support evaluating a voluntary public health-plan option that competes alongside private and employer-sponsored coverage without forcing anyone to leave their existing plan.
• Oppose replacing private and employer-sponsored insurance with a mandatory single-payer system; preserve patient choice while expanding affordable access through voluntary and financially sustainable options.

Foreign Policy

• Reassert Congress's authority by requiring authorization for sustained military action except when immediate action is necessary to defend the United States or protect American lives.
• Oppose regime-change wars and indefinite nation-building.
• Reduce unnecessary overseas commitments while maintaining a military capable of defending the United States and deterring attacks.
• End open-ended foreign military aid. Allies should assume a greater share of their own defense costs and generally purchase U.S. defensive systems, with narrowly defined exceptions only when Congress determines that assistance is necessary to protect a direct U.S. national-security interest.
• Oppose broad tariffs that increase consumer prices and harm Washington exports; use targeted trade enforcement against specific unfair practices.
• Support peace through diplomacy and economic leverage.
• Focus U.S. resources on domestic priorities.

Abortion and Federalism

Ken supports limited federal legal protections for abortion access while leaving policy outside those exceptions to the states.

• Establish federal legal protections for abortion access in cases of rape, incest, a life-threatening medical emergency involving the mother, and fatal fetal anomalies.
• Allow states to establish their own abortion laws for circumstances outside those federal exceptions.
• Oppose federal abortion restrictions outside these guaranteed exceptions and leave other abortion policy to the states.
• Protect access to medically necessary emergency treatment.
• Require clear, workable medical standards so doctors are not forced to delay life-saving care because of legal uncertainty.

Public Safety, Addiction and Drug Policy

• Focus federal enforcement on fentanyl, methamphetamine, cartels, violent traffickers, and dealers who knowingly distribute lethal drugs.
• Support federal decriminalization of marijuana possession and allow states to regulate legal cultivation and sales, while focusing federal enforcement on trafficking, impaired driving, distribution to minors, and dangerous drugs.
• Expand addiction treatment, recovery services, drug courts, naloxone access, and youth prevention.
• Improve cooperation among federal, state, local, county, and tribal law enforcement.
• Support trained mental-health and crisis-response partnerships so police are not expected to manage every behavioral-health emergency alone.
• Protect due process and hold both violent offenders and government agencies accountable.
• Strengthen penalties and supervision for repeat violent sexual offenders and prioritize removal, after due process, of noncitizens convicted of serious violent sexual crimes.