LAST 2 WEEKS IN REVIEW

I’m your Representative in Congress and I write to keep you informed.

• If you’re standing on American soil 
• GOP votes to add $5.5 trillion to national debt
• A man-made recession?
• Working for a stronger economy amidst uncertainty
• I need your help: oversight of RFK Jr. on measles
• How the social media corporations lobby Washington
• Outcompeting China in a G2 world
• Defending Harvard’s freedom of teaching & research

If you’re standing on American soil 

Trump’s refusal to return Mr. García is an attack on Americans’ freedom: The Trump Administration's lawless deportations and bullying of immigrants are not improving border security; they are undermining due process and the thousand-year-old tenet of habeas corpus. Throughout my tenure in Congress, I have consistently supported strong border security measures, the deportation of criminals, and bipartisan immigration reform that will draw criticism from both left and right. Without the rule of law and individual freedom as the starting point, however, no immigration measure can be just.

I spoke to the Boston Globe to affirm that freedom means that if your feet touch American soil, you get to stand in front of a judge and put forward the facts on an equal basis to the awesome power of the state, with the confidence that there will be an impartial application of law based on those facts. Mr. García's feet were on American soil, and, by the administration’s own admission, he was denied that right. Trump has said he now wants to apply the same measures to American citizens. We must all condemn such dangerous lawlessness.

GOP votes to add $5.5 trillion to national debt

More debt, more chaos: Congressional Republicans voted on a party-line measure last week to advance their ‘one big, beautiful bill’ that will add $5.5 trillion of debt over the next decade and cut Medicaid, especially at-home care for seniors. They also inserted a provision that blocks Congress from taking back tariff power from the president. Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune continue to abdicate their responsibility to lead a separate and co-equal branch of government, checking presidential power. Instead, they act like courtiers to Trump.

 A man-made recession?

Trump’s tariffs are the largest peacetime tax increase in American history: I invited trade expert (and Brookline native) Ed Gresser as my special guest for a Zoom town hall on tariffs. The administration's chaotic trade war is the largest peacetime tax increase in American history, which will cost families thousands of dollars each. This is a source of massive uncertainty for businesses, big and small, and could tip our economy into a recession.

I criticized the much more modest Biden tariffs as well, so my objections are not partisan. Rather, I believe tariffs must be nested within well-scoped and long-term industrial policy, aligned with diplomacy regarding both allies and adversaries, and passed through Congress to signal enough certainty for businesses to plan around. Tariffs on Chinese exports that met these three criteria could help America. Instead, prices will rise, 401(k)s will fall, and China will gain global market share.

Challenging Republicans to revoke Trump’s tariff authority: Trump's trade war is causing pain for families, businesses, and everyone counting on their 401(k). Standing side by side with House Democratic leadership and fellow Energy and Commerce Committee Democrats, I laid out why the president won't deliver long-term gain for this "short-term" pain and challenged Congressional Republicans to revoke his tariff authority.

Working for a stronger economy amidst uncertainty

Unlock housing production: I joined the Brookline Community Development legislators' breakfast to discuss federal and state housing policy. The cost of housing is the biggest economic challenge facing Massachusetts, and together we reviewed ideas for federal action to unlock housing production to drive down rents:

• Zoning and permitting reforms: tying low-income housing tax credits to cities' land-use reforms for more missing-middle housing. Permitting residential buildings up to six stories to have one staircase and no parking
• Financing innovation: complementing the state's Momentum Fund with no-interest loans from Fannie Mae for affordable housing developers
• Factory-built catalyst: issuing demand signals through HUD for large-scale, modular construction of apartments and condos

Supporting Bay State Trades: The Massachusetts Building Trades Unions hosted their legislative breakfast in Washington, where I spoke with plumbers, pipefitters, ironworkers, laborers, and painters about the local project pipeline, tariffs, and energy policy. There was broad support for my conviction that Massachusetts should lift its ban on nuclear energy in order to create jobs, lower energy prices, and take the Bay State off the whip-end of the gyrating global energy markets.

Visit to Bird’s Hill Pharmacy: Andrew Stein, owner of Bird's Hill Pharmacy in Needham, welcomed me to his business for a discussion with fellow pharmacists about independent pharmacy. Pharmacists are medical providers, small business owners, and community cornerstones who have unique insight into healthcare delivery, corporate and government impositions on entrepreneurship, and the needs of their downtowns. 

I'm one of the most active legislators on pharmacy issues in Congress because I know that the needs of independent pharmacists align with everyone's desire for less frustrating health insurance, lower co-pays on Rx drugs, and thriving small businesses. This week there was progress when one of my bills – bipartisan legislation drafted with Senator Elizabeth Warren to ban pharmacy benefit managers (the middlemen of drug pricing) from owning their own pharmacies – was the basis for legislation that Arkansas passed.

Prioritizing water infrastructure: Jen Pederson of Mass Water Works, along with Fall River's water director and other municipal water experts, met with me in Washington to discuss infrastructure, PFAS, the EPA, and Fall River's Combined Sewer Overflow issue. Since taking office, I have directed millions of dollars in funding toward clean water projects across the district, and I'll continue to prioritize water infrastructure. I am also focused on holding the EPA accountable for enforcing clean water, clean soil, and clean air regulations.

Harnessing the U.S. bioeconomy: The National Security Commission on Emerging Biotechnology released its bipartisan recommendations on supporting the U.S. bioeconomy. Biology is the greatest factory known to nature. From agriculture to energy, industrials to pharmaceuticals, the United States can rebuild its industrial backbone with good jobs, lower prices, and healthier products. No tariffs necessary.

I'm particularly encouraged by the prospect of better, faster, cheaper clinical trials; by rationalizing the Coordinated Framework for the Regulation of Biotechnology; and of a student-to-scientist initiative to map the genetic codes of all flora and fauna in the National Parks.

This report could form the bipartisan basis for upgrading the Food & Drug Administration (FDA), but only if Congressional Republicans are willing to first stand up to the corruption and incompetence of RFK Jr. and his cronies, who are mangling the FDA through firings and a reorganization that will make everything from generic-drug approvals to eyedrop-safety testing harder, slower, and less reliable.

I need your help: oversight of RFK Jr. on measles

A second child dies of measles, hundreds more infected: Secretary Kennedy continues to undermine the childhood immunization schedule, despite a measles outbreak. Epidemiologists advise that 95% of a population should be vaccinated against measles to achieve herd immunity, which is a high threshold. Due to RFK Jr’s anti-vax propaganda, that rate is declining in many regions. I am pressing the GOP leadership of the Energy & Commerce Committee, on which I sit and which has jurisdiction over Health & Human Services, to conduct oversight of the Secretary and his staff, many of whom are both unqualified and compromised insofar as they run businesses regulated by the agencies they are overseeing. 

The Chairman of Energy & Commerce, Brett Guthrie, represents the Second Congressional District of Kentucky. He needs to feel the heat from his constituents. So, my request: if you have friends, family, or connections in the district – please tell them to request a meeting with Chair Guthrie to discuss RFK Jr’s incompetence and corruption.

How the social media corporations lobby Washington

How social media corporations protect their special interests: Deepfake pornography targets women, while also harming young men by lying to them about sex and perverting their capacity to form healthy, intimate relationships on their own. The social media giants—whose market caps exceed the GDPs of many nations—are lobbying aggressively to stop Congress from reforming Section 230 and addressing this harmful content. Section 230 is the 1990s law that provides immunity for social media corporations for harms that arise from the content on their platforms.

You might wonder, 'How do social media corporations protect their special interests in Washington?' First, they hide behind the guise of 'free speech.' But let’s be clear: Section 230 is not the First Amendment. These platforms shouldn’t receive immunity from tort law that journalists don’t get.

Then, the social media corporations lobby on China. "If you tax us, China will win on AI!" But, OpenAI just raised the largest private round of funding in history. There's plenty of money getting invested in AI.

Finally, the corporations don't show up at all. In their place, remarkably well-funded front groups push their agenda under the guise of sympathetic issues. Congress must peel the bark off these social media platforms, freeing Washington from their corporate capture and fixing what they have broken.

Do you support Section 230 reform to enact a duty of care for social media platforms? 

The future of U.S. national security leadership: For the second year, I joined an MIT class to discuss technology and national security. MIT and U.S. Special Operations Command have a partnership in which students, many of whom are active or reserve special operators, are studying the tactical and strategic implications of autonomous systems.


I shared my views on the imperative to grow the Navy and shrink the active Army; on pivoting our procurement system to pay-for-performance instead of cost-plus contracting; on how the United States must better digest the tactical lessons of Ukraine's experience; on partnering with allies like South Korea, Japan, and Australia to build ships; and on the challenges and opportunities facing the Chinese Communist Party as it seeks hegemony in the Indo-Pacific. The comments and questions were superb. These men and women are the next generation of America's national security leadership.

Trump’s xenophobia will cost the U.S. leadership in AI innovation: Of the eight authors of 'Attention Is All You Need,' the landmark 2017 AI paper from Google, seven are immigrants. The eighth is the grandson of refugees. At a recent Energy and Commerce hearing, I raised this paper and its authors with the former CEO of Google, Dr. Eric Schmidt, to highlight how immigration is critical to beating out China for AI dominance — and how much Trump's xenophobia is slowing down America in this race. Dr. Schmidt was clear and compelling in his testimony that welcoming immigrants is essential to American innovation in AI, energy, biotech, cyber, and more.

Standing up to Trump was a ‘step on the road back for Harvard’: I spoke to Boston Globe columnist Shirley Leung about Harvard saying No to Trump on behalf of academic freedom, research, and immigrant students:

During Harvard’s annus horribilis, Newton Congressman Jake Auchincloss has been both a critic and champion of his alma mater. Auchincloss, who is Jewish, does not think Harvard has done enough to address campus antisemitism and thinks the progressive left has captured too much of the university’s teaching and learning mission. Yet he vehemently disagrees with Trump’s approach to dealing with Harvard by threatening its research funding.

Auchincloss liked what he saw Monday from the university and called its current plan to address antisemitism “a step on the road back for Harvard.”

Making references to the university’s motto — veritas, the Latin word for truth, Auchincloss said “to pursue truth, the university must be free from political pressure, whether the progressive orthodoxies of the left or the authoritarian impulses of the right . . . Harvard needs to pursue truth independently of both of those forces, and today, it rejected the authoritarian impulses of the right.”

I have worked with both the Anti-Defamation League and the United States Commission on Civil Rights, as well as universities individually, to address antisemitism and ideological diversity on college campuses. I will continue this work, while rejecting political attacks on universities’ research or academic freedom.

Question: "Is there a democratic version of Project2025? If so please shall with the people. If not, shame on the party and when is the party going to develop their own version?"

 - John, Attleboro

Answer: Americans know what Democrats are against, but not what we’re for. We need big, bold ideas. 

Last month, I spoke with TIME Magazine to explain why it's crucial for Democrats to embrace bold ideas in order to regain a governing majority.

What went wrong for Democrats, and how can it be fixed?

It's encapsulated in the school closures. The school closures were a catastrophe. Those are elementary school kids who didn't learn reading and writing because it was on Zoom. That's high school kids who missed out on baseball practice. That's college kids who didn't get to enjoy the college experience. And what defined those school closures was a condescension, it was an inflexibility, and it was a resistance to feedback about the effects of our government’s decisions. It was this toxic confluence of smugness with inflexibility, and frankly, poor governance.

Democrats need to acknowledge that we were wrong as a party on our stance on school closures. It's not enough to say we were wrong on this. We also have to have a plan of action for how we're gonna remediate it.

What do you think that plan should be?
 
I think it's twofold. One is we should make a commitment of one-on-one, high-dosage tutoring for every kid who's behind grade level in this country. We know it's one of the few educational interventions that are rigorously tested for efficacy. It's scalable, it's complimentary to the work that teachers are already doing, and we should be saying as a matter of party principle: every single kid who's behind grade level, Democrats are here to ensure that they get one-on-one, high-dosage tutoring.

The second thing we should do is hold the social-media corporations to account for their generational attention fracking of our youth. I have legislation that's bipartisan to revoke Section 230, and make social-media corporations accountable to a duty of care for things like deepfake pornography that target young women. But we gotta go even further, and tax the daylights out of these social-media corporations. A 50% tax rate on all digital advertising that they accrue on the revenues. And use it to fund initiatives like local journalism and education.

Does the party need a new direction? What should that direction be?

That's the core challenge we have. It's that we are bereft of big ideas. And that's what I'm worried about. Everyone's focused on ‘we need a new message frame’ or ‘we need we need a new angle’ or ‘we need new leaders to emerge.’ I can assure you there is no shortage of ambition out there, candidates will emerge. There's a shortage of ideas. It's all kind of hand waving unless you actually have some big ideas. Let's put the big ideas out there. Let's talk about them. Let's see what people will get excited about. And then organically, I think a narrative starts to emerge from that.

And this is to a certain extent what MAGA did and Donald Trump did. He came out talking about 'build the wall,' right? We forget, ‘build the wall’ was the foundation of MAGA, which has since engendered many other ideas and narratives. But you can see why it's kind of the intellectual genesis of that movement.

So what should be the Democrats’ next big ideas?

Let me put a few more out there. We have got to stop focusing on expanding health-care coverage and focus instead on lowering health-care costs. Community health clinics account for about 1% of U.S. health care spending, but they treat 10% of Americans. They are primary and preventative care and if they could team up with hospitals in particular, they can be incredibly effective stewards of health care dollars. We have to start subsidizing them directly, as opposed to what we currently do, which is subsidize the health-insurance companies. For 15 years we’ve been subsidizing health-insurance companies, and they keep on telling us everyone's going to get healthier, and all I see is that they get richer. How do we subsidize these community health centers? How about a value-added tax on junk food, in the way that the Navajo Nation has. The Navajo Nation put a tax on junk food. It's modest, but they've used it to fund wellness initiatives. We could do that nationally.

So in the same way that we tie the attention tax to fund journalism and education, we tie the tax on junk food towards radically expanding funding to community health centers. So that everybody under 300% of the federal poverty rate has access to primary and preventative care.

What should be at the core of Democrats’ economic agenda?

Cost Disease needs to be the centerpiece. Our Democratic economic agenda really could be seven words: "treat cost disease and protect Social Security."

What is cost disease? Can you explain it to me like I’m five?

Let’s use two examples to explain it. The average family spends relatively less on TVs and electronics and relatively more on health care than they did 50 years ago. Why did that happen? The reason is that in sectors where they are able to do at-scale product manufacturing, the cost goes way down. In sectors that are very labor intensive, costs tend to go up over time. TVs got really cheap to make, and so a relative share of your budget they went down. Health care is very labor intensive, child care is very labor intensive, and so they, as a relative share of your budget, go up.

The goal then, if we're serious about treating cost disease in housing and health care, which are the two sectors that are most affected by it, is: how do you turn a service into a product and then how do you mass produce that product?

What does that mean for housing?

We totally have to do land-use reform. We gotta make it easier to build. I'm here in Massachusetts, and it’s impossible to build in this state with our zoning code. But we also have to figure out how to turn housing construction from a very service-intensive endeavor into a product. And we actually know how to do that: offsite construction.

One way to break through is for us to get serious about building new cities in this country that just totally bypassed the local zoning issue, right? Americans used to build new cities every time we ran into a river. We stopped building new cities, but they're very important ways to foment economic dynamism and mobility. We've got lots of decommissioned military bases that are not locally zoned, federal land that's not locally zoned. Let's invest in building new cities there, and it’ll open up lots of opportunities.

What other big ideas do you have?

We need to get rid of the primary system. Get rid of the primary system like California did or Alaska did, try to limit the influence of big money like Maine is trying to do. Every state should be pushing for those reforms and Democrats should be leading the charge there. Because what that does is it unlocks the power of the median voter. Right now, of 435 members of Congress, only 35 of them are oriented towards the median voter. The other 400 are oriented towards their primaries.

So if you take all these big ideas together and package them, how would you describe them? How would you explain this worldview to somebody if you didn’t have time to go through each idea step by step?

It's a great question, but I'm gonna reject the debate, actually. I am insistent that right now, we need to be talking about the ideas, the merits of the ideas. I am sure that some people will agree with what I'm putting forward. Some people will disagree. We need to be seeing what excites people. What actually galvanizes the electorate? What do people see as relevant to their lives? What I'm very skeptical of is this top-down approach where the pollsters or the storytelling maestros of Democratic circles say, ‘this message is what works, it’s about fighting for the working class,’ or whatever. The American people can tell.

You can submit a question for a future newsletter here. Please note that casework inquiries for federal agencies must be submitted to my website here. My casework team will respond to these in a timely manner. 

Onwards,

Jake