Economy

I'm a proud product of public schools. My kids deserve the same shot I got and right now, they're not getting it. Here's how we get back on track:

• Public dollars belong in public schools. No more sending tax money to private schools that can turn your child away.
• Fund every public school in America at the same level. Your zip code shouldn't decide your child's future.
• Better pay for teachers and support staff. Teachers are leaving for better pay one state over.
• Summer programs, so working parents have somewhere reliable to send their kids and children don't lose ground over the summer break.
• Pay for it with a tax on fortunes over $50 million, about 1 in 1500 households. Not a tax on your paycheck. Not a tax on your groceries.

This year, Missouri legislators filed 58 bills aimed at the LGBTQ+ community. One passed. That's not a reason to relax. It's a description of the cost. It means parents and doctors and teenagers drove to Jefferson City and sat through six-hour hearings to hold a line they'll have to hold again next January — and the January after that. And, when a government decides one group's care is open for debate, it rarely stops there. The privacy and healthcare protections that cover one community are the same ones that cover all communities. Protecting privacy and access starts with:
 

• 988 — This crisis line for LGBTQ+ kids sat funded and switched off. Congress appropriated $33.1 million and directed HHS to restore it. A year later, kids call and still get nothing. Congress already paid for it. I'd make them turn it on. 
• Telehealth:  For much of rural Missouri, the nearest specialist is a half-day away.
  In a small town, it's the whole county. In the suburbs, it's your mom's coworker at the front desk. Somebody always sees you walk in — and often it's into an office where nobody's done this before. Telehealth fixes both. Whether a video visit gets covered by insurance is up to Congress—right now they renew it in short stretches, so it's always about to run out. I'd make it permanent. 
• Providers — Missouri has made practicing here a legal risk, and doctors are leaving.
  Congress can't rewrite a state's licensing law, and I won't pretend otherwise. What it can do is fund the pipeline — loan repayment for physicians who commit to underserved Missouri counties — so the places losing doctors have a way to replace them. 

None of these three things helps only one group. A crisis line that answers, a specialist within reach, a doctor who stays — that's what a farmer in Vernon County needs, and what a family in Kansas City needs when the clinic is close by but is booked three months out. Rural or urban, it's the same shortage wearing different clothes. Fix it where it's hardest and you've fixed it for everyone. And, as a member of Congress, I will ensure every community has a seat at the table because policy should be shaped by people with lived experience, not imposed by those unfamiliar with the challenges they face. 

I was raised in rural Missouri. I live in Kansas City now. In this district, that isn't a contradiction — that's the map. Farmers here are working a year when the market is running below the price floor Congress set. That’s not something you out-work. What needs work: 

• The Farm Bill. The last one expired in 2023, and everything since has been patchwork. I'd protect crop insurance and stop letting the same things get dropped every time: farm loans, conservation, ag research, and the beginning farmer programs that decide whether there's anybody here to farm in twenty years. 
• Exports. In 2025, China stopped buying American soybeans — not slowed, stopped, not a single bushel for three months — and spent that stretch deepening its ties to Brazil and Argentina. Orders have resumed, but the relationships China built in the meantime didn't disappear when we came back. Soybeans are the extreme case. That's exactly why they're the warning.  
  
  I’d fund the programs that go find buyers in the markets we've been ignoring. That won't replace a customer the size of China, and I won't pretend it will — but an operation with six buyers survives losing one, and an operation with two, doesn't. Take the input side seriously, because a bad price year is survivable and a bad price year with fertilizer, fuel, and equipment all up is what ends a farm. And put tariffs back in front of Congress. You can think the tariffs were worth it, but I still think farmers should have gotten a vote before their biggest customer walked. 
• Broadband. Missouri has the third-largest federal broadband allocation in the country, and most of it still isn't building anything. Meanwhile, expanding reliable rural broadband infrastructure is what decides whether you can market grain or file with FSA. I’d put these allocated funds to work. 

Two problems that look opposite but aren't: what it costs to build a house or access reliable childcare is increasingly out of reach for people. And where there's demand, it shows up as a price we can't meet or a housing and childcare desert. Either way, a family that works here can't live here. 

I’ve spent my career in design, and I know that a plan only gets built if it has the people and funds to build it. Congress just passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act with support from both parties. Passing it was the easier part. Now comes the work of making sure every town, county, and provider in this district has help getting an application in the door, the money follows and we keep tracking long after the ribbon-cuttings are over. That's the work I do every day, and it's the work I'll do for this district. Where I'll focus: 

• Follow-through not headlines. I’ll focus on making sure the new law actually reaches this district — the planning grants that connect housing to transportation, pre-approved designs for ADUs and starter homes, and rural housing reform.  
• Childcare for every child under five. Childcare is infrastructure, not a personal problem to solve alone at 5 a.m. Every family should be able to find and afford care from the time their leave runs out until the day their child starts kindergarten — the years when the bill is highest and the options are thinnest. That means bringing down what families pay while helping childcare centers stay open, because a center that can't make payroll or keep staff closes even if there's a waiting list. Home-based providers count too. In much of this district they aren't part of the childcare system — they are the childcare system. 
• No more deserts. Build housing and childcare together. The house is here, the childcare opening is somewhere else, and a parent's schedule has to absorb the difference. A home you can afford isn't affordable if the nearest childcare is forty minutes the wrong way. I'll work to align housing and childcare funding, so they stop being planned in separate rooms. 

I know something about how a building gets sited. You hold hearings. You tell the neighbors. You show your work. What happened here was the opposite: a detention facility pushed toward our communities; without the conversation any project of that size is supposed to have. This isn’t a disagreement about immigration. It’s a disagreement about whether the people who live here get a say in what gets built here.
How I’ll take action: 

• Go see the facilities myself and let others see them too. Members of Congress can visit detention facilities. I'll go, report back in writing, and go again. I'll also push for facilities to be government-run and open to independent monitors. Nothing changes in a place nobody is allowed to look at. 
• Put the standards in writing. Real training and professional standards for everyone carrying a badge in immigration enforcement, independent audits, and misconduct prosecuted. Bring in mental health professionals and community organizations, because de-escalation is a skill, not a slogan.  
• Vote for a path and keep voting for it. Citizenship for workers and families. Protection for DACA recipients. Hearings in months, not years, with families kept together. Targeted humane and ethical enforcement and modern technology at the border. I don't expect that on my first day. I expect to be there when it passes.
   

I believe we can secure our border, treat people with decency, and protect civil rights all at once. We've been told for years we have to pick. We don't.