The Texas congressman represents the future of the GOP, hopefully.
Will Hurd has put serious miles on his car.
Hurd, a freshman Republican congressman, represents Texas’s 23rd congressional district, which wraps itself most of the way around San Antonio, then spreads out westward, covering 29 counties out to the eastern edge of El Paso — an area, in toto, larger than 26 states. The highway speed limit for most of the trip is 80 mph (God bless Texas), and it still takes ten-and-a-half hours to cross. Since taking office in January 2015, Hurd has done more than 400 in-district events. “I ran for office for two reasons,” Hurd says: “To be a leader in national security, and to be the gold standard when it comes to constituent relations.”
In Texas-23, the two go hand-in-hand. San Antonio has one of the largest populations of active and retired military personnel anywhere in the U.S., and the Department of Defense’s largest medical center is at Fort Sam Houston; there’s a reason they call it “Military City.” It is also home to NSA Texas and the largest cybersecurity employment hub outside of Washington, D.C. But not only is Hurd responsible for a good deal of that; he is also the congressman with the single-longest stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border — more than 800 miles of it, dividing up (at least theoretically) the expanse of sun-beaten terrain so friendly to drug smugglers, human traffickers, and any others who might prefer to enter America surreptitiously.
When, in 2006, the Supreme Court struck down the boundaries redrawn during Texas’s much-contested 2003 redistricting, they inadvertently led to the creation of one of the most interesting congressional districts in the nation — a 58,000-square-mile territory that boasts a Silicon Valley-style tech boom alongside old-time ranching operations, pristine Big Bend National Park alongside the Permian Basin fracking boom, wealthy suburban San Antonio alongside border-city barrios. They also created one of the country’s most hotly contested congressional seats. Following the Court’s decision a decade ago, Republican Henry Bonilla lost his bid for an eighth term to Ciro Rodriguez, a Democrat, who served two terms before losing to a Republican, Francisco “Quico” Canseco, who lost after one term to Democrat Pete Gallego, who lost to Hurd in 2014. Gallego has now engineered a rematch, having won the Democratic primary earlier this year.
Since his upset victory in 2014, Democrats have had set their sights on Hurd. He’s exactly what they fear: a young, dynamic, African-American Republican representing a majority-Hispanic district. He’s also not your average politico. Prior to his election, Hurd advised on cybersecurity issues for Crumpton Group LLC, a D.C.-based strategic-consultancy firm founded by Henry Crumpton, a longtime operative in the CIA’s Clandestine Service. It was an obvious fit. After graduating from Texas A&M in 2000 (he was student-body president at the time of the fatal bonfire collapse), he spent the next nine-and-a-half years with the CIA, conducting undercover intelligence-gathering operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He was “the guy in the back alleys at 4 a.m.,” he likes to say. Trying to talk confused congressmen through the distinction between Sunni and Shia Islam prompted Hurd’s transition to a more public form of public service.
Since arriving on Capitol Hill, Hurd has focused on pushing a bloated federal bureaucracy to get serious about cybersecurity. Just how urgent is that need became clear last year, when it was revealed that hackers had infiltrated the federal Office of Personnel Management, absconding with the personnel files of 4.2 million former and current government employees and security-clearance background-investigation information on 21.5 million individuals dating back to the Reagan administration. The full extent of the attack was chronicled in “The OPM Data Breach: How the Government Jeopardized Our National Security for More than a Generation,” a report from the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released last month and co-authored by Hurd.
“Here’s what is so frustrating about the OPM hack,” he says, summarizing the scathing rebuke in the report: “It wasn’t like it was an incredibly sophisticated attack. They leveraged vulnerabilities that were known and should’ve been fixed.”
Hurd has put forward legislation to address these and other failures. Last year, Congress passed his “DHS IT Duplication Reduction Act,” which requires the Department of Homeland Security to supply Congress with a list of information-technology systems it is using, and cut down on overlapping systems — something that’s not sexy, Hurd recognizes, but is important. It also passed, as part of the appropriations omnibus, his “EINSTEIN Act,” which requires all federal agencies to make use of intrusion-detection and -prevention technology known as “EINSTEIN.” He hopes for more sweeping reforms. The House has passed his “Modernizing Government Technology Act” and “State and Local Cyber Protection Act,” and he’s introduced the “MOVE IT Act” (“MOVE” = “Modernizing Outdated and Vulnerable Equipment”). “We have systems for which vendors stopped providing support in 1993, but these technologies are still being used on our networks,” says Hurd. “It’s crazy.”
For Hurd, these policies must be part of a larger reorientation toward the challenges raised by a digital age: “What constitutes a digital act of war? How should we think about that? What is an appropriate response?”
But Hurd is also occupied with real, physical borders — which, as is no secret, are also dangerously porous. For him, it’s a question of allowing law enforcement on the ground to adjust their tactics and procedures as they see fit, but also to think bigger: “We can’t think of the Rio Grande as the actual edge. We have to be thinking further, and working with our compatriots in Mexico.” That, says Hurd, is a crucial step toward, among other things, chastening the 19 criminal organizations coming into the U.S. illegally, disrupting and endangering the lives of those who live near the border. Unsurprisingly, his name is attached to a great deal of legislation related to border security, from his “Enhancing Overseas Traveler Vetting Act” and “Foreign Fighter Review Act,” which have passed the House, to his “Strong Visa Integrity Secures America Act,” introduced in May.
#related#Making constituents aware of these and other accomplishments is part of the reason for those 400-plus in-district events. But Hurd is interested in something more: introducing conservatism to voters, perhaps thousands of them, who otherwise might never encounter it. How to do that? “It starts with showing up in communities where the Republican party hasn’t been,” says Hurd. “You show up and say hello and show that you care.” “You’re not going to do it overnight, it’s a prolonged effort,” but it’s possible. “When they know that you care, they’re open to listening to you and trusting you.”
To people for whom conservative politics is life, Will Hurd is difficult to classify. He’s certainly not part of the “Establishment.” He’s also not a “Tea Partier.” He’s a pro-life, free-trade, national security–focused conservative who wants to broaden conservatism’s coalition.
He is, in other words, what a vibrant, future-oriented conservatism could look like. Is that of interest to the voters of Texas-23? We’ll find out.
— Ian Tuttle is the Thomas L. Rhodes Fellow at the National Review Institute.