Tom S. P. Perriello

In Congress, Tom will fight to lower costs, clean house on corruption, and restore sanity and common sense to Washington.

Tom's most urgent priority will be to save families money by ending the tariffs that spiked grocery bills, ending the Iran war that’s made gas and fertilizer prices insane, and ending the shady deals bankrupting our country. Virginia families have lost $3,500 out of our pockets, because Rep. John McGuire and this Congress put the powerful ahead of the people. Tom’s priority is not just to reverse the pain caused by this Congress. He will keep fighting until every family can afford healthcare, childcare, housing, and a secure retirement.

Tom will tackle the corruption and the abuse of power spreading like a cancer across Washington. He will fight to ban dark money and insider trading from our politics, and he will not rest until all criminals associated with the Epstein files and its cover-up are arrested. Tom is going to fight to get our taxpayer dollars back from those who have stolen billions from the national treasury to enrich themselves.

Like so many Virginians, Tom is determined to end the chaos and circus coming from Washington. We need leaders who answer to the people, not to dark money groups or party bosses. Our Constitution has survived through a system of checks and balances that must be restored immediately.

Ban stock trading in Congress. Members of Congress and their spouses should hold index funds or a blind trust, nothing else. It is time to ban stock trading by members of Congress and get rid of those who have broken the public trust.

Protect VA services from cuts. Fully fund and fully staff all VA medical facilities and claims processing offices so veterans receive prompt, professional, and complete VA healthcare and benefits, especially in rural areas of Virginia.

Prevent the Death Spiral of Rural Health Services. Tom has already begun fighting for the next Congress to take urgent action to prevent the deep cuts scheduled for January for 2027 that would devastate rural communities. We must reverse the rapid spread of maternal health deserts and primary care options across rural Virginia.

Restore the Voting Rights Act. Pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, so no politician of either party can rig the rules against voters. For decades the Voting Rights Act stood as one of our strongest protections against discrimination at the ballot box. Tom will fight to restore it to full strength.

End the weaponization of the Justice Department. Prosecutors should follow evidence, not enemies lists, no matter which party holds the White House.

But the science is also clear that brain development during the first three years of life is essential. We need a nationwide commitment to fully funding early childhood education. No young family should have to decide whether to have children based on access to affordable childcare, and no child should be denied quality early learning. Too many young children, particularly the economically disadvantaged, are falling behind in school and in life. Our country, our businesses, and our families will realize extraordinary returns on such an investment. State proficiency scores in reading, math, and core subjects will rise, regardless of a child’s race or economic background, young parents can go to work, young adults can build a career, local businesses can recruit and retain quality employees, and the economy can continue to grow.

Make AI and tech companies liable for harm to kids. When a technology company builds a product that hurts a child, they should pay the price. Rules should make clear their legal obligation to consider protection of children in their designs and applications.

Every child deserves the chance to reach their full potential. It is essential for us to invest in quality schools and quality teachers, expanding beyond the K-12 years to fit the realities of the modern economy. We should build a free, hassle-free P-14 system: affordable quality childcare, universal pre-K, world class public schools and two debt-free years of public community college, trade school, or apprenticeship for every kid, regardless of zip code or family income. covering at least one year of pre-k and two years of career certification, community college or university education.

Match the national minimum wage to Virginia’s. Americans working full-time should earn enough to pay for their rent, healthcare, groceries, and a car that runs.

Every American deserves access to quality, affordable health care. But more and more families across our region face delays, denials of coverage, and long, expensive drives to find the nearest doctor. We cannot let insurance companies keep rationing care, driving up costs, and preventing doctors and nurses from providing the care they have trained their whole lives to provide, because insurance lobbyists paid this Congress to add on layer after layer of red tape and pre-authorizations. We need a system that rewards healthcare providers for keeping us healthy, and reverses the slow death of rural healthcare clinics, hospitals, and services.

Make lowering family costs an urgent congressional priority.

• Focus on health care, child care, housing, and retirement security.

End the broad tariff policies the campaign says are raising grocery and household costs.

• Preserve room for targeted strategic tariffs without continuing a general trade war.

Vote on the first day in Congress to end U.S. participation in the war with Iran.

• Treat the conflict as an unnecessary and costly war of choice.

Ban undisclosed political spending in federal elections.

• Make people and organizations financing persuasion publicly identifiable.

Limit members of Congress and their spouses to diversified index funds or blind trusts.

• Remove opportunities to trade on official information.

Restore the constitutional checks and balances the campaign says have eroded in Washington.

• Make public accountability more important than party leadership.

Raise the national minimum wage to Virginia's level.

• Set full-time work on a path toward meeting basic household costs.

Reduce health-care costs and expand affordable coverage options that are not tied to a job.

• Reduce the portion of compensation absorbed by employer health premiums.

Make community college and trade school tuition-free.

• Build additional paths into family-supporting careers.

Prosecute employers that undercount hours, misclassify workers, or withhold earned overtime.

• Enforce existing pay rights.

Pass the Protecting the Right to Organize Act and increase penalties for retaliation against organizing workers.

• Protect collective action and bargaining rights.

Close offshore and other tax loopholes and require wealthy people and corporations to pay the taxes they owe and a fair share.

• Apply comparable compliance standards to wages and investment income.

Use federal incentives to reward communities that remove zoning and permitting barriers to starter homes.

• Increase supply where demand has outpaced construction.

Invest federal funds in building and maintaining homes affordable to lower-income families, especially in rural areas.

• Support both new supply and preservation.

Expand down-payment assistance and first-time-homebuyer programs.

• Help families buy homes in their own communities.

Crack down on private-equity firms and corporate landlords buying single-family homes in bulk for marked-up rent.

• Protect starter-home supply for resident buyers.

Restore and expand temporary rental assistance and permanent housing-first programs.

• Make homelessness rare, brief, and non-recurring.

Oppose benefit cuts and privatization of Social Security and Medicare.

• Preserve benefits workers paid for throughout their careers.

Reduce the utility bills, prescription costs, and property-tax pressures that fall heavily on fixed-income seniors.

• Keep broader affordability policy attentive to fixed incomes.

Invest in home- and community-based services that let older adults remain in their communities.

• Reduce avoidable institutional placement.

Reverse scheduled federal funding cuts that threaten rural hospitals, clinics, maternity care, and primary care.

• Act before the 2027 funding cliff.

Protect state and local authority to limit or prohibit data-center development.

• Reject federal preemption of local land-use and consumer safeguards.

Require data-center owners to cover the full cost of their facilities, transmission, and generation infrastructure.

• Prevent ratepayers from subsidizing industrial expansion.

Condition new or expanded data centers on clean power or creation of equivalent clean generation on the grid.

• Pair digital growth with added clean supply.

Restore programs that help farmers earn revenue from on-farm clean-energy production.

• Let farms sell useful power back to the grid.

Expand access to agricultural credit, crop insurance, and disaster assistance.

• Prevent one bad season from ending a family operation.

Open land and credit opportunities to young and first-generation farmers.

• Reduce entry barriers created by rising land costs.

Allow farmers to repair their own machinery or use an independent mechanic without manufacturer software locks.

• Protect ownership rights after purchase.

Stop postal closures and service reductions that delay rural prescriptions, checks, and ballots.

• Preserve dependable universal service.

Complete last-mile broadband and fund rural roads and water systems.

• Treat connectivity and basic infrastructure as foundations of rural economic life.

Create federal AI guardrails and liability standards while preserving stronger state protections unless federal law replaces them.

• Address catastrophic, consumer, and civil-rights risks.

Rewrite federal tax and health-care incentives so companies benefit from hiring and paying people rather than automating them away.

• Give workers a seat in AI transition policy.

Require age limits, clear-use warnings, and company liability for reasonably foreseeable harms to children from AI products.

• Put the compliance burden on product designers and sellers.

Require disclosure when political advertising uses AI and impose penalties when platforms fail to remove deceptive candidate impersonations quickly.

• Protect voters from synthetic-media deception.

Prohibit fully automated denial of benefits, sentencing, medical care, or lethal decisions and require an accountable person for government actions.

• Keep consequential public power under human responsibility.

Fully fund Head Start and make free pre-kindergarten available to every family.

• Improve training and compensation for early educators.

Cap what families pay for child care relative to household income.

• Prevent care costs from forcing parents out of the workforce.

Expand the supply of licensed rural child-care providers and pay child-care workers a living wage.

• Address both access and workforce retention.

Build a P-14 public-education pathway that includes pre-K and two debt-free years of community college, trade school, or apprenticeship.

• Make support available regardless of ZIP code or family income.

Expand apprenticeship and technical-education programs so a four-year degree is not the only route to a good-paying job.

• Align education with multiple career paths.

Defend the Department of Education's role in equal access and support for students with delays and disabilities.

• Maintain federal civil-rights and inclusion safeguards.

Lower student borrowing costs and expand loan-relief options.

• Reduce the effect of debt on homeownership and family formation.

Create a legal duty for technology companies to consider child safety and liability when their products cause harm.

• Cover AI, apps, chatbots, and related platforms.

Support age-appropriate technology limits and local phone-free classroom policies.

• Keep adult-oriented products away from children.

Require child-safety design standards for apps, chatbots, and other technology products.

• Put safety ahead of engagement-maximizing design.

Hold platforms responsible for harmful amplification and create accessible recourse for targeted children and parents.

• Address continuous, large-scale online bullying.

Support tools that let parents understand app behavior, identify worthwhile content, and enforce limits platforms cannot override.

• Give families practical control rather than relying solely on company settings.

Do not preempt state child-safety and AI laws unless a stronger national liability and guardrail system replaces them.

• Preserve both red- and blue-state protections.

Fully fund units dedicated to internet crimes against children and human trafficking.

• Strengthen local, state, and federal investigation capacity.

Support release of the Epstein files and prosecution of people implicated by evidence in crimes or concealment.

• Follow admissible evidence rather than partisan protection.

Pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and restore the Voting Rights Act's protections against discriminatory election rules.

• Apply the protections regardless of which party controls a jurisdiction.

Treat threats against poll workers and registrars as crimes and enforce protections for election administrators.

• Protect the people responsible for running elections.

Require federal prosecutors to follow evidence rather than political enemies lists regardless of the party in power.

• Restore neutral law enforcement.

Limit license-plate readers, facial recognition, and data-broker access and require warrants before agencies buy or search location records.

• Apply constitutional process to commercially available data.

Codify nationwide access to contraception, abortion, and fertility care.

• Make basic reproductive rights independent of state residence.

Protect health records and family medical decisions from government interference.

• Keep clinical decisions between patients, families, and doctors.

Protect parents' authority to make medical decisions with and for transgender children.

• Reject government punishment based on family identity or belief.

Ban warrantless immigration raids, arrests at courthouses, schools, and churches, racial profiling, and detention without a fair hearing.

• Create accountability when agents violate civil liberties.

Invest in border officers, immigration judges, and technology and clear the case backlog.

• Shift resources from chaotic enforcement to lawful border security.

Fully fund and staff VA medical facilities and claims offices, including rural services.

• Deliver prompt, complete health care and benefits.

Block breakup or privatization of the Department of Veterans Affairs and fund it to provide coordinated care directly.

• Preserve the campaign's stated quality and cost advantages.

Expand education, job training, hiring, health-care, and benefit support for veterans moving into civilian life.

• Make the service-to-civilian transition more seamless.

Strengthen safeguards against people and companies trying to steal veterans' disability, education, retirement, or other benefits.

• Target fraud against earned benefits.

Provide strong congressional casework for Fifth District residents dealing with the VA.

• Make the district office an accessible problem-solving channel.

Use hearings, subpoenas, and other congressional authority to block the Valley Link transmission project.

• Require executives to explain the project's property and ratepayer impacts under oath.

Prevent use of eminent domain to take family land for privately profitable data-center transmission lines.

• Protect rural landowners from uncompensated project burdens.

Use congressional oversight to require the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and related agencies to act transparently in the public interest.

• Focus federal review on ratepayers and host communities.

Fund inspectors general and auditors, prosecute theft from the public, and aggressively recover ill-gotten gains.

• Make anti-corruption enforcement financially consequential.

Extend the cooling-off ban that prevents former officials from immediately becoming paid lobbyists.

• Reduce cashing in on recent public service.

Require major federal-election spenders and paid social-media influencers to disclose their high-dollar funding sources.

• Make large-scale political persuasion traceable.

Prohibit regulated utilities from billing ratepayers for lobbying campaigns.

• Keep political spending out of customer utility charges.

Support rural primary care with obstetric services, telehealth, mobile clinics, added residency slots, and clinician loan repayment.

• Rebuild maternity and primary-care access where patients live.

Reinstate Affordable Care Act tax credits that reduce working-family marketplace premiums.

• Reverse the campaign's cited 2026 premium increase.

Give family caregivers financial support and flexibility to care for children with disabilities, chronically ill adults, and older relatives at home.

• Help families avoid unwanted institutional care.