Rob Wittman recently wrote a commentary that tells a story about his life, and it’s a good one. He was adopted as an 8-month-old by parents who wanted him. His father came home from World War II and used the GI Bill to get his footing. His mother taught school in Hanover and Richmond. They raised him to believe in service, and he’d tell you his whole career flows from that.
But there’s a difference in our stories that matters. His parents’ example sent him to the Corps of Cadets at Virginia Tech, but he chose not to serve directly in the military after college, instead beginning a career in public health. That’s service, and I mean that. My mother’s example sent me to Navy ROTC at the University of Virginia, then to the cockpit of an F/A-18 for 21 years. Two boys, raised by families the country invested in, who grew up wanting to give something back. The safety net didn’t make me dependent. It made me able to serve. His father got a home loan and a shot at an education because Congress decided that some returning soldiers had earned the country’s investment. His mother built her career in public schools that taxpayers chose to fund. Those programs weren’t open to everyone at first. Black veterans came home from the same war and were often denied equal access to those GI Bill benefits through discriminatory practices in banking, housing and higher education, and it took decades of fighting to extend that promise more fully to every American who had earned it. Wittman and his family received that investment in full. Then he went to Congress and, in my view, started voting to weaken those same opportunities for everyone else.
Consider Education. The last time Congress raised federal loan limits for undergraduates was 2008, months after Wittman arrived in Washington. Eighteen years later the caps haven’t moved an inch. A dependent freshman can still borrow just $5,500 a year, the same as in 2008, and by 2022 those limits had already lost 22% of their purchasing power to inflation according to research by the Urban Institute. Then last year he voted to make it worse. The budget bill he voted for eliminates the loans graduate students relied on to become doctors and nurses, caps what parents can borrow to get their kids through school and replaces existing income-based repayment plans with a new system that advocates for borrowers say will require many low-income borrowers to pay more. This is not how you make education achievable.
Then there are the federal jobs. According to analyses of Bureau of Labor Statistics data, Virginia lost more than 23,000 civilian federal jobs last year. Those cuts hit the families who commute to Dahlgren from the Northern Neck, the workers at Yorktown. Wittman said publicly he was worried about what the cuts meant for Virginia workers and yet the bill to write DOGE’s cuts into law came to the House floor, and he voted for it. It passed 214 to 212. He wrote a guest column expressing concern and then voted for a rescissions package that Republicans said would codify DOGE’s spending cuts into law. Votes matter.
As for his claim of support for healthcare, he voted for cuts to Medicaid and food assistance, cuts that pay for tax breaks at the top. More than 24,000 people in this district are expected to lose health coverage, according to a Joint Economic Committee analysis of CBO data reported by The Times-Dispatch. His constituents — people in Tappahannock, Gloucester and Mechanicsville — may find out what that coverage was worth if those projected losses become reality.
Food assistance is heading down the same road. Virginia had about 867,000 SNAP participants in March 2025. A year later that number had fallen by nearly 14%, and the law Wittman supported cuts the program by another $187 billion over the next decade. Votes matter. Defending his vote, Wittman said the bill’s reforms would make Medicaid “sustainable.” And when a reporter told him analysts estimated a quarter million Virginians could lose coverage, he assured them it wouldn’t happen. Coverage would continue, he said. No interruptions.
So, when Rob Wittman calls these programs unsustainable by repeatedly voting against them, I’d ask him to finish the sentence. Unsustainable for whom? The math worked fine for his father, who came home to a country that kept its word. It worked for his mother, whose classroom existed because her neighbors paid for it. It worked for him. These programs only became unsustainable when tax cuts for the ultrawealthy became more important than families in need, families trying to achieve the American dream, families like mine and his.
I know what these lifelines actually do, because I lived it. My 19-year-old mom raised me by herself, on Medicaid and food stamps. That help gave her room to take night classes learning Fortran instead of a second or third job. She went from community college to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, then NASA, then the Naval Research Laboratory. Nobody handed her that career. She earned every step. The safety net held long enough for her to reach the next rung, and the taxes she paid over the decades that followed repaid the country’s investment many times over. From food stamps to fighter jets. The same math holds for millions of families. It held for the Wittman family.
His story and mine aren’t so different at the start. We were both raised by parents the country decided were worth investing in. Where we differ is what we did with it. I spent 21 years in the Navy and came home believing the promise should hold for the next kid the way it held for me. I believe Rob Wittman has spent nearly two decades in Congress voting for policies that pull that ladder up after him.
Jason Knapp is a retired Navy commander, F/A-18 combat pilot, and Democratic candidate for Congress in Virginia’s 1st District. He can be reached at josh@jasonknappforcongress.com.
