Interview with Congressman Don Beyer
Interviewed by Keshav Kannepalli, August 2026
Don Beyer Timeline of Major Events:
1985 (Age 35): Became Northern Virginia Coordinator for Gerald Baliles's Campaign for Governor
1986 (Age 36): Gov. Baliles appointed Beyer to Commonwealth Transportation Board
1989, 1990 - 1998 (Age 39, 40-48): Elected Lt. Governor of Virginia, Served two terms at Lt. Governor
2009 (Age 59): Appointed by Obama as ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein & served
2014 (Age 64): Won First Democratic Primary for VA-08
2015-2019 (60s): Served on Science, Space, and Technology & Natural Resources Committees
2019 (Age 69): Joined House Ways and Means Committee
First Virginia democrat on the committee in 20+ years
2020 - 2022 (70s): Became Chair of the Joint Economic Committee of 117th Congress
First Democrat chair since 2013
Focused on AI and emerging technology policies, leadership in Congressional AI Caucus
Went back to school at George Mason University, taking CS coursework toward a masters degree in Machine Learning
Laws Passed
Better Information Act (2020)
CHIPS and Science Act (2022)
2023: Became Vice Chair of the bipartisan Congressional AI Caucus
Co-sponsored Fusion Energy Act, passed under Biden
2024: Served on Bipartisan AI Task Force
2026: Reintroduced the AI Environmental Impacts Act
Legislation would require reporting and studying of AI data centers’ environmental and energy impacts
You may watch the interview here.
Keshav: Today, I’m joined by Congressman Don Beyer of Virginia’s 8th Congressional District, who has served in Congress since 2015. Before entering Congress, he served as Virginia’s Lieutenant Governor and as the U.S. ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein. In this conversation, we will discuss his path into public service, his experiences in congress, his insights on opportunities for today’s youth, and his perspectives on technology and American politics.
Keshav: Good morning Mr. Beyer, it's great to meet you. And thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today.
Rep. Beyer: Absolutely!
Keshav: And I just want to say congrats on winning your seventh Democratic nomination, second primary by almost 70%. That's amazing.
Rep. Beyer: Yeah, it was. It was harder than most. Being 76 years old, there's a significant anti-incumbent wave out there right now. And a lot of ageism too, which is part of that. Based on the opponents I had, they did really well. If I'd had somebody who had been a serious player in the community already, I'd have been in real trouble.
Keshav: I saw a poll earlier today [aggregated by CNN’s Harry Enten] that found that around 57% of voters think that the Democratic Party is becoming a little bit too liberal. What's your view on that?
Rep. Beyer: I think almost anything that describes the Democratic Party as the party fundamentally misunderstands it. There's no central governing body that decides how everybody's going to be. Even in the DCCC (Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee), which is the house political arm, it's still the Wild West. We're really trying to support the candidates that are in trouble, the incumbents that are in trouble, or the challengers that we think can win. But the political philosophies of those people are across the board. You have a very broad range.
Rep. Beyer: The people who make comments like that look at New York City and this democratic socialist [Zohran Mamdani] that won, or maybe to a lesser extent, the woman that knocked off Diana DeGette [Melat Kiros] in Denver, again, democratic socialist. But then they ignore the other 200+ Democratic seats that are not like that. And, in fact, Keshav, one interesting thing is that when I got there 12 years ago, the New Democratic Coalition, which was, in theory, the moderates—they're pro-trade, pro-business, and pro-innovation. I’m pretty liberal, but still I understand that you need economic growth to be able to pay for all the things that we liberals want to do. [The New Democratic Coalition] had like 35 people in it. Now it has about 130 in it! At that point [118th congress, 2023-2025], the Progressive Caucus, the CPC, had more than 100, and it's down to about 80, and maybe shrinking some more. So the balance within the Democratic committees actually shifted, I think, a lot more towards the middle.
Rep. Beyer: On the other hand, before I got there in 2008—the landslide year was 2010 when we lost 65 Democratic seats right after passing the Affordable Care Act and a House vote on the Waxman-Markey Bill (American Clean Energy and Security Act), which was the big environmental bill—there were 56 members of the Blue Dogs, and the Blue Dogs are the conservative Democrats. So you had anti-choice, anti-abortion, anti-tax, and pro-gun Democrats—a lot of those Democrats there. They virtually disappeared. There's a handful right now, maybe five or six. So in that sense, it's moved left. But, I actually say, if you step back far enough over a 25-year period of time, it's really moved very much to the middle.
Keshav: I would agree with that. I want to take a step back and start chronologically from your childhood to right now. I saw that you grew up in D.C. as the son of a U.S. Lieutenant Colonel. How did your upbringing in your youth shape your interest in public service?
Rep. Beyer: Had more to do with my grandparents than with my mom and dad. Three of my four grandparents were New Dealers. The most important one was my grandmother, Clara Mortenson-Beyer. And if you Google on her, she comes up really quickly. She was teaching at Bryn Mawr and then Columbia and was recruited to Washington in 1917 by Felix Frankfurter, who ran the minimum wage board, and ended up with a 50-year career in the federal government. She was Frances Perkins' right hand for the 12 years Frances was labor secretary. So my grandmother stood up the Bureau of Labor Standards in 1933.
Rep. Beyer: Her husband [Otto Sternoff Beyer Jr.] was a labor negotiator and was the second chair of the National Mediation Board, ran transportation during World War II at the Department of War. My other grandfather [H. Stewart McDonald Jr.] quit Wall Street during the Depression and came down and worked for the Department of Interior. So, I was raised basically in a—not a campaign environment—but a public service environment where all the dinner stories were about public service-type things.
Rep. Beyer: And, I was also Catholic in Washington, D.C., in a little Catholic school where Robert Kennedy's kids all went to school with me. Kathleen was a year behind, and Joe was two years behind. When John F. Kennedy was elected in 1960, it was like the biggest thing happening in our community! So I was always a Democrat, but that really locked it in.
Keshav: Earlier you talked about a lot of Democrats shifting more moderate in your view. I know one of the big things you talked about was being pro-business [and anti-tax] for those Democrats. You expanded your father's auto business in your 30s. How did that shift to—I know you talked about your family being interested in public service from an early age—but when was your first moment when you realized, “I will do politics”?
Rep. Beyer: I think when I was 10. In fact, when I went off to college, one of the attractions of Williams College at that time was it had a major called political economics, which was the combination of a political science major and an economics major. I ended up just doing economics, but that was what attracted me to it. Even all the time I was selling cars and fixing cars, I was still reading everything I could about political life.
Rep. Beyer: And interestingly, having a car business—I was general manager when I was 28—gave me the flexibility to actually go volunteer on political campaigns. Because when you're at the top of the work pyramid, you actually have more free time in the sense that there's still a mechanic back there fixing cars and still a salesman back there selling cars when I can run off at five o'clock in the afternoon and volunteer on a campaign. It actually worked out very, very well.
Rep. Beyer: If I'd gone to law school, medical school, or econ grad school—all of which had been tracks I was on—it would have been much more difficult to find the time and also the elevation to be successful in grassroots politics. The nice part about the dealership was it was called Don Beyer Volvo, and we did a lot of advertising every year. So, I had all kinds of name recognition way before I was a political person.
Rep. Beyer: No one knew what I looked like or who I was, but they knew the name.
[Both Laugh.]
Keshav: I saw that you were the Northern Virginia coordinator for Gerald Baliles' campaign for governor [in 1985]. Was there anything that inspired you to campaign for him specifically?
Rep. Beyer: Well, my first campaign—that's a great question. No one's ever asked me that before, either. Two years before, I volunteered on the campaign for Myra Lesner, who's still alive, 92 years old, living in Southern California. It was the most fun I'd ever had. He lost by less than 2% to an incumbent who went on to serve 32 more years. But one of the guys on the campaign was this guy named Darrell Martin from Southwest Virginia, who was my version of Yoda. He knew so much. He had to have been 800 years old. And he sort of looked like Yoda too.
[Both Smile.]
Rep. Beyer: And so two years later, he had run Gerald Baliles' campaign for attorney general in '81. He came to me in November of '84 and said, “Hey, I want you to come meet the attorney general.” And so he set up a lunch, which I was very flattered by. And the attorney general said, “Will you help me on my campaign?” I said, “Sure, it'd be great.” They paired me with another woman as the Northern Virginia coordinators. She promptly quit because she got a better job. And so it was just me.
Rep. Beyer: I just threw heart and soul into it. We took the mechanics' lunchroom and turned it into the campaign headquarters. I spent way too much money. I hired field teams. We just—it became a whole life commitment, and he won, which was very cool.
Rep. Beyer: In fact, there's a great line from a Kurt Vonnegut novel, Jailbird (1979), about this guy who goes from being a senior White House aide to being in prison. He's lying in the prison bed. He's lost his wife, he's lost his job, he's lost his reputation. But he says, “But at least I quit smoking.” And after Jerry Baliles got elected, I thought, no matter what else that happens in my life, I can say, “At least I helped elect a governor.”
[Both Laugh.]
Keshav: That's an incredible story. I'm just going to fast-forward to your time as Virginia's Lieutenant Governor. You were a Lieutenant Governor for eight years. I found two notable accomplishments: you co-founded the Northern Virginia Technology Council, and then you chaired the Virginia Economic Recovery Commission to advance pro-business reform to advance high-tech research. It seems that you got really interested in technology during your time as Lieutenant Governor. Was there anything that struck you about the importance of technology in modern society?
Rep. Beyer: Well, I've always been really interested in it. My little dealership had the second dealership website in the country. The first one was in Seattle that served Microsoft. I think we're back on December 1, 1975—I'm not good with many things, but I can remember dates really well—we took the dealership accounting from pencil to online. It was one of those deals where you type in your one entry and you'd hit enter and wait five minutes while it went all the way to the computer in Ohio and then came back again.
Rep. Beyer: I've always been an early adopter. What I discovered in 1990 when I was in my first year as Lieutenant Governor was that because we had AOL (America Online), and even more importantly, MCI Communications and WorldCom were headquartered right there in Northern Virginia in Loudoun County. All this new stuff with this thing called the internet, way before the World Wide Web, was coming through Northern Virginia.
Rep. Beyer: A friend suggested that Pittsburgh, in the crisis after the steel and the coal had gone down, had created their own technology council. So, I decided to do the same thing and found two tech friends that were actually in the business. We went around and signed everybody up and raised a little bit of money. And it has 500 member [companies] right now. It's still thriving all these years later. It's a very powerful force in Northern Virginia.
Rep. Beyer: You know—sometimes you don’t know what’s going to happen. You just have to go do it!
Keshav: Wow. That's inspiring. I want to take a step back on that topic. We’re going to talk more about technology during your time as Representative. I just want to go straight to you being the ambassador for Switzerland and Liechtenstein, appointed by Obama. You received the Thomas Jefferson Award in 2012. What would you say was your most memorable moment during those four years as ambassador?
Rep. Beyer: The most memorable thing was that before I went overseas as ambassador, I did like 65 individual meetings at the Pentagon, CIA, and a lot of different divisions in the State Department, trying to just learn what my job was. One of the most fascinating stories was with the guy who was in charge of emptying Guantanamo [Daniel Fried]. He called it an impossible task. At that point, we had a couple hundred people in Guantanamo.
Rep. Beyer: I got to Switzerland. Two of the people in Guantanamo were Uyghur brothers from China, [Arkin Mahmud and Bahtiyar Mahmud]. One had some serious mental issues. He fled China to go to Afghanistan and learn how to be a terrorist. His mother sent his brother right after him to pick him up and take him back. In Afghanistan at that time, we were paying $500 to locals who would turn in would-be terrorists [through the U.S. Department of War Rewards Program]. So a lot of people were getting turned in that weren't part of the [terrorist] community, or family enemies were getting turned in. There were a lot of people that were turned in that weren't actually terrorists.
Rep. Beyer: Well, these guys got turned in right away, and they were in Guantanamo, and the Bush administration early on decided they were not in fact terrorists, but they couldn't send them back to China because they'd be executed. China was very much in a suppression-of-the-Uyghurs stage. No other country would take them because China would threaten them with economic sanctions if they took them.
Rep. Beyer: We had Frank Wolf, the guy that my guy [Myra Lesner] lost to in 1982, had passed a law, [Keep Terrorists Out of America Act] saying no Guantanamo people could be settled in the United States. So a little canton next to mine called the Canton of Jura, only 35,000 people, got their cantonal board to agree to take these two Uyghur brothers and embarrassed the Swiss government into saying, “Well, they're going to do it. I guess we have to say yes.” So, they flew them in in the middle of the night so nobody could take pictures of the airplane. They ended up settling there, getting Swiss passports, Swiss girlfriends, and learning French—all that stuff.
Rep. Beyer: I heard Bill Clinton once, a long time ago when he was governor, say that ultimately we make things better one life at a time.
Keshav: That's so true.
Rep. Beyer: So basically saving these two young men was the highlight for me, I guess.
Keshav: I'm going to move on to you being elected Representative of Virginia's 8th District in 2014. You won by a lot—I think that was your first primary. And then this year (2028) was your second primary. So in Congress, you spent a lot of time on various committees—many times as a leader: you spent time on Natural Resources; Science, Space, and Technology; and Ways and Means Committees.
Keshav: You were the first Virginia Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee in 20 years. Then you were also the first Democratic chair of the Joint Economic Committee since 2013. So, all in all, you've had a lot of leadership experience in Congress. What do you think is one thing that you've learned as a leader in Congress about trying to get things done?
Rep. Beyer: That so much of it comes down to relationships. You can have a lot of good ideas. In fact, I won't bore you, but here are my three pages of stuff that I've already introduced—pending Legislation.
Rep. Beyer: And that I'm trying to get ready for the next Congress when I hope we'll be in the majority. You can have a lot of ideas, you can put in a lot of legislation, but none of it's going to get passed unless you can build a relationship with the committee chairs, with enough of your colleagues to co-sponsor it, and ultimately with leadership who will agree to put the bill on the floor.
Rep. Beyer: Virtually none of these have come to fruition in the last three years because we've had Mike Johnson as the Speaker and I don't have any relationship with Mike Johnson and he’s probably impossible to get to. So, it is very difficult to get a Democratic bill on the floor. But even then, even if we take back the House, my number one bill here is actually not my bill, it's Zoe Lofgren's, but it's $10 billion in fusion research, a federal investment in that, that will serve every fusion company in the world.
Rep. Beyer: I'm spending so much time right now making sure that our relationships with Hakeem Jeffries and Katherine Clark, who will be number two, and Pete Aguilar, who will be the Democratic Whip, and Zoe, who is gonna be chair of the Science Committee, that everybody's on board and excited about this and sees the difference it'll make. This is also why it's so difficult for people in the first couple of years there to have any substantive difference because relationships are built on trust and trust is only earned over time.
Keshav: I would definitely agree with that statement. What do you think is one misconception that the general public has about people like you in Congress?
Rep. Beyer: Let me give you two. One is that it's an ugly place where people are all fighting with each other and hate each other. It's not. It's actually a very friendly place. I have a hundred, at least a hundred Republican friends. I'm OCD, so I keep a spreadsheet—virtually every Democrat, with two or three exceptions, only because they're misanthropes, are good friends. And friends for life.
Rep. Beyer: We often vote differently, but in the middle of a Ways and Means hearing, we'll go off to this little lunch room and sit around and eat and talk. And it's incredibly like brothers and sisters. So much of the polarization comes from the fact that our districts, like my district—so I won the primary, and I'm not really worried about the general—it's a lay down. When you get 80 or 90 percent, some big number districts. Then it becomes very difficult to wander too far in my [district]. Even though there are probably more centrist positions I'd be willing to take, I don't take them because it's not worth the political risk, you know. I try not to do anything that I wouldn't agree with.
Rep. Beyer: But the other deal is that there's a perception that members of Congress are incredibly privileged somehow financially. The last raise was 2008. So most people can make a lot more money doing something other than Congress. My health insurance is $2,100 a month, because we're forced to be on the exchange.
Rep. Beyer: I have an aunt who writes to me once a year about all the incredible benefits I get. Like I get my salary for life. No, no. In fact, the pension scheme is 1% for every year that you work. So if I retired today, I'd get 12% of my salary. And I'm contributing $638 a month to pay for that 1%. I'm not saying it's a sacrifice because at $174,000, that's still way more than the average American makes. And, I own my own car, I pay for my own gas, and I drive myself everywhere. It's not a cushy job. And the hours are very long. I work seven days a week. Most members of Congress do.
Rep. Beyer: You figure you only hear for a finite period of time. You have to do everything you possibly can. I saw one study once that said members of Congress in their district work 80 hours a week. When they're in Washington, they only work 60 hours. And that pretty much matches my experience.
Keshav: I think regardless of how much money you make, I think you've inspired so many people. You've done so much. You're so dedicated. So I just want to thank you for that.
Keshav: I know you've spent a lot on technology in congress. After 2020, you've become increasingly involved in technology and its impacts on the environment. You were the Congressional AI Caucus leader and on the AI Task Force. You even went to George Mason University to get a master's degree in machine learning at 72 years old! What inspired you to do that? Why machine learning? Why computer science?
Rep. Beyer: That's what I'm doing this morning. I'm on my next graduate course right now; it’s all math. It's really quite interesting, quite fun. Yeah, well, machine learning goes back many, many years to a speech I read by the guy who used to be on 60 Minutes, Eric Sevareid. He just said in 1977 that we have so much information, we can't see the causal connections or even the non-causal, the correlations within all the data that we have.
Rep. Beyer: And as this evolved over the years, I'm fascinated by the throwaway stat that we generated more information last year than the first 2,000 years in the modern era. So machine learning—I took one little Coursera course a couple of years ago from Stanford where we could do math about gradient descent. And it's just so cool how this works. You can use math to figure out the connections in massive sets of data.
Rep. Beyer: But then I got to—you needed to be able to code, you need linear algebra. I didn't know how to do either one! So I had to quit the course. Starting at George Mason, I've been able to get my linear algebra good; doing C, Java, and Python; and now doing graduate work. So hopefully I'm in a much better position to lead the AI Caucus and do meaningful AI legislation and hopefully have an impact on the technology evolution of our world.
Keshav: You talked about how your time at George Mason helped you pass major legislation. I look at the Better Information Act (2020) [incorporated in the Corporate Transparency Act], the CHIPS and Science Act (2022), and then the Fusion Energy Act (2024) that passed under Biden. So how would you say your graduate work at George Mason helped you pass these legislation bills?
Rep. Beyer: I wish I could say the stuff I learned in class was directly relevant. I think the simple truth is that my undergraduate education—which is probably not a lot better than what you're doing right now—in fact, when I was taking Python, I realized most of the young people around me had taken it in high school and had gotten fours and fives on their AP computer sciences and were way better coders than I was.
Rep. Beyer: What it did was it got me in the room. That, by virtue of being a 70+ year-old person taking computer science classes, people said, “Oh yeah, he'd be a good chair of the AI Caucus. You should be on the Science Committee.”
Rep. Beyer: Sam Altman came in once, before ChatGPT-3 rolled out, opened his laptop on my desk and showed me some cool things. That doesn't happen anymore, by the way, but so it got me in the room. And that's the big part.
Keshav: That’s so cool, regardless. I want to focus more on AI and its environmental impacts, with your recent bill with Senator Markey. I know you showed me three pages of all the legislation you want to introduce. I saw that recently you reintroduced the AI Environmental Impacts Act. In summary, this legislation requires the reporting and studying of AI data centers' environmental and energy impacts. How can youth or I or anyone help pass this legislation?
Rep. Beyer: A couple of different ways. Number one is social media of any kind. That's how people learn right now. It's Instagram and Twitter and X—all those different media. When I was your age, we all watched the evening news and looked forward to the newspaper coming, and all that's not irrelevant now, but far, far less relevant now.
Rep. Beyer: The second thing is helping elect good people. You're in Ohio, and I'm not being partisan, there are good Republicans too. Find the people that you like and do what you can. Young people, as you know, have a much lower voting participation rate, which is sad. And one of the reasons why something like two-thirds of the federal budget is spent on people over the age of 60 or over 65—Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. You guys have ridiculously expensive college educations, underfunded schools, and underfunded teachers—worst of all.
Rep. Beyer: So the more engaged you are, the better off you can be. And you don't have to be old. I won't bore you with stories, but two of my most important political volunteers over the years were 17 years old—both of them. Part of the reason I got nominated to Lieutenant Governor back in '89 was that those two young men won two different counties for me in Virginia over much older people. One of them being a sitting state senator who was very pissed off by it.
[Both Laugh.]
Keshav: How do you think youth should approach representatives who are not aligned with their political views, but they still want to approach them with an idea or suggestion? How would you say that they should do that?
Rep. Beyer: You know, I've had a number of Republican members of Congress over to our house for dinner. And I try to talk to as many as I can on committee and on the House floor. One of our principles with these bills is that wherever possible, we want to start with the Republican co-lead.
Rep. Beyer: On the fusion bill, for example, I started the Fusion Energy Caucus. I went and got two Republicans to co-chair it with me. So it's not me, it’s we the Fusion Caucus chair. It's also Chuck Fleischmann from Tennessee and Jay Obernolte from California. So the same with the AI Caucus, the Mental Health Caucus. If I'm in a position of leadership on it, I want to make sure that the Republicans feel equally engaged, recognized, and respected.
Rep. Beyer: My great hope for the next president, Keshav, is a president who will heal us, who wants to bring us together. We have the only president, I think, in American history who actually sets out to divide us right now. The Bushes, Reagan, all of them, at least, were trying to bring us together. Obama, certainly.
Keshav: I'm not going to push you on anything right now, but who do you think will win the Democratic presidential nomination? I don't think I'm not going to push you on it, but—
Rep. Beyer: You know, if Pete Buttigieg runs, I'm all in for him. I have many, many people who tell me Pete can't possibly win. We have to have a straight white male after losing with Hillary, losing with Kamala. I don't buy it.
Rep. Beyer: I think for me, Pete is the smartest we have, the most articulate we have, and a good person. So, I'm going to be with him. If he runs, I'll be with him until he's no longer the candidate and then I'll roll over whoever. My wife really likes JB Pritzker. I had a long conversation with Wes Moore yesterday afternoon, our governor in Maryland. Lovely guy. Smart.
Rep. Beyer: Yeah, but there's a lot of good people out there. We'll be fine.
Keshav: You stated that you were interested in political economics. What would you say to youth interested in that field? What do you recommend?
Rep. Beyer: I'm prejudiced for Williams College, where I did economics. It's small, out in the mountains, and hard to get into. Probably no harder than Duke or Penn. But it's the number one liberal arts school in America. Think about that.
Rep. Beyer: Also, six years from now, think about doing a Marshall's Fellow or a Rhodes Scholar. One of my great regrets is that I didn't apply for a Rhodes Scholarship. I thought I had to be a star varsity athlete, then I met a whole bunch of Andy Kims, who are clearly not star varsity athletes. So, don't forget those free postgraduate experiences. I've been on the Marshall Scholars Committee the last number of years. It's ~30 young Americans two years out of college—they're 23, 24. England pays for everything. And you're studying in Oxford, London, or Cambridge. I didn't even know about it when I graduated from college. I want to make sure that people like you who have the potential to get it know that it's out there.
Rep. Beyer: And Duke is terrific. In my back office, I have six people and three of them are Duke graduates. I just lost the fourth. We went off to law school at Duke. My son-in-law is a Duke Fuqua School graduate. The business school. It took him two tries to get in, but now he's doing terrific.
Keshav: I've seen like a bunch of teachers on social media from there. I'm like, okay, like I really want to meet this guy. Thank you so much for the interview opportunity. You're like the coolest person I've ever met in my entire life.
Rep. Beyer: No, no. It’s not true.
Rep. Beyer: One thing youth can do for me is get Marcy Kaptur reelected. She's in Ohio. She's the longest serving woman in American history. She's lovely. One of my favorite people. But they put her in a Trump +10 district. She's the only Democrat that can win it.
Keshav: We will be sure to do that! But yeah, thank you so much again for your time. I appreciate you.
Rep. Beyer: Thank you so much. Enjoy the rest of your summer.
Keshav: You too. See you.
Rep. Beyer: All right, see you.
