Guest: Rep. Jake Auchincloss
Host: Jack Prior
Recorded: Friday, January 30, 2026
Introduction
Jack Prior 0:00
Welcome to the Fig City News podcast. Fig City News is an online nonprofit newspaper serving Newton, Massachusetts. I’m Jack Prior, a volunteer Director and reporter, and today, Friday, January 30, we’re in the 4th District office of Jake Auchincloss.
Jake is a 2006 Newton North grad, a 2010 Harvard Government and Economics grad, after which he went into the Marine Corps for several years and came back to Newton, got his MBA at the Sloan School at MIT in 2016, and was elected to the City Council in the 2015 election, serving from 2016 to 2021, and he served in Congress since 2021.
Full disclosure: As a private citizen, I endorsed Jake in 2020 when he first ran for Congress.
Jake, thank you so much for making time today for our Fig City News’s first live interview for our new podcast.
The goal today is to catch up since you left the city council. A lot of people don’t have cable news subscriptions. They don’t have time to maybe jump on Zoom[ meetings]. A lot of the questions I’m asking here are what I would ask you if I ran into you in Newtonville and had 10 to 15 minutes.
So it’s a chance to catch up on what you’ve been doing since you left the City Council, to get your take on the issues of the day, and to get a sense of where things are going.
District Offices and Staff
Jack Prior 1:30
So I thought to start with, we’re here in your office here in Newton, and one of the questions I was curious about is, “What does it take to run a congressional office?”, both for your constituent service operations, and maybe your political operations, if you want to cover that. If I’m a Newton resident and I want to reach out to you for help or to voice an opinion, who might I run into? I think a lot of people know Dana Hanson, who is a Newton resident, and is now Chief of Staff to the new [Newton] Mayor Marc Laredo – What does a congressional office look like?
Jake Auchincloss 1:40
Jack, thanks for having me on. Thrilled to be the inaugural interview. When I think about running a congressional office with the 15 or so staffers who make it happen, I recollect a piece of advice that became famous in the Marine Corps, from a commandant of the Marine Corps.
He was asked how he became so successful as a four-star general, and he said, “You know, when I was a lieutenant, my battalion commander brought me into his office and gave me three pieces of advice. The first was, surround yourself with great people, and over the years, I’ve forgotten the other two”.
That is the situation with the District and DC offices that I have, which is that I’ve surrounded myself with great people, and they do terrific work. We won the Congressional Management Foundation’s Award for Best Constituent Services this year, for responsiveness and for ability to deliver on constituent issues, whether they’re passports or immigration issues or asking about votes.
Current Priorities – Constitution, Drug Prices, and Social Media
Jack Prior 2:54
You’ve been in Congress for five years now – two and a half terms. What are your proudest achievements, and what are your current focuses?
Jake Auchincloss 3:07
I am on the Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over the environment, technology, health, and social media. And my areas of focus right now are really threefold:
The first is just generally trying to meet the constitutional moment that we are in. We are facing an administration that lies, that uses violence against its own people, and that fundamentally doesn’t respect the Constitution as the supreme law of the land, and it requires all of us to use all levers of power at our disposal, to ensure, in the words of Benjamin Franklin, that we can keep it.
The other two areas of focus are specific to the jurisdiction of the committee that I’m in and also to the district I represent.
One is drug pricing and biotechnology. There is a false choice often presented to the American public that you can either have low co-pays and be able to afford prescription drugs, or you can have biotech innovation. I reject that false choice. I think in fact, that it’s quite the opposite, that in order to have the biotech innovation that has been such an engine of the Massachusetts economy, we also need to have insurance design that lowers co-pays for patients. And so I’ve been working a lot on fixing the pharmaceutical value chain to make that happen.
And then the [third] big area has been social media. I am one of the proud leaders of what I call the touch grass temperance movement, of trying to get particularly, our young people to log off, to connect with one another in real life, and to thrive in their sense of self and society. I think these social media platforms have been “attention fracking” our children and exploiting our economy. They have not been held accountable by Congress, and that needs to change.
Commuter Rail
Jack Prior 5:04
In terms of your activity in Congress, one thing you achieved was helping to get funding for the Newton rail upgrades in Newtonville. Can you speak to that and the current status of it? Is it at risk at all?
Jake Auchincloss 5:17
A day one priority for me when I took office five years ago was getting that Newtonville commuter rail station, and really ultimately all three Newton commuter rail stations, to be accessible and also to lay the trail work, I guess you could say, for fully regional rail that ultimately would be better in connecting Framingham Worcester to Boston, and in connecting constituents outside of the sort of nine to five commuter rail schedule that I think has held back the regional economy.
ICE and National Guard
Jack Prior 6:02
Okay, on to the ICE topic you mentioned, I understand that on a Zoom call this week, you expressed support for use of the National Guard to intervene in ICE operations if they were to ramp up In Massachusetts, can you speak more to that?
Jake Auchincloss 6:16
Yes. So in Minnesota, I know my constituents have been watching with alarm as ICE has acted as a paramilitary in that state, sowing fear in communities, murdering us citizens, and launching dragnet operations against immigrants. Governor Walz has activated about 1500 members of the Minnesota National Guard. They are largely, sort of in a community outreach posture, and we’re now seeing the president back down, and it looks like probably trying to pull ICE out of the state because of the political blowback that he has gotten, an example of successful opposition to the President’s agenda.
But should things go the other way, Governor Walz is well within his rights to use the National Guard to protect public health, protect public safety, and uphold civil rights, and that is true regardless of the vectors that are degrading those civil rights. If that happens to be a federal agent, the State National Guard still is within its rights to do that.
And I feel the same way about Massachusetts. 250 years ago, we refused to quarter the king’s troops. We’d refuse to quarter the President’s troops now.
Israel, Gaza, and Academic Discrimination
Jack Prior 7:34
Thank you. Next question on Gaza and the war in Gaza; it’s been very divisive to the country. Locally, I’ve known you personally as a free speech defender, both in your service, in the Marines, defending the Constitution, taking stands, difficult stands, over the course of your career, to support free speech.
In the case of Gaza, I know you’re supporting Israel largely, but I think one question that I think residents have is, if they have concerns about what they see happening in Gaza, in terms of the human suffering the rubble, what is an appropriate level of protest, and when does that protest cross the line? Can you speak at all to that?
Jake Auchincloss 8:16
Yeah, you’re presenting as a binary about being in favor of Israel or in favor of the people of Gaza. I don’t see it as that binary. I think the loss of any one human life, of any innocent children’s life, is the loss of a whole world, and I think that’s true of Palestinian children, and that’s true of Israeli children.
The enemy of both has been Hamas. Hamas has immiserated the Palestinian people for 15 years, has murdered the Palestinian people, and has done so under a nihilistic agenda where it casts Israel as the demon in all things to hide its own moral bankruptcy. And the defeat of Hamas, I think, is critical for both the well-being of the Israeli and the Palestinian people.
That does not excuse any action that the Israeli Defense Forces might take against Hamas. Israel is subject to the laws of armed conflict, and Israel’s actions, particularly in the spring of 2025, I thought crossed lines in terms of disregarding the situation on the ground and humanitarian conditions, and I said so publicly and communicated that through many channels.
When it comes to the right ways to protest. it’s not for me to say all the different right ways to protest. One of the genius of the American people is that we use freedom of association and freedom of speech to protest in many creative ways. To me, what’s critical is that your right to protest does not become harassment.
And in the context of college campuses, which is really where this kind of became a flash point. Title 6 says that you can’t create an inhospitable learning environment and you can’t have targeted discrimination against individual students. And what happened was the learning environment did degrade into inhospitable environments for Jewish students, and there was outright discrimination by both faculty and other students against Israeli students, and that’s not acceptable.
New Majority Democrats PAC
Jack Prior 10:28
One thing you’ve taken on last year is the creation of a PAC/Super PAC, called Majority Democrats. Can you describe that effort and its goals? And your goals in the coming midterm election season?
Jake Auchincloss 10:43
Majority Democrats is a coalition of younger elected leaders from across the country, 32 to begin with, who are committed to reinventing the Democratic Party by 2028 and doing so by building out a faction that helps elevate new leaders, helps win tough races, and ultimately, and most importantly, helps govern better.
So some of our members include Governors Spanberger and Sherill in Virginia and New Jersey — recently elected Democratic governors – Alyssa Slotkin, senator from Michigan, and James Talarico, a state representative in Texas who’s waging a campaign for the United States Senate to unseat John Cornyn.
And what all of these individuals, and there are dozens more, have in common is that they’re willing to challenge the status quo, whether it’s a mayor in Denver or a state rep in Texas, and they are authentic to their district, and they’re willing to think differently about how to define and win a new center of American politics.
Political Diversity in the Fourth Congressional District
Jack Prior 11:50
Related to that, you moved from being a City Councilor in Newton to representing a vertical district within Massachusetts that stretches down to the coast with a lot of diverse communities. How has that affected you? What have you learned? Has it shifted your views? What’s that been like in the last five years?
Jake Auchincloss 12:10
Well, certainly, I’ve tried to always learn. It is a geographically, socio-economically, politically diverse district. People think about a Massachusetts congressional district, they assume it’s bright blue, and certainly the district voted for Kamala by a relatively wide margin over Trump in 24, but the biggest city in my district, Fall River, voted for Donald Trump in 24 and Bristol County, which is the southern part of my district, is the reddest part of Massachusetts, alongside Blackstone Valley, part of which is also my district.
So I represent 35 cities and towns. Probably about 15 of those cities and towns, if you looked at their select boards, for example, are majority Republican. So it absolutely requires me to get out there and engage in a granular way, and certainly requires me to take my own advice and to log off touch grass and connect with people in real life, because what you see is that the extreme left or the hard right on Twitter or Tiktok or whatever really are not speaking for the exhausted majority of Americans, of base Staters, in which there is a deep reservoir of common sense and decency.
Artificial Intelligence
Jack Prior 13:29
Thank you. In 2023 you gave the first generative AI/Chat-GPT-generated speech in Congress so on AI have three questions. First, do you think we’ve already seen the last non-generative-AI assisted speech in Congress, Second, how is it impacting your office, in terms of what comes in at you, how you maybe can run more efficiently and third, more largely what are your concerns and hopes for the country as generative AI continues as exponential growth?
Jake Auchincloss 13:57
Sure. Yeah. I gave that speech a couple years ago. I wanted it to serve as a class. Call to other policymakers that we had to take this seriously. It was going to move fast, certainly faster than policy making moves, and that we shouldn’t let this be like social media, where, for 15 years we sat in our haunches and just watched the tech firms, the social media companies, work their will on the American public.
I would say the average American recognizes that was a mistake, that it has become exploitative, and so we got to be more proactive than that.
No, I don’t think that was the last non Gen AI speech. I write all my own stuff, and I do use AI for research. I find it helpful to synthesize research that’s out there, and then I’ll kind of challenge it to summarize and synthesize and summarize and synthesize. But when it actually comes to writing, it’s all me.
What do I hope for in this? I would say, first of all, I don’t really subscribe to either the boomer or the Doomer narratives, this idea that we’re all going to be taking orders from AGI overlords in a year and a half. I don’t really buy it, or the idea that this is going to cure cancer in two years, so everyone should just hang out and just wait for the glory?. A lot of people are pitching their own book there.
What I do want for this is to have to shoehorn itself into very intentional outcomes that society wants. I think society wants a couple things. One, we want inequality to get better. The last 50 years have seen widening inequality and AI could go one of two ways. One, it could exaggerate and augment returns to capital, or by making labor more productive, more creative, it could exaggerate returns to labor. I think we really want this to reward labor and not just become greater returns for investors. So that is one set of intentional policy choices that we have to do.
And there I put forward policy about trade schools and others to try to do that, it’s going to require tax code changes. The second big thing is, I think this has to help us build a shared reality. If this, if AI puts social media on steroids, and everyone is cloaking themselves, not just in their own recommendation engine, but now their own personalized AI chat bot that’s telling them how brilliant they are, and every thought gets positively reinforced, we are all going to go down rabbit holes, and we’re going to atomize our sense of shared reality. I don’t think that’s good for us as a country. Maybe good for the tech firms, but not good for us.
So I think we need to insist that whether it’s a medical bot or a journalist bot or, a generic bot like they need to be subject to the same rules of defamation and liability that credentialed experts would be if they were humans. Like we. We need to have some epistemological guardrails on this.
To the extent that AI is being applied in the world of atoms to build ships or power plants or discover new molecular combinations for new drugs. I’m bullish on it. Let’s do it. Let’s build faster, better, cheaper, absolutely like we shouldn’t be. We shouldn’t be Luddites about the use of AI for rebuilding America, but we should be intentional about it.
Divided Government
Jack Prior 17:19
Thank you. Related to that in terms of legislation. I meant to ask about it a little bit earlier. You began your career with control of Congress and the presidency in the first two years. Now, you’ve sat with a split, and then what you’re what you’re living with now. What is life like in Congress, in those various environments, is it for Democrats? Is it? Are you sitting on your hands? It does seem like you’ve had some bipartisan activity. What does the day to day look like? What is your ability to have an effect look like in the three different environments?
Jake Auchincloss 17:56
Well, it’s more fun the majority. That’s why I’ve helped launch Majority Democrats. I don’t want us to get stuck in this vacillation over the next — let’s call it a dozen election cycles – where one party gets 51% the other party gets 51%, and the control of the House is constantly slipping by a couple of votes.
I think one, that’s a very bad way to actually effectuate policy if it’s constantly getting changed, or if you can’t really pass things with a big without any defections from your own side, it’s very hard to do that. But two, it’s sort of a lazy political strategy, right?
Democrats should be aiming to put another 15 states on the map for ourselves, right, in the Senate, in the house, for governor’s seats, and that’s what “Majority Democrats” is doing. In Iowa, we’ve got a bunch of candidates running there. Texas, like I said, North Carolina, Michigan, we cannot accept being a coastal party that occasionally, if we’re lucky, gets 52 Senate seats like that’s not where we need to be.
We need to be aiming to durably earn the trust of two thirds of this country. And I believe that we can, but it requires us to think differently about how we define the center of American politics, and be willing to draw on various factions of American ideological life.
Mid-Term Elections
Jack Prior 19:29
Related to your work on majority Democrats, as a layman I find it a little hard to follow how November could turn out with redistricting in Texas, redistricting in California, other efforts, controversy, shifting opinion.
What is the floor and ceiling in terms of the margin the Democrats could get in the house?
Is it at best, a few? Is it at best 20? What is the range of outcomes and how much you can shift them?
Jake Auchincloss 20:02
The big picture story is that over the last 50 years, the number of seats in play in November has gone from 200 to 20, right? That’s bad for democracy on both sides. It’s just bad.
And we can talk about how that happened with gerrymandering and partisan primaries, and we should fix that. That’s more of a long term project in the short term. And 26 we’re down to about 2025 depending how you want to count, it is not much bigger than that. I think Texas and California basically wipe each other out, right? And so it’s like it’s a dozen or so seats where this thing is going to get decided.
Neither party, I don’t see having big, boisterous majorities in 26 now, as I said, that’s the thing that we have to be changing over the course of the next few election cycles, but in 26 it’ll be close.
I want to put an asterisk on the fact that this President’s political capital is draining his numbers on economic mismanagement. Now, about two thirds of Americans think he’s messed this thing up as he has his strongest issue previously was immigration. He’s broken that mandate with the American public with his heinous actions in Minnesota.
So this guy is flailing now that makes him in some ways more dangerous and reckless, and we need to be on guard for him trying to steal the midterm elections. It also means that there could be a wave that breaks the Republican map.
So what they did in Texas, for example, is they basically, they got those five seats in Texas in their gerrymandering by asking five members to, don’t quote me on these numbers, but basically, to take double digit margins that they had and shrink them down to single digit margins for re election.
Well, that’s all fine and good until it becomes a wave election year, and then that whole map breaks for them. That’s like the Hail Mary scenario for us, but it’s certainly something that we should be pressing on.
January 6th
Jack Prior 22:07
Thank you. I just had one more question and sort of a reflection. You’ve probably told the story dozens of times now, but five years later, you started in Congress in January of 2021. You were in the Capitol on January 6. I mean, what was that like? How shocking was it? What was the experience like? And what do you see looking back at it now? Is it more shocking to see how it turned out now?
Jake Auchincloss 22:33
All of it — I mean, I can remember watching the Capitol Police with their perimeter, establishing their Cordon, and watching it break, I was, as you’d mentioned, Jack. I was in the Marines for four years. I was an infantry man. We trained in crowd control, tactics and how to establish a cordon, and I could see it was breaking, and I couldn’t I couldn’t believe it. I said that this is gonna actually, they’re getting behind them.
And then it became — I mean — the Capitol became the site of a riot, and an eventful and violent one.
Stepping over broken glass to walk into that chamber to vote to certify the election results, is certainly an experience that will always stay with me. The thing that is most searing, and that has really been the political lesson for me, was seeing the fear on the other side.
I think people probably believe that bad things happen in Washington, because there are bad people who have bad ideas. That certainly happens, sometimes, most of the bad things that happen in Washington, frankly, most of the bad things that happen in any sphere of government are not because there are bad people with bad ideas. It’s because there are scared people who won’t speak out against the relatively small number of people who have truly bad ideas. And that’s what I saw on the other side was scared people.
They knew that the election wasn’t stolen. They know now that the election wasn’t stolen. There may be a handful of true cult-like, true hardcore believers, but they know – J.D. Vance on down – they know – they’re scared. And I promised myself then, I said, I’m never taking a vote out of fear.
Wrap-Up
Jack Prior 24:15
Thank you. Well, that’s all the questions I had. Anything that you’d like to add before we wrap up? I would just like to again thank you very much for taking the time here on a Friday afternoon before you head back to Washington to speak with us.
Jake Auchincloss 24:26
I appreciate the work that Fig City News does, and that you do Jack. One of the things that I’m passionate about is restoring local journalism, so I appreciate that you’re part of the solution here, because we’re not going to rebuild shared reality and a sense of communal trust in this country without some shoe-leather reporting.
Jack Prior 24:47
Thank you very much. On that note, I’d ask folks that do manage to listen to this, to like and subscribe to the podcast. It’s an experiment, and we need to see people listening to grow it. And then certainly come to figcitynews.com for more in depth news every week, and as well as utilize our Fig City News app, which we have on iOS and Android. That wraps up our podcast. Thank you.
