Jason Knapp

Jason Knapp served in the U.S. Navy from 1997 to 2018. He earned a high school diploma from Hayfield Secondary School. He earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Virginia in 1997 and a graduate degree from Florida State University in 2010. His career experience includes working as a military officer.[1]

Who are you? Tell us about yourself.

I’m a retired Navy Commander and F/A-18 combat pilot with 21 years of service, a clean energy advocate, and a father of three under 10 years old, running to restore the promise of America for working families.

My story is proof that America works when we invest in people. I was raised by a nineteen-year-old single mother, and we were caught by the safety net. Food stamps and Medicaid gave us the means to survive — and they gave my mother something a third job never could have: the chance to take night classes instead. That is how she studied to become a FORTRAN programmer. She had no college degree when she went to work — first at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the Voyager and Space Shuttle programs, then at Goddard Space Flight Center, and finally on classified satellite programs at the Naval Research Laboratory. The safety net did not make us dependent. It gave us a running start.

I spent two decades serving this country, all over the world. I served in Iraq, including on the ground in Baghdad, as the military lead developing NATO’s training and capacity-building mission there. As Executive Officer of the Operations and Planning Division of the NATO International Military Staff, my portfolio included all current and planned NATO missions. I served as a Defense Congressional Fellow on Capitol Hill assigned to the Armed Services Committee, and I’ve taught government at American University. Before this race I worked in clean energy economic development — working to build

Please list below 3 key messages of your campaign. What are the main points you want voters to remember about your goals for your time in office?

I’ve lived in countries all over the world — many far poorer than ours — and in nearly every one, people take care of their weakest. They feed them, clothe them, house them. Only here, in the richest country on earth, do we so often choose to let our most vulnerable suffer. That is a choice, and we can do better. The wealthiest nation in history should never force a family to choose between medicine and food, leave veterans fighting a bureaucracy for benefits they earned, or crush the farmers and watermen who feed us to protect corporate profits. I’ll fight to protect Medicaid, SNAP, and the safety net — these are not bargaining chips. I was one of the kids that net caught, and I know exactly what it makes possible.Working families in VA-01 are squeezed by rising prices, high housing, and healthcare costs — while the incumbent protects the corporations driving costs up. I’ve done the work: my universal healthcare framework covers every American — dental, vision, mental health — is fully funded, and saves families, government, and business money. On data centers, not one component of their build or operation should touch your power bill — with protections for water, noise, EMI and RFI, and setbacks from homes and schools. I’d build cheaper battery storage over gas peakers, build housing with union labor, and restore tax rates asking the wealthiest to pay their share. Your paycheck should work for your family, not corporate profits.I’m not running to climb a ladder or get rich. Twenty-one years in the Navy taught me you serve the mission and the people depending on you, not yourself — and I’ll bring that with hard commitments most politicians won’t make: a ban on members of Congress trading stocks, term limits, and my pledge to serve in the House no more than four terms. The plain truth: a politician who takes corporate money is compromised. Corporations don’t donate out of the goodness of their hearts — they donate as a business expense and expect a return. So my answer is no corporate money, ever. No Dominion Energy money, ever. I want to answer to one group: the constituents of this district. That’s the whole job.

What areas of public policy are you personally passionate about?

Veterans — I’ve personally helped fellow service members navigate a broken benefits system, and I rely on VA care myself. Access should be automatic, not a battle. Safety-net programs — I was raised on SNAP and Medicaid; they gave my mother the stability to build a career in public service. They save lives and should never be political leverage. Clean energy — as an Atlantic Council Veterans Advanced Energy Fellow and a clean energy professional, I’ve worked to strengthen American energy independence and manufacturing. Education and the trades — a majority of high school graduates don’t earn a four-year degree, and we need real investment in vocational training and apprenticeships. These are personal to me, not just policy positions.

What organizations or individuals have endorsed your campaign?

Endorsed by former Congresswoman Madeleine Bordallo, by Veterans for Responsible Leadership, and by Williamsburg/JCC Indivisible.

Campaign websiteKnapp's campaign website stated the following:HealthcareAmerica spends more on healthcare than any country on earth and gets worse results — and the gap is not waste, it is profit. I believe healthcare should be about taking care of people.I will:Defend the ACA against repeal and make its premium subsidies permanentExpand Medicare’s power to negotiate drug prices, cap insulin at $35 for everyoneProtect the rural hospitals this district cannot afford to lose — without raising taxes on working families.Read the full paperReproductive FreedomDecisions about pregnancy are between a woman and her doctor. Not Congress. Roe v. Wade established a federal floor for almost fifty years. The Supreme Court took it away in 2022, and the result is a patchwork — a woman’s rights change at the state line. Members of Congress have introduced legislation that would impose a national abortion ban, and bills that define personhood at the moment of fertilization — which would ban abortion nationwide and put IVF and many forms of contraception at legal risk. Rob Wittman has cosponsored that legislation — the Life at Conception Act — in four Congresses, including as an original cosponsor in 2021. Jen and I have two daughters. They have fewer rights today than the day they were born. That’s not a country I’m willing to hand them.I will:Vote for the Women’s Health Protection Act to restore the protections of Roe in federal lawVote for the Right to Contraception Act to protect access to birth controlProtect IVF and fertility careProtect the doctors who provide that careProtect the right to travel for medical careThe politicians who pass these laws don’t live with them. Women do.Read the full paperSocial Security & the Safety NetMedicare, Medicaid, Social Security, SNAP — these are lifelines, not bargaining chips. I am one of the kids the safety net caught: my mother raised me on food stamps while she built her career at NASA. The bridge held. That is the entire purpose of the program. Right now the net is under threat from two directions. The Republican Study Committee — roughly 80 percent of House Republicans, including our own incumbent — has backed a plan to raise the Social Security retirement age to 69, cutting benefits by up to 13 percent for every worker not yet near retirement, while leaving the program’s solvency problem untouched. And in July 2025, Congress passed the largest SNAP cuts in the program’s history — nearly $200 billion over ten years, sweeping in older workers, parents of teenagers, and the active-duty military families already locked out of the program by the way their housing allowance is counted as income.I will:Oppose any increase in the Social Security retirement age and fight for the honest fix — asking wages above $400,000 to pay the same rate working people already pay on every dollar.Reverse the OBBBA SNAP cutsFix the military-families gapDefend Medicaid against work requirements and block grantsReform the SSI asset limit that has been frozen at $2,000 since 1989.Read the full paperVeterans & Military FamiliesI have more than 20 years of national security experience, including twenty-one years in the Navy. This district is home to tens of thousands of veterans, active-duty servicemembers, and military families. The promise this country made to them is being broken in real time — the VA has lost more than 40,000 employees in a single year, the Chesapeake clinic still cannot fill its staff, and the Hampton VA has gone nearly two years without a permanent director. At the same moment, the administration is sending Americans into a war Congress never voted to authorize. That is not two stories. It is one.I will:Defend VA careDemand congressional authorization before another warCodify reproductive care for servicemembersTreat the promise made to those who served as the debt it isRead the full paperEducation & The TradesEducation is supposed to be the engine of American mobility. Right now the engine is being dismantled. The Department of Education is on the chopping block, public school dollars are being routed to private schools through a new federal voucher program, and the country is running out of skilled tradespeople — for every five who retire from the trades, only two are coming in to replace them. National average per-pupil spending is around $17,600. Mississippi spends about $12,300, among the five lowest in the nation. The kid in Meridian doesn’t get a vote on that. I do.I will:Defend the Department of EducationFully fund IDEADefend and expand Title IDefend Virginia’s pre-K investmentFully fund rural schools through REAPMake a major federal investment in apprenticeships and the tradesRepeal the federal voucher program before a single public dollar flows through itRefuse corporate PAC money from the for-profit education industry, predatory student-loan servicers, and ed-tech firms whose business model depends on extracting federal subsidiesRead the full paperWorkers' Rights & The PRO ActThe deal in this country used to be simple: if the company did well, the people working there did well too. That stopped being true forty years ago. Since 1979, American workers have produced about 90 percent more per hour while pay for the typical worker has grown about 33 percent. The gains did not go home to the people doing the work. The strongest opposition to unions does not come from workers — or from the small businesses of this district, who already treat the people working for them like the neighbors they are. It comes from large corporations and the lobbying groups they pay.I will:Co-sponsor and vote for the PRO Act — the most significant update to labor law since Taft-Hartley in 1947 — and be honest that the bill would override Virginia’s right-to-work law, which I support overriding anywayFight for twelve weeks of federal paid family and medical leaveDefend the National Labor Relations BoardDefend the federal civil service against the Schedule F order that threatens workers from Yorktown to Dahlgren to LangleyCrack down on the misclassification of workers as “contractors”Ban most non-compete agreements in statuteRefuse corporate PAC money from union-busting consulting firms and from private equity firms that extract value by cutting wages and benefitsRead the full paperEnergy & Lowering the Cost of PowerEnergy policy is not a talking point I picked up for a campaign. It is my career. I am an Atlantic Council Veterans Advanced Energy Fellow. I have worked on grid modernization, battery storage, and critical-mineral supply chains, and I have worked directly with the House and Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committees and with the Department of Energy’s grant and loan programs. I know how this system actually works — and I know how to make it work for the people who pay the bills.My position is simple. Power should be reliable, it should be affordable, and the dollars we spend on it should build American jobs instead of deepening our dependence on adversaries. Right now, families in VA-1 are being asked to pay more so that a handful of enormous customers can pay less. That is backwards, and I am running to fix it.I will:Make the biggest customers pay their own way.Defend the laws that are already working.Modernize the grid and expand storage.Protect Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind.Rebuild the American supply chain.Read the full paperHousing AffordabilityHousing is foundational. When it fails, every other part of a family’s economic life starts to fail with it — the teacher who cannot afford to live in the county where she teaches, the Navy veteran whose VA disability does not stretch to cover the rent, the farmer whose son is leaving the Northern Neck because the inherited house needs forty thousand dollars in repairs, the young couple with two incomes who still cannot find a starter home in Henrico.The shortage has been built by decades of underbuilding, by treating homes as assets to accumulate rather than places to live, by federal programs left underfunded for a generation. What choices built, choices can rebuild. Here is how.I will:Build more housing by expanding the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit.Restore public housing. Repairing and modernizing what already exists—no demolition without one-for-one replacement.End veteran homelessness by expanding HUD-VASH and its funding.End shell-company games, tax loopholes, and private equity in single-family housing, requiring disclosure of bulk ownership.Strengthen USDA rural housing and help first-time buyers.Read the full paperFarms, Fishing, and Rural CommunitiesFood security is national security. Family farms and working waterfronts are the backbone of every rural community in this district. Right now they are being squeezed from two directions at once. A handful of consolidated meatpackers and grain merchants set the price a farmer has no power to argue with. A trade war just cost American soybean growers their largest customer overseas. The biggest operations can absorb that but a family farm or a family boat cannot. When one side of every deal has all the leverage and the other side has none, a policy decided far away lands hardest on the operation with the smallest cushion.I will:Enforce the Packers and Stockyards Act.Rebuild trade relationships without writing bailout checks.Pass a long overdue Farm Bill that works for family-scale agriculture.Strengthen USDA Rural Development.Defend the working waterfront, the Chesapeake Bay, and the shellfish industry that is its future.Read the full paperTribal NationsTribal sovereignty is not a gift the federal government grants. It is a fact, and in American law it carries a specific obligation: the relationship between the United States and tribal nations is government-to-government, and the federal government is bound to honor it. For four hundred years it has treated that obligation as something to negotiate down whenever it became inconvenient. Treaties broken. Recognition withheld while bureaucrats decided whether nations that have been here for thousands of years were real enough to count. Virginia’s 1st District is unfortunately where that pattern began, but here’s how I think we can achieve a better version that finally holds.I will:Reauthorize the tribal housing law — now.Fully fund the Indian Health Service and the Bureau of Indian Affairs.Complete the work on jurisdiction and on missing and murdered Indigenous people.Treat treaty enforcement as a binding federal duty — not a courtesy extended when convenientRefuse corporate PAC money from any interest that profits when tribal land, resources, or sovereignty are treated as negotiable.Data CentersIt’s your and your communities right to want or not want data centers, as long as its built with eyes open, paying their own way. The families here who work the trades build these centers, and the fight was never with them. It’s with a monopoly using the buildout as an excuse to pick your pocket — on your bill, in the air your kids breathe, in your own backyard. The people who drive the cost should be the ones who carry it. I don’t take a dime of utility money, and I’ll make these big corporations pay their own way.I will:Make data centers pay for the grid they demand — so the buildout lands on the industry, not on your monthly bill.Put the billion-dollar data-center tax break on a clock — and end it if it can’t prove it pays for itself.Protect the families who live nearby — clean air, not a wall of diesel exhaust next to homes and schools.Build them only where they’re wanted — full public review, with the community keeping the final say.Accountability and CorruptionThe people in charge make decisions they never have to answer for — the gains stay at the top, and the losses roll downhill to you. I believe the people who make the decisions should have to live with the consequences. That starts with refusing the money that buys the silence.I will:Ban members of Congress from trading individual stocks — and put my own holdings in a blind trust the day I’m sworn in.End dark money and shut the revolving door, so policy stops getting written for the few.Take no corporate PAC money and hold myself to a four-term limit — accountability starts with me.— Jason Knapp's campaign website (June 25, 2026)Note: This text is quoted verbatim from the original source. Any inconsistencies are attributable to the original source.