Top image: Senator Todd Young (R-IN)
Each year at the Summit, I choose a member of Congress to recognize as my hero, alternating between Republican and Democrat. Previous winners include Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Sen. John Curtis of Utah. This year I happily selected Sen. Todd Young of Indiana.
He is a Naval Academy graduate, a Marine, a fifth-generation Hoosier, and one of the most serious and capable legislators in the Senate, dedicated to national security and family policy alike. When I asked him to describe Hoosiers, he said, “We’re understated, we’re sincere, we don’t engage in a whole lot of puffery.” He was describing himself. Here are some snippets from our conversation.
Sen. Young and Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) lead the Ships for America Act, a bipartisan bill to rebuild the commercial shipbuilding capacity the Navy would depend on in a conflict. His case for the legislation takes about a minute and a dose of common sense. “Last year we built a whopping one vessel in the United States. China can build over 1,000 in one year, so if you intuit that could be a national security issue, you’re right.” The Senator looked up and inspected the fleet on the LED Screen and said, “That’s a container ship. That’s exactly the type of ship we want to start building in this country.”
The women from the morning’s skilled trades panels were still in the audience, and Rachel suggested he would need them to build America’s ships. He replied, “We can’t build the chips, we can’t build the ships without our women involved and being actively recruited into professions where historically sometimes they’ve been excluded.”
The Senator co-chairs the Senate’s AI caucus, and his AI for Main Street Act with Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) allows small businesses to deduct the cost of AI tools and the training to use them. Asked whether his colleagues are paying enough attention to AI, his message was resolute. “I don’t think we can spend enough time. I think every committee in Congress needs to be intently focused on this. We know the AI age is going to involve at least as much disruption to our lives as the Industrial Revolution did. It’s what a board of directors does, and I sit on a sort of board of directors for our country. We have people driven to the polls, on one hand, who are libertarian conservatives who think government should do absolutely nothing, and that shuts down any thoughtful and constructive conversations about preparing for the challenges ahead, and then you have others who are really afraid of AI. They marinate in the risks so much that it paralyzes them, and it’s going to inhibit our ability to seize the upside potential of AI, knowing that it’s going to be upon us, irrespective of how we feel about it.”
Sen. Young has four children, and his wife stayed home with them for a stretch, with help from a babysitter in her rural hometown. He knows most families in Paoli, Indiana, cannot say the same, and parents willing to work overnight hours face the hardest math. His After Hours Child Care Act with Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH) is built for them. “Maggie and I have partnered up to help what back home I often call the Walmart mom or the Walmart dad, and we need to make sure that they have access to childcare too.” He frames childcare as infrastructure, in the same category as housing.
“If you want your labor markets to work, set aside the family values component, which should not be underestimated. I’m willing to pay for my values, right, which lends itself to a slightly larger government investment, but it’s an investment, but it’s also infrastructure. If you want a mobile labor force, you need affordable housing, and you need childcare. There are certain essentials, and that’s how I look at this issue. That’s what informed this bipartisan effort.”
The class arriving at the service academies in 2026 enters 50 years after the first women walked through the gates at Annapolis, West Point, and the Air Force Academy. As the Senator recalled, fortunately by the time he arrived at Annapolis, women were already there, which he counts as the highest praise the institution can be given. “We didn’t think much by the time I arrived about serving with young women. They were incredibly smart. They were physically prepared for the challenge. They added a lot to the team.” He pointed to Marine Corps Gen. Carol Mutter, a fellow Hoosier and among the first women in the military to wear three stars. “It’s great for guys to have women role models. It doubles the number of people you can respect and learn from and observe.”
Sen. Young is poised to take the gavel either as Chairman or Ranking Member of the Small Business Committee in the next Congress. “First, Sen. Joni Ernst, who’s the current chair, will be retiring from the Senate, going on, no doubt, to do great things. Good friend of mine, I think she’s done a really good job as chair. When the time is appropriate to start discussing with my colleagues, my vision is one that I haven’t seen yet, where there’s collaboration and partnership with other committees, where you can leverage the small business and entrepreneurship portfolio. For instance, Sen. Roger Wicker of Armed Services and I on small businesses and supply chain resilience, or partnering on tech issues with Sen. Ted Cruz to make sure our small businesses are being duly and appropriately considered on the Commerce Committee, or partnering on tax issues with Sen. Mike Crapo on the Finance committee. And, of course, still looking at the basics, regulatory reform, improving SBA programming, and doing oversight.”
“But one of the great things about the Small Business Committee is it is the key to economic development. Increasingly, I think my colleagues, and more broadly Americans, are understanding that most of economic development these days is not about landing the big charismatic factories in your congressional districts. It instead is creating an environment in which more people feel inclined to take risk, to manage that risk, and to grow over a period of time, and if you can even on the margins improve that environment, you’re going to have a lot more women and men alike starting small businesses and creating opportunities for all of America.”
