I’m not a career politician. I’m an Army veteran, engineer, former union member, dad to four girls, youth hockey coach, and Western Pennsylvanian. I started working as a teenager at the Steel Car plant in Greenville. I served in Iraq and spent 15 years as an automation engineer.

I’m running because too many people I grew up with, worked alongside and raised my family around are doing everything right and still falling behind.

Groceries are near unaffordable. Rent keeps going up. Childcare can eat up a paycheck. Seniors worry about prescriptions and Social Security.

The current administration campaigned on a promise to bring prices down. But nearly two years later, families are still waiting.

After a while, you start asking a pretty reasonable question: If the economy is supposedly working, who exactly is it working for?

Working people are stretching every paycheck while wealth keeps piling up at the top. I support raising wages, protecting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, lowering prescription-drug costs and stopping corporate investors from pricing families out of their own neighborhoods.

And healthcare is deeply personal to me. I lost my mom this summer after a yearslong battle with cancer. I saw what Medicare meant for her ability to get care.

Mike Kelly voted for new Medicaid requirements that could cost people their coverage. I could never look someone who depends on Medicaid in the eye and defend that vote, because it is not a vote I would ever cast.

When working people keep getting squeezed, you have to ask why Washington seems so disconnected from the people living with the consequences.

A big part of the answer is money in our politics.

Corporations do not spend millions influencing politics out of the goodness of their hearts. They expect access and favorable rules. But the biggest check should never get the biggest say.

That is why I take no corporate PAC money and support banning members of Congress from trading individual stocks.

Through June, three out of every four contribution dollars Mike Kelly’s campaign raised came from PACs and other political committees. And his share of itemized individual contributions from Pennsylvanians fell from 73% in 2022 to 24% this cycle.

After nearly 16 years, people should not still have to wonder whose interests come first.

Last year, the bipartisan House Ethics Committee formally reproved Kelly for failing to meet his duty of candor during its Cleveland-Cliffs stock investigation.

We have to be able to trust the people representing us, because the decisions they make reach our communities, our homes, and eventually our monthly bills.

That is exactly what is happening in Butler County, where a massive data center has been proposed in Forward Township.

I am an automation engineer. I believe in technology. What I do not believe in is asking communities to carry the risk while corporations walk away with the reward.

People deserve answers about electricity, water, jobs, and who pays. “Build it first and figure out who pays later” is not a plan.

If somebody wants to build the future in Butler County, fine. But Butler County gets a say in what that future looks like.

The same goes for Congress. If I am asking to represent you, you should be able to question me and tell me when you think I am wrong.

That is why I am promising an in-person town hall every month I’m in Congress. My opponent sticks to telephone town halls and has yet to accept my challenge to debate in all six counties of PA-16. If you want the job, you should be willing to show up, look people in the eye, and answer for it.

And some decisions are so serious that accountability should not be optional. We are seeing that right now with Iran, as Washington drags us deeper into another conflict while families back home live with the consequences.

I served in Iraq. I know that when politicians talk casually about war, somebody’s son or daughter eventually gets the orders. Congress has a responsibility to decide when we send Americans into war, and I will oppose blank checks for unauthorized, endless wars.

Whether the question is healthcare, development, war or just making it through another month, the principle is the same: The people living with the consequences deserve a government that listens.

I know that we might not agree on every issue. But representation means showing up even when the questions are hard.

Working people are watching a hundred dollars disappear at the grocery store, twenty bucks barely move the gas gauge, and every bill take a bigger cut of the paycheck. And while folks are told to keep being patient, America made its first trillionaire this year.

After nearly 16 years with the same congressman, I think the people of PA-16 have earned the right to ask a simple question:

Is this really as good as it gets?

I refuse to believe it is.

I cannot promise that I will walk into Washington and fix everything overnight. But I can promise you will never have to wonder who I went there to work for.

Not the corporations. Not the PACs. Not the people with the biggest checks.

You.

And if I ever forget it, you can look me in the eye and tell me yourself. Because I plan on actually showing up.

Justin Wagner is a candidate for Congress in Pennsylvania's 16th District, a U.S. Army veteran, an engineer and a father.