This is the thirteenth in a series of in-person, in-depth New Jersey Globe interviews with New Jersey’s members of Congress. The interviews will be published as-is, with editing for length and clarity.
This week, the Globe spoke with Rep. Herb Conaway (D-Delran), a first-term Democrat from Burlington County who serves on the House Veterans Affairs and Small Business Committees. The Globe sat down with Conaway to talk about his transition from the state legislature to Congress, his hopes as a physician for health care policy reforms, his belief that “resistance on all fronts” is needed against the Trump administration, and more.
Previous interviews: then-Rep. Andy Kim, Rep. Chris Smith, the late Rep. Bill Pascrell, Rep. Rob Menendez, Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, Rep. Mikie Sherrill, Rep. Jeff Van Drew, Rep. Josh Gottheimer, Sue Altman (in place of Rep. Tom Kean Jr.), Rep. Donald Norcross, then-Senator George Helmy, Rep. Frank Pallone
New Jersey Globe: You are still new at this job; you’ve been here for a month and a half. But you are not new to the job of politics – you were in the State Assembly for almost three decades. What has that transition been like?
Herb Conaway: As much as I know about getting laws passed in New Jersey, the process here is much more complicated and it involves a lot more steps than in New Jersey. If my bill was over in the State Senate, I could just walk down the hallway and talk to the senator about some things, or easily get them on the phone and go over particular bits of language. There’s a lot more steps here, and a lot more people are involved in that process. Here, you’ve got multiple staffers who are going to deal with a bill; you’re going to have to deal more closely with cosponsors than you would have to do generally at the state level; you have authorizing committees and appropriators, of course you have leadership, and then you have the whole other body [the Senate]. I have to tell you, among the interesting things to note here is that you don’t run into the senators; they’re in their own part of the building. You’re not crossing paths with them unless you’re doing a joint press conference or something like that.
They think they’re a bit above you.
Well, they can think so. We’ll let them think that.
The learning curve, I would presume, has been somewhat less steep for me than for others. I think if you have some grounding, particularly in a legislature – I don’t know that my long experience is necessarily an advantage, though, over somebody else who also came out of a state legislature but was there for six years or something like that. The one point is that I had experience with a lot of different pieces of legislation, and I know where the pitfalls are and where the various interest groups may line up. You can get that over 26 years, but you might not get it if you’re in a legislature for only six.
It has been busy. One of the surprises is how much walking you have to do here. You’re fairly well-fed at lunch – a lot of meetings have lunch or some kind of a meal attached to it, so you worry about eating all day, which you wouldn’t do at home, but then you do a lot more walking than you do at home. That issue of distance and moving from your office, over to the Capitol, go do fundraising, then back to your office – the days are longer down here than we would generally experience at home.
Have you found the scale of it to be difficult to wrap your mind around? How many steps a bill has to go through, how far apart things are, how many things you have to be paying attention to at once?
It’s just orders of magnitude. We’re a big, powerful nation; there are a lot of interests; and you certainly learn about, ‘I can’t believe somebody has that job,’ when you realize there’s some particular interest – people who just deal with sugar, that’s the only thing they do. On a national scale, you’re talking about the whole of the various productive endeavors that people can undertake. The dollars behind it are orders of magnitude greater. The number of individuals that are going to interact with the federal government is far and away beyond anything you could even really imagine at the state level.
Your initial committee assignments are Veterans’ Affairs and Small Business. Were those the assignments you were gunning for? How are you going to make those work – are you hoping for something different if you’re re-elected to future terms?
Like many people who come to Congress, their committee assignments will change as they gain seniority. Veterans’ Affairs was always on my list, from the beginning. Small Business, quite frankly, was not on my list, but small businesspeople drive the economy. I met with the Chamber of Commerce already, during the first district work period. We’ve had some meetings in the Small Business Committee, trying to make sure that the Small Business Administration works better in terms of its interaction with veterans so that veterans can get their small businesses moving forward.
At the VA, there are of course many challenges, including some of the things we’ve been addressing in New Jersey: access to care, community care issues, transportation to care. The veterans’ administration is a very large agency, and we’ve spent quite a lot of time in committee hearing about dysfunction in the VA. As someone who’s been in practice, managed patients, sent them off to other vendors of care depending on what’s going on with them and their health, I have been disappointed. It is clear to me that the VA is understaffed and needs more resources to do its work. I’m sure there are some reorganizational things that need to take place as well. You ought to be able to get this referral process done more quickly than it’s currently being done. If we did nothing else, we’ll have done a lot to save people’s lives and make sure that the outcomes people receive in the VA meet the expectations of everyone who interacts with it.
Having said that, veterans will tell you, repeatedly, that they want the veterans’ administration and their ability to access care to be there forever. They are pleased, generally by and large, with the care they get there, and there have been several studies that show that the care that veterans receive in the VA system is as good as any care they’ll get anyplace else. And so we want to preserve the best that’s there, but we have to deal with the mechanics and the administration of the VA to make sure it works more quickly and with less administrative burden than it does at present. That, I guess, is my early assessment having had just three committee meetings here on the VA Committee.
On health care more broadly – you were the Health Committee chair in the State Assembly. You don’t necessarily have that same high-ranking perch here, but you’re still part of that conversation. Health care reforms, from what I’ve seen, don’t seem to be a huge focus of what the Republican majority is trying to do right now; they’re focusing on other things related to taxes and energy policy and immigration. What would you like to see Congress do with regards to health care?
The number one job right now is to prevent the cuts to physician payments under Medicare. In the last 20-odd years, physicians’ payments have declined by 33 percent, and costs have gone up by I think 26%. So you have costs that are going up, and reimbursements for care that are going down quite dramatically, in ways that are not commensurate with other industries. At bottom, this dynamic of cut after cut after cut to physician reimbursement means that if Medicare is your main insurance, doctors are going to increasingly be unable to afford to treat you, which is the same dynamic we see in so much of the Medicaid system. As physicians and other groups who are interested in the care of patients – senior groups, AARP, et cetera – we need to impress upon this Congress that this proposed 2.8% cut in fees should be reversed, should not happen, and then we need to quickly pivot to reforming the payment system so that it’s sustainable over time. These repeated efforts we have to make to stop these deleterious cuts would go away if we got down to business on comprehensive reform of the reimbursement system. The Senate has a working group on their side, as I understand it. Perhaps we will follow suit with our own working group or see what their product is, and the parties will take it up over here. But something needs to be done.
Then there’s an issue that I have been working on in New Jersey: dealing with social media and health care. As you know, I’ve done a lot on mental health services for kids, nutritional standards for kids, kids’ health care expansions and the like. I’m very pleased to see these commercials now that Instagram is coming out with, calling for more parental control for kids that are 16 years and younger. I would praise them for doing that, and perhaps there’s an opportunity now there to see whether or not Congress can finally get going on an issue of concern to many parents across the country, and that is the impact of social media on their kids.
I’m very pleased – and I talked to the governor about it last week – [about New Jersey] dealing with the issue of cell phones during school hours. That they’re taking this issue on is, I think, critically important. If kids are going to be in school and learning, they need to be paying attention to the lesson that’s being imparted in the classroom. Kids need to focus on the tasks of the day, and you can’t do that when you’re getting interruptions from texts. It’s causing a lot of problems. Where these measures have been introduced, within about two weeks, teachers begin to notice a change in the deportment and the attention of their charges. I believe, although the data’s not there yet, as these policies take hold, we’re going to see achievement gains as well. An attentive child is a child that can learn, and you’d expect that to translate into academic achievement gains. I’m very hopeful about that, and should it be taken up at the national level – it’s common-sense enough to me that a measure like that ought to go forward. But states are moving ahead of the federal government, as they often do, because they’re smaller jurisdictions and they can move things faster. It’s a much simpler process to get things done at the state level. It is a great aspect of our country that we have these 50 experiments in democracy, and we can learn from each other as we think about what’s worked, what the response has been, and as we study what’s going on in different jurisdictions.
One other health-related question: you’re a physician from South Jersey. Do you think that pork roll and Taylor Ham are things that New Jerseyans should be consuming at the rates that they do?
Well, I’ll tell you, I grew up as a Case’s Pork Roll person. It was the one thing that I could cook up for myself and make a sandwich with beyond peanut butter and jelly when I was a kid. The dietary choices that people make, the amount of fat in your diet, the amount of salt in your diet should always be of concern. Quite frankly, pork roll – as much as I enjoy it – you have to be careful how much of it you eat, because it is high in salt and high in fat, as good-tasting as it is. If somebody said, ‘Do you want a pork roll sandwich right now?’ I’d say ‘Go get me one.’ But we have recommendations on this, and people should watch their salt intake, they should watch their intake of fats, and limit those. I don’t say never have them, but a balanced diet that has an appropriate relationship with the various components of that diet is important for everyone.
The problems you mentioned before with Medicare and Medicaid are happening in a broader conversation about what the Trump administration is doing with federal funding. Obviously, this has been a very, very eventful first few weeks for any presidency. To what extent do you agree with any of what the Trump administration is doing, and how do you think Democrats should best respond to this stuff that’s coming down from above?
Well, there’s a lot of concern among the public. When you look at what’s going on in the news not only in our country but around the world, there is a growing concern about what the administration is doing and what its impacts are going to be on the American people. And I think it is absolutely true that these cuts are being made in service of a narrow special interest of very wealthy people. That interest, very often, will be a detriment to people who are not wealthy – it will be a detriment to average people. Because it’s average people that are employed in these agencies; it’s average families that have a parent in a nursing home that need care or have someone they know who needs to go to the hospital; who want to see their kids educated, particularly children with disabilities. People care whether or not a kid can go to a venue of care that will allow them to get adequate nutrition, and get weighed, and make sure that they’re not being exposed to lead so they can grow healthy and strong and able to live out their dreams.
I’m very concerned about our withdrawal from the world stage in terms of health. There’s so much that’s important for America and the world. Having a relationship with other countries and the health systems of other countries, in part through the involvement of the World Health Organization – our surveillance for emergent pathogens relies on good communication and institutions overseas. I see this as a public health officer in Burlington County: we would get alerts of somebody leaving Africa coming from an Ebola region, someone leaving the Middle East when MERS was circulating, Zika. We are not on an island, in our own spaceship, in our own bubble. It is an increasingly small globe. A lot of people travel all over the place, entering our country. And some of them are going to be bringing pathogens with them. We have people coming from countries where their vaccinations are not up to snuff – then we get another measles outbreak. And we haven’t even gotten to the RFK Jr. situation.
We’ve got trials on an HIV vaccine that are halted now. You get to [the United States Agency for International Development], you’ve got kids that are starving because $800 to $900 million of food is sitting in warehouses rather than being distributed to people in need. And this soft power that America exerts is critical to our national security. There’s an economic benefit if you’re a farmer growing corn and wheat, and making a surplus that then goes into a distribution system for food for people who need it in other parts of the world. Our involvement there is important to raising the prestige of our country and the humanity of our country around the world. People understand that our nation is a wealthy nation, and in other countries they appreciate that we are helping to bring clean water to a community, that we’re bringing food, that we’re bringing electrification, that we’re helping to build their health care infrastructure. This soft power is critical to our power writ large, and the vacuum created by our withdrawal only allows China and Russia to walk right in. They are cheering this decision to withdraw from that arena. Hopefully that can be reversed – I’m hopeful that it will be – but when the administration’s keenest interest seems to be how to figure out how to pay for a $1.5 trillion tax cut, then you have to stop paying for a whole bunch of things, which hurts individuals and, in the context of USAID, hurts our national defense.
You raised a question as to what Democrats should be doing. This is certainly something that we saw in our town meetings. We have to resist broadly, and everywhere we can, these initiatives that we know are going to hurt average Americans, not only in my district but across the country. We know we have to stand up and raise the alarm. I stood out in front of the Labor Department at a rally and raised concerns about Elon Musk’s access to records and health care information in the department. I’ve stood in front of HHS to decry the nomination of RFK Jr. We’re having town hall meetings to let people know what’s going on so that they can be activated, write their cards and letters, call into the White House to say that these changes are wrong and bad for the American people. Certainly, we’re supporting the cases that need to be brought before the courts to push back against what we regard, I think quite rightly, as illegal actions that usurp the power that Congress has over the purse. These are laws that have been passed, these appropriations have been made, and to think that, without going back to Congress, you can simply brush aside those enactments of spending and the priorities that are embodied in those spending bills – the best thing about our system is this counterpoise between the executive, the legislative, and the judicial. If the executive is going to basically run the whole show, then we’re going to lose something very important about our country and the power of regular people – not oligarchs, not people who are grabbing every bit of power they possibly can. It will be good for them, but it will be bad for the average citizen in this country.
Resistance on all fronts is what we should be doing. And I think that the American people, at the end of the day, in their righteous anger, will put this right. The hope is that that will happen soon enough, before there’s so much destruction that the rebuilding process is going to be much longer than it need be.
A lot of this stuff was known even before the election – the involvement of Elon Musk, the involvement of RFK Jr., the desire to cut taxes and cut spending. And yet the American people still did vote for Trump; New Jersey shifted 10 points to the right, your district shifted six points to the right. You said that you want the American people to have a whiplash back against this, but this is also sort of what they voted for. How do you –
Well I would disagree that the American people foresaw any of this. What they were told by the president – and by the way, something that he has done nothing about, and in fact has actually exacerbated – was that he was going to bring down inflation, and he was going to bring down the cost of living for the American people. Indeed, the latest figures are showing that the exact opposite has happened. He hasn’t addressed this issue really at all, except to make it worse.
He has talked about tariffs, he’s imposed them, and a tariff is nothing but a tax on the American people. For the average American person, they’re going to be paying $1,000 to $1,200, roughly, more per year for the goods that they buy – that is inflationary. And he’s done nothing about, and will do nothing about, the massive consolidation in the industries that supply food, the industries that supply health care. That is also inflationary.
I have to tell you, I don’t think anybody contemplated that the president would abrogate all of this power and control to Elon Musk. Elon Musk was going to have the ear of the president? People expected that. You can argue that Elon Musk elected the president in many ways by the actions he took – $250 million, I think bribing people to vote and to register to vote. Those things are illegal, you’re not allowed to do that. He’s not been prosecuted for it, it’s been raised in the press. But I don’t think anybody contemplated that he and his band of 20-year-olds would be able to go in and access the private data of anybody who pays taxes, of anybody who’s on Medicare. Will there be an appropriate penalty for that illegal activity? Were oaths taken to support the Constitution of the United States in what he’s doing? There’s certainly no department for it, there’s been no appropriation. We have, in my view, a rogue element in the government.
People did not vote for this. They did not vote for chaos, they did not vote for incompetent people being appointed to critical agencies. We’ve got a guy running the Defense Department now – I mean, if he has an issue with alcohol dependence. I’m a physician, I am sympathetic and want to make sure that person gets help. But has he gotten help? Is he going to be able to be ready to go when the call comes in at 3 o’clock in the morning? This is a person who’s never run an agency with more than a couple hundred people in it, and when he did run those agencies, their financial situation turned out to be a shambles and he was dismissed for mismanagement. And now you’re going to put him in charge of the largest bureaucracy in the world? I think people would say it’s impossible for something like that to happen. Nobody would be foolish enough to put that kind of a person in charge of an agency like that. But yet here we are. Nobody would think that we’d put a person who is skeptical of science and data in charge of one of the foremost agencies [HHS] that relies on data, and facts, and truth-telling as an essential part of the mission – and yet that’s what we have. I don’t think anybody voted for that.
So that’s why I think that people are going to rise up in righteous anger and deal with this issue, along with those of us – mostly Democrats – who are resisting this chaos and these illegal operations that are emanating out of the White House. We’ll see, of course, whether I’m right or not about the legality of some of these actions – but it will go to court, and whatever the court says, we’ll agree with the court’s ruling. Let’s see whether they do when some of these things that they want to do receive the approbation of the court. And then, when they don’t, we’re going to have a constitutional crisis.
Your district has been through a lot of different members of Congress in the last 15 years. You had John Adler followed by Jon Runyan followed by Tom MacArthur followed by Andy Kim, and now you. That means that it hasn’t had the opportunity to develop all that much seniority. And frankly, you are in your early 60s – you’re joining the freshman class as one of its older members. How do you intend to build power for this district, one that hasn’t been able to really get that over the last couple of decades?
We Conaways are long livers, and we never stop working.