This article contains an interview with a sitting elected official. The views expressed by interviewees do not necessarily reflect those of Across the Aisle™, or its programs, including Free the Facts™ and Answer the Call™.
Representative Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) has built a reputation as one of Congress' most bipartisan lawmakers. Representing Pennsylvania's First Congressional District since 2017, he has championed bipartisan legislation on infrastructure, public safety, veterans' issues, and fiscal policy for nearly a decade.
Today, Fitzpatrick is the Republican Co-Chair of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, alongside Representative Tom Suozzi (D-NY). He also serves on the House Ways and Means Committee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
In this conversation, Fitzpatrick discusses America's fiscal outlook, the policies he believes are needed to strengthen the nation's economic future, his advice for the next generation of leaders, and what gives him hope. Some responses have been edited for clarity.
What fiscal challenge facing America keeps you up at night?
The affordability crisis—and the need to confront the structural forces driving it.
Families experience the economy through the essentials: whether they can afford a home, fill a prescription, keep the lights on, pay for child care, and still save for the future. Washington too often treats those costs as separate problems—or responds to each of them by spending more without reforming the systems driving the costs in the first place.
That is why Representative Tom Suozzi (D-NY) and I built the Problem Solvers Caucus Affordability Agenda around both sides of the equation: addressing the deeper forces pushing prices higher—including our national debt, inadequate energy supply, health care costs, and workforce shortages—while delivering practical relief across housing, health care, energy, child care, and food. We cannot lower costs for families by ignoring the structural forces driving them higher, and we cannot claim to be fiscally responsible while allowing the basic costs of American life to move beyond people’s reach. Fiscal policy is not an abstract debate about a government ledger. Federal borrowing affects interest rates. Energy constraints affect the cost of nearly everything. Housing shortages drive rents and mortgages higher. Eventually, every structural failure in Washington arrives as a bill at a family’s kitchen table.
How would you solve that challenge if it were up to you?
No durable solution to the affordability crisis will come from one party acting alone. So I would follow the model Tom and I established through the Problem Solvers Caucus: diagnose what is actually driving a cost, reform the system producing it, and build a bipartisan coalition strong
enough to turn an idea into a result.
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act is the clearest example.
We just passed one of the most consequential bipartisan housing reform packages in decades because we agreed on the underlying economic reality: America has a housing shortage, and you cannot solve scarcity by simply subsidizing the price of the same limited supply.
The bill goes directly at the bottlenecks driving the crisis. It expands supply, cuts permitting delays and duplicative requirements, removes financing barriers, modernizes outdated federal programs, helps communities convert vacant and underused properties into homes, and
strengthens access for veterans and first-time homebuyers. It also includes several provisions I led to accelerate homebuilding, rehabilitate abandoned properties, modernize the voucher program, and ensure veterans can fully access the home-loan benefits they have earned.
We should apply that same model to health care, energy, child care, and food: identify what is driving the cost, listen to the people closest to the problem, remove the barriers making it worse, and build the coalition necessary to deliver a result.
What advice do you have for young people interested in public service?
Stay close to the people you serve and away from the noise.
Public service is not about proximity to power. It is about proximity to people—to their problems, their hopes, and their needs.
Treat it as you would any important relationship: show up, listen, communicate honestly, and keep your word. Too often, we allow the narrow margin of disagreement to eclipse the broad ground we share. I have always believed that 80 percent of something is better than 100 percent of nothing.
Learn the substance. Do the work. Spend more time learning how to make government work than learning how to get attention.
Know what you believe and have the courage to defend it. But conviction and cooperation are not opposites. Some of the most important progress I have been part of began when people who disagreed on a great deal decided that the problem before them mattered more than the politics
surrounding it.
Be the person others can trust when the issue is difficult, the cameras are gone, and the work still needs to be done.
What gives you hope about America's future?
The American people.
Every day, I see a country far stronger and more united than our politics would have us believe. I see neighbors showing up for one another, veterans continuing to serve, first responders running toward danger, small businesses creating opportunity, and families carrying their communities through difficult times.
That is the real America.
Tom and I may come from different parties, but we share a belief that disagreement does not have to become division—and that country must always come before party.
America remains the greatest nation in the world because, in every generation, ordinary people have answered the call to serve something larger than themselves. As long as that spirit endures, so will the promise of America.
Want to hear more from Representative Fitzpatrick on where America is headed? Join us for our next conversation with the Co-Chairs of the Problem Solvers Caucus, Representatives Fitzpatrick and Suozzi, on July 22.
