Greetings from Wittman Watch HQ! 👋 🇺🇸
Last Tuesday we predicted how Rob Wittman will try to attack Shannon Taylor, and gave you the tools to counter these attacks.
On Thursday we suggested five ways you can lower your cost of living. (Spoiler: all of them involve voting Wittman out!)
Today we welcome you to the first Thursday Throwdown, an occasional series that debunks whatever nonsense Rob Wittman has been spinning. He runs around like a rodeo clown, but he never jumps into action to represent and protect the regular people of VA-01 – and we can prove it.
For today’s Throwdown, we have a lot of options. Over the last two weeks, Rob has sent at least 11 emails:
Four about health care
Three on the Chesapeake Bay
Two puff pieces about his public service history (why?!)
Two about 529 savings plans
He’s also posted several photo ops on social media, and said he was “horrified and heartbroken” about the shooting at VSU (after voting against every gun regulation bill since 2019 and celebrating a 19th anniversary of receiving money from the NRA).
But it’s what he didn’t talk about at all that shows who he truly is.
The 2,500 square miles of Virginia coastal seafloor that a Florida treasure-hunting company wants to vacuum up, based on policies whose development Wittman has led.
The 5,000 American sailors who have spent more than 260 days at sea aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, fighting a war Congress never authorized, in conditions their own families describe as unlivable.
Are these omissions an oversight? Nope. Rob Wittman uses strategic silences to hide the true impact of his work on the constituents whom he represents. Well, we think that stinks. Wittman may be a clown, but he’s a dangerous clown.
It’s throwdown time!
Dredge, baby, dredge
Here’s the headline: Wittman consistently joins small, bipartisan, uncontroversial conservation items, and is consistently absent from the fights that will determine the health and future of the Chesapeake Bay.
In his newsletters, he has mentioned four measures where he demonstrated leadership:
Mitigation Action and Watermen Support (MAWS) Act (H.R. 4294):
This helps watermen fight invasive blue catfish in the Chesapeake Bay Watershed.
Wittman is a co-sponsor; it was written by Rep. Sarah Elfreth, the Democrat from Maryland’s 3rd District, although he occasionally refers to it as “my” bill.
Status: Not yet law. Passed the House; stuck in Senate committee for five months so far.America’s Conservation Enhancement (ACE) Act of 2020 (P.L. 116-188):
This raised the authorization ceiling (note those words!) for the EPA Chesapeake Bay Program from a lapsed $40 million (expired 2005) to $90 million in FY21, stepping to $92 million by FY25.
He helped pass the original ACE Act as a House cosponsor in 2020, and led the House reauthorization that became law at the end of 2024.
Status: Authorizations are permission slips, not money. ACE funds partnerships, monitoring, modeling, and some grants. The actual pollution-reduction dollars are elsewhere, and Trump’s FY26 budget proposed cutting those funds by $3.46 billion. The FY27 request trimmed the Bay Program itself from $93 million to $91 million while cutting EPA overall by 52%. What has Wittman done about this? Nothing.Advancing Water Research and Collaboration (AWRC) Act (H.R. 7889):
Wittman is the lead sponsor of this bill to “amend the Water Resources Research Act of 1984 to reauthorize the water resources research and technology institutes program.” It’s a research-coordination bill roughly thirteen months from any possible effect on water quality. In real terms: it appropriates no money, but simply reauthorizes coordination on research activities. See how this sounds important but delivers nothing tangible? That’s Wittman’s whole shtick in a nutshell.
Status: Hasn’t passed the House. All Wittman’s done is introduce this bill. Nothing has happened with it.$400,000 in the FY27 Commerce-Justice-Science bill for the Virginia Institute of Marine Science (VIMS).
Status: Not actually appropriated. His own release states the measure “has been approved by the House Appropriations Committee and awaits passage on the House Floor.” In the context of our $1.3 billion seafood economy and a 40-year restoration failure, $400,000 is a rounding error – but he announced it as an accomplishment, and it hasn’t even happened yet.
Let’s summarize simply: with these measures, Wittman has achieved nothing of substance on the Bay or for our watermen. They are all pinky-promise achievements, optimistic hopes that something will emerge from them. Folks, he’s had 19 years to do something — ANYTHING! — and this is all he has. This is performative politics, and it has real, negative impacts on our district.
Where is Wittman in the fight to restore the Bay’s health, and to protect it from further harm? Here’s where: his own signature achievements threaten the Bay, and he’s trying to hide it by speaking only about these tepid measures, most of which have not even become law!
We won’t let Wittman hide how his own policies threaten the Bay
Wittman is Vice Chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee. He said he would use this position to advocate for a cleaner, safer, healthier Chesapeake Bay. He also sits on the Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee, which on January 22 held an oversight called “Deep Dive: Examining the Regulatory and Statutory Barriers to Deep Sea Mining.” Note that word: “barriers”.
Wittman has spent three years building an argument to open up American waters to seabed mining. In December 2023, he and Elise Stefanik (R-NY) led 31 Republicans in a letter urging the Pentagon to allow seabed mining as a new way to compete with China. He co-chairs the Critical Minerals Policy Working Group, where his stated priority — dating back to at least 2024 — is overhauling environmental permitting to expand domestic mining.
“Top of mind for Wittman is an environmental permitting overhaul to help expand domestic mining and rare earth production.”
— Axios, July 3, 2024
Wittman wants the Pentagon to use the Defense Production Act to strategically stockpile key minerals as a counter to Chinese export controls on gallium, germanium and graphite. His bipartisan SECURE Minerals Act (H. R. 7126), which he crows about frequently, would create a wholly government-owned corporation with a $2.5 billion authorization to stabilize prices and stockpile minerals, on the explicit theory that Chinese pricing makes domestic projects impossible.
Read that last part again: the bill exists to make mineral projects viable that the market would not otherwise support. This brings us to a company called Odyssey Marine Exploration.
The Florida-based Odyssey wants a minimum 20-year lease on roughly 2,500 square miles of seafloor (an area larger than the state of Delaware) just north of the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. They use trailing suction hopper dredging: a vessel drags a vacuum across the bottom, digging down close to ten feet. The Army Corps uses the same technology to clear navigation channels, but never at anything approaching this scale. No one has done shallow seabed mining commercially in the United States. No one has done it successfully anywhere; similar projects in Namibia, Mexico, and New Zealand have been paused, stalled, or rejected outright.
What’s more, nobody has studied what minerals actually exist on the seabed floor. Virginia Energy’s own geologist has said the mineral “hot spots” come from surveys done in the 1980s and ‘90s, and that those surveys may contain anomalies, and would require follow-up. Odyssey told federal regulators they’re confident they can develop the resource, but then they redacted the numbers (which does not suggest confidence in those numbers!). In its 2025 annual report, the company told the SEC that its losses raise substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern. (Worth noting: Odyssey spent years in federal court trying to claim a Spanish shipwreck’s treasure, lost the case, and was ordered to hand it back.)
So what’s at risk? Virginia’s seafood industry generated $1.3 billion and supported about 7,200 jobs in 2023. Menhaden, the keystone forage fish that feeds striped bass and osprey, migrate straight through that water into the Bay. So do North Atlantic right whales, loggerhead sea turtles, and Atlantic sturgeon. Accomack County, Northampton County, the city of Virginia Beach, and Ocean City, Maryland have all filed concerns about Odyssey’s proposal. So has the Virginia Marine Resources Commission, whose commissioner told federal regulators he has critical concerns about the impact on fisheries and the businesses that depend on them.
Now, two notable facts:
Wittman has advocated primarily for deep-sea nodule mining, as this 2023 letter to DOD shows. This would be for deposits “hundreds to thousands of miles from shore” at depths of 200 meters or more, regulated by the International Seabed Authority. By contrast, Odyssey’s Virginia proposal is for industrial dredging in 15 to 330 feet of water, a few dozen miles offshore, regulated domestically by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), part of the Department of the Interior. Odyssey’s proposed operation is different to that described in Wittman’s letter. However, they each share the same justification – which Wittman has championed.
As far as we can tell, Odyssey is not a donor to Rob Wittman. We searched the public record for Odyssey, The Metals Company, Impossible Metals, and every related term we could think of, and found nothing. So any suggestion that Wittman has been “paid off” is not substantiated.
Wittman didn’t get bought. He built the argument, and now he seems prepared to sacrifice the coast of the Commonwealth he has spent 19 years telling us he loves — for reasons he will neither explain nor justify.
What’s the response from the man who chairs two committees with jurisdiction over this issue? Nothing. No statement on the Odyssey proposal. No statement on the June 22 BOEM notice about Odyssey’s proposal. No comment in any of his newsletters about the Bay.
Now, Wittman could say that Odyssey’s proposal is adjacent to Jen Kiggans’ district (VA-02), not VA-01. But she’s said nothing about it either! In fact, while all of Virginia’s Democratic representatives and senators demanded that BOEM extend the comment deadline on Odyssey’s proposal, Virginia’s entire Republican Congressional delegation has been 100% absent.
The fact is that if the seabed adjacent to the Bay is dredged, the impacts will be felt by the entire Bay and all of its communities, including the parts in VA-01. And Rob Wittman knows that.
All of this is part of a repeating pattern. When Wittman sends us messages about the (minimal, mostly unfinished) measures he’s involved with on the Bay, he’s talking about non-controversial work where broad consensus already exists. But when questions about seabed mining come up, he has to choose between his conservation “brand” and his defense-oriented, critical-minerals agenda – and he wimps out. Despite the comment period on the mining closing on August 22nd, for weeks he’s sent us emails about other things.
What can YOU do? Before the federal comment window closes this Friday, go here to submit your comments on this proposal. Because Rob Wittman will stay silent while his own policies threaten the Chesapeake Bay and all of us who rely upon it.
He oversees only his own complicity
On November 21, 2025, the USS Abraham Lincoln left San Diego. It has made only one port stop since, a single day at Guam in December. It has now been at sea longer without a port call than any American carrier in living memory, supporting a war against Iran that began February 28 and that Congress has never authorized. (Wittman voted against ending unauthorized hostilities with Iran every time it came up.)
The reason for the history-making length of deployment traces back to the war’s first hours. On February 28, the day hostilities began, Iran struck the headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet in Bahrain, badly damaging the region’s main logistics hub. Military supply lines are, of course, absolutely essential to the success of campaigns. The Navy was forced to reroute supplies through the British-operated island of Diego Garcia, located 2,200 miles away in the Maldives. That is not a reliable supply line; it’s fragile, distant, and lower capacity than Bahrain. According to reports, the destruction of the U.S.’s Bahrain facility led directly to the strain on the Lincoln and to its historic tenure at sea.
Critics have accused Hegseth of actively concealing the extent of the damage in Bahrain. The Pentagon has separately been caught downplaying casualties elsewhere in the war, including quietly removing four confirmed deaths from its official casualty count in August. In any case, as Vice Chair of the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), it’s Wittman’s job to hold the Pentagon to account, and especially Hegseth himself. The damage in Bahrain was on the first day of the conflict – 173 days ago – and the impact on supply lines and America’s global defense preparedness was obvious from the start. Why has Wittman failed to ask Hegseth a single question about this critical issue in 173 days?!
The consequences for our service members have been physically and mentally horrific. On August 3, a sailor went overboard. He was recovered within the hour by a search-and-rescue helicopter and transferred off the ship for care. The Navy has described it as a mental health episode. Family members, speaking to Military Times and to Navy leadership at town halls this month, say multiple sailors have jumped overboard to escape conditions on the ship. They have described moldy showers, broken toilets, weeks without hot water, food shortages, and a ship’s doctor warning that the crew needed port soon. Acting Navy Secretary Cao (a close friend and campaign buddy of Rob Wittman’s) disputes parts of that account, and Hegseth claimed the reports “misrepresented” the facts – but failed to provide any proof. Asked on August 14 whether the deployment had run too long, the President said it was not nearly long enough.
The Pentagon has now taken action, and is moving the USS George Washington from the Pacific to replace the Lincoln in the Middle East. Even Hegseth’s former employer, Fox News, understands the downstream impacts of this move:
“The real problem is deterrence: Can we sustain a demanding conflict in the Middle East while keeping enough ready combat power elsewhere to persuade China that this is not its moment to attack Taiwan?”
Since the destruction of the Bahrain facility, this dilemma was 100% predictable, and now it’s urgent. U.S. forces are being stretched thin worldwide, creating weaknesses and vulnerabilities that our adversaries can exploit. This is what America now faces because of Trump, Hegseth, Cao, and Wittman’s multiple and cascading strategic follies.
In his role on the HASC, Rob Wittman chairs the Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcommittee. He sits on Seapower and Projection Forces, which he used to chair. He co-chairs the Congressional Shipbuilding Caucus. He is, by any measure, one of the most powerful people in Congress on exactly this concern.
He has said nothing about the plight of the service members on the USS Lincoln, or the consequences for America’s global defense and strategic priorities.
This is not the first time Wittman has defaulted to silence when Navy service members have suffered at the hands of Trump, Hegseth, and Cao. The USS Gerald R. Ford came home to Norfolk on May 16 after 326 days, the longest carrier deployment since Vietnam. In March, a fire in its laundry burned for more than a day; over 200 sailors were treated for smoke inhalation and roughly 600 lost their bunks. There were sewage failures and inoperable laundry – on a $13 billion ship.
Wittman could have raised questions. He did not — but someone else did. On March 19, Senator Tim Kaine wrote to the Secretary of the Navy demanding answers on maintenance, morale, and retention, and noting that sailors “and their families in Virginia are being pushed to a breaking point.” Kaine is the ranking member of a Senate seapower subcommittee. Wittman is the vice chairman of the House committee that writes the defense bill. He’s a friend of Acting Secretary Cao, for crying out loud! So why did he do nothing?
Oh, but he did do something, and it’s right on brand: rather than meet with sailors from the USS Ford or their families, Rob Wittman met with his defense contractor donors.
On June 3, the House passed a war powers resolution directing the President to end hostilities with Iran. Four Republicans crossed over: Massie, Fitzpatrick, Barrett, Davidson. Wittman voted Nay.
So: Wittman voted to keep the deployment running, and his committee owns the oversight of what it costs the crew. When the bill came due in the form of deteriorating conditions, exhaustion, at least one man in the water, and weakening America’s defense in the Pacific, the man who calls himself an advocate for our men and women in uniform and committed to America’s global defense sent us 11 emails without a single damn word about any of it.
What you can do now
Before Friday, August 22, file a public comment with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management on the Virginia mineral leasing proposal. Regular people already have. It takes five minutes and it goes in the record.
Call Wittman’s offices. Yorktown, (757) 527-6270. Glen Allen, (804) 401-4120. Washington, (202) 225-4261. Ask two questions, politely, and write down what they say:
Does the congressman support Odyssey’s lease off Virginia’s coast, yes or no?
As Vice Chairman of Armed Services, what has he asked the Navy about conditions aboard the Lincoln and the Ford?
He owes us all answers on both these issues. He has jurisdiction over both, and for two straight weeks – with 11 chances to bring either one up – he has chosen silence. Is that the representation you want in Congress?
Nope, neither do we. Support Shannon Taylor’s campaign however you can! We can’t afford Rob Wittman.
There’s more to Rob Wittman than you think
Rob Wittman’s disinformation campaigns are detailed and numerous. Arm yourself against them using our archive. Here’s where you can get more insight on some of the topics in today’s newsletter.
Chesapeake Bay & the Environment
Healthcare
Representing VA-01
Jobs
To get the full picture on Rob Wittman, subscribe to this Substack (two emails a week, and we’ll never bombard your inbox about anything else) and any of our social media channels: Facebook, Instagram, BlueSky, or Reddit.
[would create a wholly government-owned corporation ]
All Republicans politicians routinely call their detractors “Communists “. Mostly they use this moniker as their hero Trump uses it consistently because his thinking and memories are with the Communist “Red” scare of the 50’s.
But the US government is now doing what Communist governments do. They are using your tax dollars to buy individual companies and abandoning capitalism that let the market decide.
So far 30 individual companies have been purchased with your tax dollars.
https://www.cato.org/blog/government-ownership-stakes-companies-becoming-routine-under-trump