Anthony Dang

I grew up in Foster City, in the district I want to represent. My dad came to the U.S. as a Vietnam War refugee, and my mom is Mexican and Native American. My older brother Andrew enlisted in the Marines after high school and was killed in Ramadi, Iraq in 2004 when I was 18. I enlisted the next day.

I deployed to Iraq in 2006, got shot, and came home with PTSD and a TBI. I have been a VA patient for over 18 years. The GI Bill got me through community college, UCSD, and a Master’s in Public Administration at Harvard. I helped start veteran transition nonprofits, then went to the Pentagon, overseeing major defense systems and contractors. From there, I moved into industry, where I blew the whistle on fraud at a defense contractor. The retaliation cost me my career, and I was featured in a More Perfect Union exposé about waste in the defense industry.

I founded ProConcordia, a Public Benefit Corporation that translates federal legislation into plain language and tracks who is paying for what in Washington. That information should be available to every voter, not just to those who can afford lobbyists.

I am running because this district deserves a representative who has actually been failed by the system rather than someone who has spent a career benefiting from it. We need people who understand what it means to sacrifice for the greater good, not people who use public office for personal gain.