Mike Gallagher

Michael John Gallagher (born March 3, 1984) is an American Republican politician from Brown County, Wisconsin.

He graduated in 2002 as valedictorian.

Gallagher was a United States Marine Corps intelligence officer, serving seven years (2006–13) on active duty.

He twice deployed to the Al Anbar Province, Iraq, serving on General David Petraeus's CENTCOM Assessment Team, both as a commander of intelligence teams in Al-Qa'im near the Syrian border.

Gallagher earned his B.A. in 2006 from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.

With a growing interest in global security, he changed his major from Spanish to Arabic.

Gallagher completed a 117-page senior thesis, "New Approaches to Asymmetric Threats in the Middle East: From Fighting to Winning", under the supervision of Frederick Hitz.

At this time he completed a summer internship abroad with the RAND Europe (UK) CIC in Cambridge, United Kingdom, working on a strategic study of terrorist groups such as Basque separatists.

Gallagher served his first tour of duty in the Iraq War with the United States Marine Corps.

His first deployment was in November 2007 to lead a counterintelligence and human intelligence team, a time where al-Qaeda appeared to have been defeated by the Iraq War troop surge of 2007; giving "some semblance of stability in the town."

He made a back-to-back deployment from 2008, taking over from a team led by Matt Pottinger.

He assessed American military strategy in the Middle East and Central Asia in his role as a counterintelligence officer, and as a member of the CENTCOM assessment team.

In an interview with The American Interest, Gallagher was very critical of the Obama administration's subsequent drawdown of United States troops from Iraq, because:"'... all the predictions we made at the time about creating a vacuum and how dangerous that was proved to be true. And I think the broader regional policy in the Obama Administration of seeking accommodation with the Iranian regime in the hopes that this would produce what the President referred to as a new equilibrium in the region produced exactly the opposite: disequilibrium."

Subsequently, Gallagher began a MSSI (Master of Science in Strategic Intelligence) at National Intelligence University and graduated in 2010.

In the 118th United States Congress, Gallagher serves as chairman of the House Select Committee on Competition with the Chinese Communist Party.

He was a decisive vote against the impeachment of Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in February 2024, resulting in outrage directed against him from some members of his party.

Days later, Gallagher announced he would not run for a fifth term in Congress.

Prior to his election to Congress, Gallagher served as a military intelligence officer for seven years, including overseas deployments in the Iraq War, and worked as committee staff on the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

He is married to Broadway actress Anne Horak Gallagher.

Gallagher lived in Green Bay through middle school.

After his parents' divorce, he moved to California and studied at Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana, while spending summers in Wisconsin.

Gallagher later said his teachers "endowed me with a love for history and set me on a path to earning a Ph.D. with a focus on Cold War history."

Gallagher completed a second M.A. in security studies at Georgetown University in 2012.

He then began doctoral studies, writing a dissertation on the administrations of Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower and the Cold War, receiving his Ph.D. in government and international relations in 2015.

His dissertation committee was chaired by Andy Bennett and included Keir A Lieber and Colin Dueck.

Gallagher served as a Republican staffer on the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

Governor of Wisconsin Scott Walker hired him as a foreign policy advisor in February 2015, in preparation for his 2016 presidential campaign.

After Walker dropped out of the presidential race, Gallagher worked as a senior marketing strategist for Breakthrough Fuel, a supply-chain management company.

He then ran for Wisconsin's 8th congressional district seat, to which Reid Ribble was not seeking reelection.

Gallagher won the primary against Wisconsin state senator Frank Lasee and Forestville village president Terry McNulty.

In the general election, Gallagher defeated Outagamie County Executive Tom Nelson, 63% to 36%.

Gallagher voted in line with President Donald Trump's position 93.8% of the time in the 115th Congress and 84.2% of the time in the 116th Congress, but broke with the White House on issues such as the Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey and Trump's denial of Russian interference in the 2016 elections.

He voted against the majority of his party about 8.7% of the time.

He is a member of the United States House of Representatives, representing Wisconsin's 8th congressional district since 2017.

His district comprises much of the northeast quadrant of the state of Wisconsin, including the city of Green Bay.

He was reelected in 2018 over Brown County assistant district attorney Beau Liegeois.

In 2018, Gallagher argued that power in the House of Representatives was too concentrated in the leadership; he proposed allowing committee members to choose their own chairs and ranking members, rather than having these positions be selected by the parties' steering committees.

This proposal was rejected in a House Republican vote.

Gallagher also argued for consolidating the appropriating and authorizing House committees and a reform of the House calendar that would have the chamber sit "at least five days a week for three consecutive weeks, then spend a full week back in their districts" (a change from the current congressional practice of very short legislative workweeks and frequent long weekends allowing members more time in their districts).

His unsuccessful reform proposals were praised by Norm Ornstein, a scholar of Congress, as "constructive" although unlikely to be adopted.