1. William Ballard Hurd was born on August 19,1977 and is an American politician and former CIA clandestine officer who served as the US representative for from 2015 to 2021.
80 Facts About Will Hurd
1. 2.
Will Hurd ran for Congress again in 2014 and was successful.
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Will Hurd was re-elected in 2016 and again in 2018, but did not seek re-election in 2020.
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On June 22,2023, Will Hurd announced that he was seeking the Republican nomination for president of the United States in the 2024 election.
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Will Hurd dropped out of the race on October 9,2023, and endorsed Nikki Haley.
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Will Hurd was born on August 19,1977, in San Antonio, Texas.
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Will Hurd is the son of Mary Alice Hurd and Robert Hurd.
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Will Hurd has a brother, Chuck, and a sister, Elizabeth.
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Will Hurd's father is black and his mother is white.
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Will Hurd was student body president during the 1999 Aggie Bonfire collapse.
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Will Hurd majored in computer science and minored in international relations.
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Will Hurd worked for the Central Intelligence Agency for nine years, from 2000 to 2009.
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Will Hurd was stationed primarily in Washington, DC, but his tour of duty included being an operations officer in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India.
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Will Hurd speaks Urdu, the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan, where he worked undercover.
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One of his roles at the CIA was briefing members of Congress, which is what made Will Hurd want to pursue politics.
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Will Hurd returned to Texas after his CIA service and worked as a partner with Crumpton Group LLC, a strategic advisory firm, and as a senior adviser with FusionX, a cybersecurity firm.
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On November 19,2009, Will Hurd announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination in Texas's 23rd congressional district, a district that is two-thirds Hispanic.
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Will Hurd's electronically filed campaign finance records indicated he had $70,000 on hand to fund his campaign.
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Will Hurd faced the second-place finisher, Francisco "Quico" Canseco, a San Antonio banker who was making his third bid for Congress.
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Will Hurd ran for the 23rd district in the 2014 United States House of Representatives elections.
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Will Hurd conducted a post-election swing through some parts of his district that had heavily supported Gallego.
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Will Hurd was the only candidate ever to be endorsed by former CIA director and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who admired Hurd's work at the CIA and was disappointed by his departure to run for public office.
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Gates said that Will Hurd "has the character and the integrity and the leadership skills for higher office".
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Will Hurd criticized Trump's "nasty rhetoric" about Muslims and Latinos and his proposal to build an $8 billion, 1,000-mile-long wall across the American border with Mexico.
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Will Hurd described the proposal as "the most expensive, least effective way to do border security".
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Will Hurd stated that he did not need to associate himself with Trump to succeed.
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Will Hurd claimed that Gallego had been insufficiently aggressive in support for veteran issues and was largely a tool of Nancy Pelosi, at that time the House minority leader.
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Will Hurd ran sufficiently well in the Bexar County portion of the district and in nearby Medina and Uvalde counties to offset Gallego's large margins in El Paso and Maverick counties, the latter of which encompasses the border city of Eagle Pass.
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Will Hurd assumed office as a US representative on January 3,2015.
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Much of Will Hurd's work focused on bipartisan cybersecurity and technology bills.
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Will Hurd has been described as a leading congressional voice on technology issues.
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In July 2015, Will Hurd was named to replace Aaron Schock of Illinois as a co-chair of the Congressional Future Caucus, along with Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii.
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Will Hurd was the vice-chair of the Border and Maritime Subcommittee of the Homeland Security Committee.
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Will Hurd was appointed to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence for his second term, replacing Mike Pompeo, who departed to head the CIA.
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Will Hurd voted against his party's positions on LGBT rights, gun control, immigration, repeal of the Affordable Care Act, and congressional oversight, and he received praise for his bipartisanship.
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Will Hurd was a member of the Republican Main Street Partnership.
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Will Hurd has said that the principal role of the government in the lives of African Americans should be to empower them to do things for themselves.
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In 2019, Will Hurd joined the Transatlantic Task Force of the German Marshall Fund and the Bundeskanzler-Helmut-Schmidt-Stiftung, co-chaired by Karen Donfried and Wolfgang Ischinger.
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Will Hurd added that a revised district plan would not affect his work in Congress or his hopes of winning a third term in 2018.
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In 2019, Will Hurd was one of eight House Republicans who voted in favor of the Equality Act, which would provide federal non-discrimination protections for LGBTQ Americans.
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In 2019, Will Hurd was one of seven Republicans to break with the Trump administration position and vote with Democrats to end a government shutdown.
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Will Hurd called for a ramp-up of US military action against ISIS in Libya and in Syria, using the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan as a model.
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Will Hurd blamed ISIL's rise on the Obama administration, accusing it of underestimating the threat.
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Will Hurd has written that Islamic extremists "are in it for the long haul, which means that we have to be ".
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Will Hurd has called for greater US defenses against foreign cyber-attacks.
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Will Hurd opposes applying the Wassenaar Arrangement to cyber technologies, arguing that "attempting to regulate cybersecurity technologies through export controls is a fundamentally flawed approach" that places the US at risk and "will not achieve the goal of curbing human rights violations".
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Will Hurd opposed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, calling it "short-sighted and ultimately dangerous", and called for the US to reimpose various sanctions against Iran, arguing that Iran violated its obligations under the agreement.
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Will Hurd has spoken out against Russian aggression, calling the Russian government "our adversary".
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Will Hurd favored the lifting of a longstanding US ban on the export of crude oil.
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Will Hurd questioned FBI director James Comey's recommendation not to seek prosecution of then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton over the Clinton e-mail controversy.
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In January 2018, Will Hurd voted down Democratic motions in the House Intelligence Committee to allow the Justice Department and FBI to review the Devin Nunes memo, a document alleging FBI abuses of surveillance powers in the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election, before releasing it to the public.
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Will Hurd voted against the release of a related memo authored by Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee.
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Will Hurd has opposed the CIA's efforts to mandate weaker encryption on smartphones and other devices to make it easier for federal agents to unlock them, arguing that stronger encryption thwarts hackers and protects national security.
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Will Hurd favors repealing the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare.
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Will Hurd did not say whether he supported or opposed the legislation.
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Ultimately, after the measure was declared dead and withdrawn from a planned vote due to insufficient support, Will Hurd "released a statement in which he appeared to oppose the overhaul".
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Will Hurd spoke out against Trump's 2017 executive order to build a wall along the southern border with Mexico, saying it was a "third-century solution to a 21st-century problem" and the "most expensive and least effective way to secure the border".
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Will Hurd instead advocated for a "flexible, sector-by-sector approach that empowers Border Patrol agents on the ground with the resources they need".
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Will Hurd criticized Trump's 2017 executive order to bar the entry of nationals of seven Muslim-majority countries to the US, describing it as the "ultimate display of mistrust".
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In February 2017, Will Hurd voted against a resolution that would have directed the House to request ten years of President Trump's tax returns, which would then have been reviewed by the House Ways and Means Committee in a closed session.
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Will Hurd said that the resolution had not been on the floor for a vote, but that he would support renewed efforts by the House to obtain the returns.
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In July 2019, Will Hurd was one of four Republican House members to vote in support of a motion to condemn tweets by Trump calling for the members of the Squad to "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came".
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Will Hurd did not openly support impeachment for the Trump-Ukraine scandal of fall 2019.
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Will Hurd became a Winter 2021 Resident Fellow at the Institute of Politics of the University of Chicago.
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In May 2021, Will Hurd was appointed to the board of directors for OpenAI.
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In July 2023, Will Hurd announced that he had resigned from OpenAI's board of directors before his presidential campaign began in order to focus on politics.
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On October 29,2024, Will Hurd was appointed as the Chief Strategy Officer at CHAOS Industries, a technology company that builds detection and monitoring solutions for defense and critical industries.
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On June 22,2023, Will Hurd announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination in the 2024 United States presidential election.
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At the time of his announcement, Hurd said he hoped his electoral record and willingness to criticize former president Donald Trump would distinguish him from other candidates.
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Will Hurd has said he will not support Trump if Trump is the eventual nominee, and said that he believes that the evidence in the indictments against Donald Trump points to Trump acting like a person who knows he is guilty.
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Will Hurd said he would not sign a pledge to support the eventual Republican nominee; signing the pledge was required by the Republican National Committee to participate in the primary debate.
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At a July 28,2023 town-hall in New Hampshire, run in partnership by WMUR-TV and the University of New Hampshire, Will Hurd outlined his issues as:.
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Will Hurd voiced support for designating a no-fly zone over Ukraine.
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Trump responded by calling Will Hurd a "failed former Congressman" and his campaign for president "ridiculous" on Truth Social.
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Will Hurd has voiced doubt about the loyalty of the Republican Party to Donald Trump, as most congressional Republicans only started to support him after he became the nominee in 2016.
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Will Hurd did not qualify for the first Republican presidential debate, which was held on August 23,2023.
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Will Hurd reiterated his desire to create a no-fly-zone over Ukraine, and concluded that none of the candidates impressed him.
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On September 20,2023, Will Hurd unveiled a detailed plan for how he would regulate AI if elected President, comparing AI to nuclear fusion, and proposing creating a branch of the executive to deal solely and directly on the issue of AI, and proposing strict regulations on civilian AI usage.
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On October 9,2023, Will Hurd suspended his campaign for president and endorsed Haley for the nomination.
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Will Hurd announced on social media that he and Wallace married on December 31,2022.