Sam Forstag Policies
MAKE MONTANA WORK FOR WORKING PEOPLE
For a lot of us in Montana, costs have reached crisis levels. Every Montanan should be able to work a job that pays well enough to afford housing, healthcare, childcare, and a good retirement.
I’m running for Congress to give working Montanans a voice in Washington. We deserve a Representative who knows what it’s been like for so many of us to work more each year and still fall further behind, and we need a Representative who knows how to make the policy changes we’ll need to fix that.
I spent a decade organizing and fighting between fire seasons for public education and libraries, housing and healthcare, reforming our justice system and defending our civil liberties. Whether it’s fighting fire or fighting for progressive policies, you have to work with people regardless their political party. That’s what it’ll take to win this election, and that’s what it’ll take to finally start passing the big, bold changes we need now!
Make Housing Work for Working People
I know what it’s like to work 1,000 hours of overtime each fire season and still have a bigger chunk of my paycheck go to housing every year, to work two or three jobs at a time and still end up paying rent on a credit card. Too many of our representatives don’t know what that’s like, and that’s a big part of why they haven’t done anything to fix it.
Montanans are being priced out of the places we live and work, but we can fix that. Here’s how we do it:
- Deliver significant federal investment in affordable housing that’s equal in scale to the housing crisis we’re facing. That means large-scale, targeted investments to build more homes in the places we need them, and deliver rentals and houses that Montanans can afford, in the places we need them. We can do this by investing in models like community land trusts, deed-restricted housing, and subsidies for building dense, infill housing with rent restrictions to make sure that public investment results in affordable rents.
- Incentivize zoning and regulatory reform in places where onerous and outdated zoning restrictions are standing in the way of building housing where working people need it most.
- End corporate home ownership by banning the purchase of residential property by hedge funds and private equity firms, and eliminating tax breaks for institutional investors and corporations.
- Expand apprenticeships and trade school opportunities and dramatically increase the number of good, union jobs available in construction and the trades.
- Bring back the first-time homebuyer tax credit to make it cheaper for young and working people to buy and own a home.
Make Healthcare Work for Working People
Our system of private health insurance is broken, and it leaves too many of us paying too much for bad health coverage. When we provide healthcare in a constant state of crisis response, it benefits insurance corporations while all of us pay more for less. When our leaders fail to fix a broken system, corporations profit and working people do worse.
Every single Montanan should have access to health coverage that actually gets them care when they need it. Here’s how we do that:
- Give everyone the choice to join Medicare – and make it free for working people. Right now, Medicare serves the people who can access it a whole lot better than private health insurance corporations’ plans that so many of us are stuck paying for. I’ll fight to give every Montanan access to Medicare with expanded subsidies to give working Montanans the choice of free, quality health care.
- Make Medicare coverage comprehensive and keep it public:
- Expand Medicare to cover vision, hearing, dental, and long-term care for seniors.
- Eliminate attempts at privatization through Medicare Advantage.
- Ensure that our rural hospitals can continue serving Montanans by increasing reimbursement rates for Medicare and Medicaid.
- Restore and expand the enhanced ACA subsidies to ensure access to free health coverage for anyone making $70,000 or less and affordable healthcare for everyone.
- Rebuild our mental healthcare system by expanding funding for community-based mental health care, case management, and peer support services, and expanding mental health services covered under Medicaid.
Protect access to abortion and reproductive health by codifying Roe v. Wade, expanding funding for family planning providers, and reversing Ryan Zinke’s Medicaid cuts that prevent Medicaid from being used with certain reproductive healthcare providers.
Lower prescription costs by allowing Medicare to negotiate prices for all prescription drugs directly.
- Expand funding for long-term care options, including community-based and in-home care.
Make Childcare & Education Work for Working People
Childcare is too scarce and too expensive for working Montanans. This system isn’t working. Right now, we have one childcare slot available for every two to three children who need one. Montana parents who do find childcare are stuck paying an average of nearly $19,000 per year. Solving this problem is fundamental to making sure that Montana remains a place where working families can stick around to raise the next generation. Here’s how we can do that:
- Achieve universal free childcare by expanding investments in quality childcare to make sure that every Montanan who wants to start and raise a family can find free, quality childcare, regardless of where they live or how much they make.
- Invest in universal Pre-K by expanding investments in programs like Head Start and public school-based pre-K to make sure that Montana kids’ access to early education doesn’t depend on how much their parents make.
- Increase teacher pay by investing in federal matching grants to make sure that every public school teacher, educational support staff, and early educator makes a living wage.
- Increase Pell Grant funding so that Montanans who don’t come from money can choose to pursue a college education without being shackled by debt, and so that cost doesn’t stand in the way of attending community college or trade school.
- Expand Paid Leave with federal matching grants to incentivize states to fund up to 12 weeks of paid leave for new parents.
- Make sure public dollars stay in public schools. Period.
Reinvest in Public Lands & Reinvigorate Public Service
Our public lands are fundamental to our way of life, and they’re the most valuable resource we have. DOGE and Congressional Republicans like Ryan Zinke spent the last year gutting our public lands agencies, undermining basic environmental protections, and slashing the local jobs they provide.
Today, that means National Forests without trails crews, National Parks without enough rangers, slower and less effective wildfire response, and contracting out the basic work of our public lands agencies in ways that make them less effective and more expensive. I’ve seen firsthand how these cuts have harmed public lands agencies, and now we’re all paying the price.
Reinvesting in our public lands doesn’t mean just going back to the way things were. Let’s proactively invest in local, good-paying jobs so we can escape this constant state of crisis response that leaves us all paying more and getting less. We can do that. Here’s how:
- Rebuild and expand our public lands agencies by fully staffing our public lands agencies and significantly expanding investments in forest management and fuels mitigation. This will create job opportunities to get people working proactively on the wildfire crisis, create good-paying jobs in Montana, and save taxpayers money over the long term by ending our crisis-response approach to forest management.
- Invest in responsible timber harvest and modernized milling capacity here in Western Montana. We can responsibly harvest the timber we need to address a housing crisis without jeopardizing crucial environmental protections.
- Expand USDA grants to help modernize and revitalize timber mills here in Montana.
- End the reckless use of Emergency Authorizations & Fast-Track programs to circumvent fundamental environmental protections.
- Fix our approach to appeals, litigation, and NEPA enforcement by investing resources up front in fully-staffed scientific positions & community collaboration programs, and creating clear, enforceable timelines when disagreements arise to make sure we can process challenges in a timely manner without eliminating the public’s right to comment and object.
- Legalize corner crossing to make sure that all public lands are publicly accessible.
Make Taxes Work for Working People
We can afford to fix big problems in this country, and we don’t have to go deeper into debt to do it. We just need the richest people in this country to carry their own weight, just like the rest of us. True prosperity comes when every person pays their fair share. That used to be the case in this country, and it can be again.
While most working people in this country pay about a quarter to a third of our income in taxes, the wealthiest often get away with paying almost nothing. That’s a tax system that’s been rigged against working people in favor of the rich, and the fact that we haven’t fixed it is a failure of leadership from both parties. It’s not too late. Here’s how:
- Repeal Congressional Republicans’ tax cuts for the ultra-rich. The vast majority of the benefits in the “Big Beautiful Bill” went to corporations and the ultra-wealthy. Let’s repeal those provisions, keep the parts that help working people, like no taxes on overtime and tips, and use those resources to start fixing housing, healthcare, and childcare.
- Make corporations carry their own weight by raising the corporate income tax rate to 35%. This would restore the corporate tax rate to where it was just a decade ago and ensure that corporations are paying their fair share.
- Pass a minimum tax rate for millionaires by establishing a minimum marginal tax rate of 30% for income over $1 million per year, also known as the “Buffett Rule.”
- Eliminate the capital gains loophole. Income from the stock market shouldn’t be taxed at a lower rate than income earned by working for a paycheck.
- Enact a Billionaire Tax of 5% on fortunes over $1 billion. This will help alleviate the unprecedented concentration of wealth that we’re seeing in this country, incentivize reinvestment of capital, and generate the revenue we need to invest in public services without going further into debt.
Make Retirement Work for All of Us
Montanans who have worked their whole lives deserve a secure, dignified retirement. So much of what makes Montana great is the legacy of the generations that came before us. For too many Montanans who have lived and worked here their whole lives, we’re not honoring that legacy like we should.
The number of Montanans experiencing homelessness has nearly doubled in the last 20 years, and senior homelessness is projected to triple by 2030. We have to do better than that. We can afford to make sure that no one who is elderly ends up living on the street or without their basic needs met. We owe that to seniors in this country, and to ourselves as Americans. Here’s how we can do that:
- Save Social Security by just having everyone pay their fair share. Social Security is set to face solvency issues in the next decade, but the fix is simple. Eliminating the Social Security payroll tax cap would mean that the top 6% of earners pay their fair share of Social Security payroll taxes just like the other 94% of us. That alone would make Social Security solvent for the next 75 years.
- Expand Social Security benefits for seniors who need it most. I’ll support legislation like the Social Security Expansion Act, which would increase benefits for seniors by an average of $2,400 per year while keeping the program solvent well into the future.
- Make Medicare coverage comprehensive and keep it public:
- Expand Medicare to cover vision, hearing, dental, and long-term care for seniors.
- Increase reimbursement rates for Medicare and Medicaid so that our rural hospitals can continue serving Montanans.
- Eliminate attempts at privatization through Medicare Advantage.
Raise Wages & Strengthen Unions
Everyone working a full-time job deserves a living wage, basic protections, and the right to organize. I’ve found myself working two to three jobs at a time and still not having enough for rent. That’s a fundamental failure, it’s an experience too many Montanans have had, and it’s something we can fix.
Working people who fought to organize and advocate for themselves earned us basic protections like the eight-hour workday, the 40-hour workweek, and overtime pay. These are our inheritance from the organizers and union members who fought to make them a reality. Today, the right to organize is under attack and has been stripped away from many sectors of our workforce.
Despite our deep heritage of union organizing winning for working people, Montanans haven’t had a union member as a congressional candidate in over a decade. I’ve been on the front lines of fighting back against the attacks on working people and union rights. Now I’m ready to take that fight to Congress:
- Raise the federal minimum wage to at least $15 per hour and fix it permanently by tying it to the rate of inflation.
- Pass the PRO Act to guarantee workers everywhere have the freedom to organize and join a union if they want, and fight back against corporations that engage in union-busting.
- Pass the Protect America’s Workforce Act to restore collective bargaining rights to over 1 million public servants in the VA, the Bureau of Land Management, and about 30 other federal agencies where that basic right was stripped away.
- Fix the “private contractor” loophole in the National Labor Relations Act that lets corporations treat employees poorly and drives wages and protections down for everyone else.
- Protect pensions and defend benefits for workers who have fought for and earned a decent retirement.
Get Money Out Of Politics
The enormous scale of money in politics is at the core of so many of our broken systems. It’s also at the core of why we see so few working people in Congress today. The limitless spending we see in elections today leaves us more polarized and less equal, and it threatens the very foundations of our democracy.
This is a problem for working people, for all of us. It’s a core part of why working people rarely end up in Congress, and it’s a core part of why working people’s lives have gotten less affordable under both parties. Here’s how we fix it:
- Ban corporate election spending and get rid of Super PACs by passing a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. Money is not speech, corporations are not people, and the limitless flow of funding into our elections poses a threat to working people’s ability to make government work for us.
- Set strict, lower contribution limits to reduce the amount of money an individual can give to a federal campaign. Politics should be a battle of ideas, not of resources, and reducing the amount of money at all levels would help us get back to that.
- Ban congressional stock trading by members and their spouses.
- Ban former members of Congress from becoming lobbyists after they have left office.
Finally Fix Our Broken Immigration System
We have a broken immigration system in this country. We haven’t had comprehensive immigration reform in 40 years. That’s a failure of leadership, and it leaves working people in this country worse off regardless of their legal status. We need to give people who want to come to this country in pursuit of the American Dream a real, achievable pathway to do so.
We can have an immigration system that keeps violent criminals and dangerous drugs off our streets without compromising our basic constitutional freedoms, terrorizing American cities, and tearing children from their families.
We need a positive vision for how we fix our immigration system so that it actually helps working people, protects all of our basic constitutional rights, and includes accountability and oversight for immigration agents, just like any other public employee. Here’s how we can do that:
- Finally pass real, bipartisan immigration reform. Both parties have failed to reform our immigration system to the point that legal pathways to citizenship have become near-impossible to navigate. We need sweeping, comprehensive reform that provides an achievable pathway to legal status and citizenship.
- Demand accountability for federal immigration agents. The problems that led to scenes of terror in American streets are bigger than ICE. It’s a fundamental failure of leadership at DHS. Anyone in the chain of command that violated the law and peoples’ basic rights during enforcement or detention should be held to account with criminal prosecution and congressional investigations.
- Restructuring, reform, and oversight. Enforcing the law cannot come at the expense of our constitutional rights or the safety of our neighbors and communities. Here are some basic requirements that ought to serve as baselines:
- Ban face masks and require that immigration agents wear body cameras and badges.
- Require judicial warrants for search, seizure and arrests.
- End illegal surveillance by banning federal law enforcement from buying or using cell phone data without a warrant.
- Make immigration courts independent and fund them adequately so that they can administer the law impartially and process our backlog of cases in a timely fashion.
Supporting Indian Country & Tribal Sovereignty
Montana’s 1st Congressional District contains 16 counties and 2 sovereign tribal nations. I’ll fight in Congress to make the federal government work for Montana’s tribal communities. That needs to include honoring our trust and treaty obligations, respecting our government-to-government relationship with tribal nations, and empowering constituents throughout Montana to enact the change they want to see in places where the federal government has fallen short for too long.
Between fire seasons, I’ve spent years fighting at the state level for voting rights, housing, and funding for tribal colleges and libraries. I still have a lot to learn, and I’ll follow the lead of tribal leaders and local elected officials to make sure I’m continuing that fight in Congress that respects and acts in good faith with Montana’s tribal communities. Here’s how:
- Tackle the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Persons (MMIP) crisis by fixing gaps in jurisdiction within tribal borders so that non-members who commit crimes aren’t beyond accountability, expand funding for tribal law enforcement, and hold the federal government accountable when they fail to investigate.
- Expand healthcare access by increasing funding for the Indian Health Service (IHS) and grants for Urban Indian Organizations and health centers, including targeted funding to expand care that is available in tribal communities, including expanding access to tele-health care so that tribal members aren’t forced to travel long distances to access critical, specialized healthcare.
- Expand education access by increasing funding for tribal colleges and libraries and eliminating the ‘financial need’ requirement for tribal tuition waivers.
- Protect Voter Access by fighting for full funding of Election Assistance Commission grants to elections offices in Indian Country, and making sure that Montanans living on a reservation have access to satellite offices that make it easy to exercise their right to vote.
- Support the efforts of Tribal Nations to continue to manage, protect and conserve their natural resources, water, environment and cultural resources. Work to protect and ensure federal funding is available to fight fires. Plenty of tribal members rely on firefighting season to make a living. CSKT and Blackfeet tribes have been stewards of the land since time immemorial, and their tribal forest and plains management is recognized as successful ways of fire management. We must also ensure the complete implementation of the historic CSKT and Blackfeet Water compacts.
- Boarding School and other Historical Traumas
Continue the fight to bring justice for Boarding School survivors and victims of other historical traumas. Provide an opportunity for healing in tribal communities and to right the wrongs of failed federal Indian policies.
- Protect Tribes’ right to Sovereignty and Self-Determination
Propose legislation that protects government-to-government relationship and requires good faith consultations with the rollout of federally funded programs on tribal lands. Promote programs that provide tribes the right to self-management of tribal affairs. Fight to ensure that federal funding meets the needs of tribal nations to carry out programs successfully.
Let's Actually Make Government More Efficient
- Fix federal hiring by granting direct hiring authority to federal agencies where appropriate, and revamp federal hiring through USAJobs so that agencies aren’t forced into an inefficient, ineffective process where hiring a single position takes 9 – 12 months.
- Strengthen and streamline environmental regulations in a way that engages with local communities on a timeline that works for everyone. We can do this by creating and enforcing reasonable timelines for the enforcement and litigation of environmental regulations like NEPA, balancing responsible development with important environmental protections. Reforms like this would help us tackle a backlog of forest management needs and actively care for our public lands, while protecting jobs in the industries we need as we tackle a housing crisis.
- Revamp and modernize outdated platforms that are still being used for federal hiring, human resource management, payroll, and workers’ comp. When our federal agencies operate using outdated software, we all end up paying more for less.
- Create and fund a Government Efficiency Commission to provide a systematic, good faith set of solutions at making our government work more efficiently while it tackles the big problems working people are facing. That should include direct consultation with people on the ground, a strict timeline for the Commission’s Work, and a commitment to providing recommendations that aren’t weakened or misdirected by corporate interests.
Fighting for Montana's Veterans
Montanans serve in the armed forces at one of the highest rates in the country. Taking care of the men and women who serve our country in war isn’t an option, it’s our duty. We need to make sure the people who served this country get the care they need, not start new wars that we don’t need.
Despite all that, 40,000 VA workers were cut last year – the biggest cuts in the agency’s history, and more positions lost than at any other federal agency. Our veterans fought for us, and I’ll fight for them in Congress to make sure the government upholds its end of the deal. Here’s how:
- Fight efforts to privatize the VA and reverse DOGE’s cuts to VA healthcare staff. VA care should be fully funded, public, and readily accessible.
- Invest in clinics, medical staff, and telehealth to make sure veterans can access care where they need it.
- Invest in expanded mental healthcare services, so that those who served our country aren’t left with nowhere to turn in moments of crisis.
- Fight for Montanans who are facing barriers to care for injuries they sustained while serving.
Stand Up for Montana Farmers & Ranchers
Local farming and ranching are at the core of our state’s heritage, the health of our people, and the sustainability of our food systems. Over the last few years, Montana’s farmers and ranchers have had to face chaotic tariffs, corporate consolidation of farms and ranches, and price fixing from large corporations who use their size to squeeze small- and mid-scale producers. Farming and ranching are volatile businesses by nature, but those are the sorts of challenges that Congress needs to help solve.
I’ll fight to give Montana’s producers the support and consistency they need and be an ally in Congress so that they can continue serving our state by growing and raising affordable, local food. Here’s how:
- Require Country of Origin Labeling for the broadest possible list of farm and ranch products so that American consumers know where the food they buy is sourced.
- Pass a federal right to repair so that large corporations can’t squeeze producers for more after they’ve already bought the equipment they rely on.
- End market manipulation by the biggest meat and poultry packers by requiring price transparency through a publicly available database.
- Lower costs and help Montana’s small- and mid-scale food producers compete with corporations by expanding investments in federal meat inspectors and in technical assistance to small-scale, local meat packing, and incentives to support agricultural cooperatives.
- Require congressional approval for tariffs to give Montana’s farmers and ranchers the stability they need & deserve.
- Support programs and resources to help young Montanans take over family farms and ranches or start their own, so that our state’s agricultural industry can feed the next generation.
