HURD, William Ballard

HURD, William Ballard, A Representative from Texas; born in San Antonio, Bexar County, Tex., August 19, 1977; graduated from John Marshall High School, San Antonio, Tex., 1995; B.S., Texas A&M University, College Station, Tex., 2000; business owner; operations officer, Central Intelligence Agency, 2000-2009; elected as a Republican to the One Hundred Fourteenth and to the two succeeding Congresses (January 3, 2015-January 3, 2021); was not a candidate for reelection to the One Hundred Seventeenth Congress in 2020.

View Record in the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress

After nearly a decade working for the CIA, Will Hurd won election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2014 from a South Texas district that stretched along the largest expanse of the U.S. border with Mexico. During his three terms in the House, Hurd used his intelligence experience to work on immigration and national security issues. Touting a focus on policy over party, Hurd crafted an independent image. “The number one issue,” he claimed, “is we need someone that represents this district that is able to work with both sides of the political divide, as well as stand up to both sides of the political divide.”¹

William Ballard Hurd was born on August 19, 1977, in San Antonio, Texas, to Robert and Mary Alice Hurd, the youngest of three siblings. Robert worked as a traveling textiles salesman in Los Angeles, California, where he met and married fabric buyer Mary Alice before returning to Texas. As an interracial couple, Hurd’s father, who was Black, and his mother, who was White, faced discrimination after moving from California to Texas. “When my parents moved to San Antonio in 1970,” Hurd recalled, “they couldn’t buy a house in certain neighborhoods because of the color of their skin.” Hurd attended public schools in San Antonio, graduating from John Marshall High School in 1995. Hurd’s father once said he had been a Republican “since Lincoln freed us,” and while in college at Texas A&M University, Hurd became active in politics.²

Hurd attended Texas A&M on a full scholarship and embraced the school’s focus on public service. He majored in computer science, but classes in Mexico City led him to pursue a minor in international studies and pushed his graduation back a year so that he could finish the required coursework. In his senior year, Hurd won election as student body president in an upset. Shortly after he took office, a bonfire collapse killed 12 Texas A&M students in August 1999. Hurd’s leadership as student body president was credited with helping the school process the tragedy.³

The CIA recruited Hurd straight out of college in 2000, and during his intelligence career he served undercover in India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Hurd also held stateside positions in New York and Washington, DC. As part of his job, Hurd was tasked with briefing lawmakers on Capitol Hill. That experience proved frustrating and led to his decision to leave the CIA in 2009 to run for office himself. “I thought, ‘Hey, I can do a better job,’” Hurd recalled. Hurd took a position as a cybersecurity consultant as he prepared for his first congressional campaign.⁴

In 2010, Hurd entered a field of five Republicans seeking the nomination to challenge the incumbent Democrat, Ciro D. Rodriguez. The massive district stretched from just outside El Paso in the west to parts of Hurd’s hometown of San Antonio in the east. Hurd emphasized his national security background, and although he won the most votes in the March primary he did not secure a clear majority and advanced to a runoff against attorney Francisco “Quico” Canseco. Hurd dismissed concerns by party leaders who insisted that a Hispanic candidate stood a better chance in the general election, pointing to his strong showing in the primary. Canseco won the runoff against Hurd with nearly 53 percent of the vote and went on to defeat Rodriguez in the November general election.⁵

Hurd launched a second campaign in 2014, challenging the incumbent Democrat Pete P. Gallego, who had unseated Canseco in 2012. In the Republican primary, Hurd again faced Canseco, but this time he won the nomination after securing the endorsement of his hometown newspaper. The district was majority Hispanic and stretched across 820 miles of the nation’s border with Mexico. Immigration emerged as the central issue in the 2014 campaign. In the months leading up to the election, large groups of unaccompanied minors from Mexico and other central American nations tried to cross the Texas border and local and federal authorities grappled with a burgeoning humanitarian crisis. Hurd compared the problems at the border with Mexico with his experience abroad working for the CIA. “We need to start treating the narcotraficantes, the coyotes . . . as an intelligence problem not just a law enforcement problem,” Hurd insisted, emphasizing the need to understand the root causes of the drug trade and human trafficking crisis. Hurd and Gallego largely agreed that the nation needed to improve existing avenues for immigration. “If you’re going to be a productive member of society, let’s get you here,” Hurd declared. Unlike Gallego, Hurd opposed amnesty for undocumented immigrants and vowed to empower law enforcement and the courts to deport individuals.⁶

On Election Day, Hurd defeated Gallego by fewer than 2,500 votes to become the first Black Republican elected from Texas. Hurd attributed his election to his interest in the issues voters cared about. “It’s because I engage people where they are and talk about the topics they care about. That transcends race, it transcends gender. It transcends party.”⁷

Upon taking his seat in the 114th Congress (2015– 2017), Hurd was assigned to three committees: Homeland Security; Small Business; and Oversight and Government Reform. Hurd was selected to chair Oversight and Government Reform’s Subcommittee on Information Technology, drawing on his years of intelligence work. Hurd left the Small Business Committee two months into his first term, preferring to focus on his other assignments. In the 115th Congress (2017–2019), he joined the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. In the 116th Congress (2019–2021), he dropped his assignments on Homeland Security and Oversight for a seat on the Appropriations Committee, which handles government spending issues.⁸

During his first term, Hurd passed more bills into law than any other freshman Representative. Three of the four laws Hurd sponsored in his first term directly benefited or celebrated the people of his district. Working with Democratic Representative Beto O’Rourke of El Paso, Hurd authored legislation amending the 2014 Border Patrol Agent Pay Reform Act to protect agents from overtime pay cuts. Additional legislation extended “availability pay”— compensation for tasks conducted by federal criminal investigators beyond the traditional workweek—to all law enforcement officers of the Air and Marine Operations branch of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Hurd also proposed renaming the Tornillo border port of entry in honor of El Paso native Marcelino Serna, Texas’s most decorated World War I veteran and the first Hispanic American to be awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.⁹

As chair of the Oversight Subcommittee on Information Technology, Hurd managed a July 15, 2015, hearing investigating the data breach at the Office of Personnel Management. In his opening statement, he remarked, “It is no secret that Federal agencies have a long way to go to improve their cybersecurity posture.” In July 2016, he questioned FBI Director James Comey regarding presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server for public business while serving as U.S. Secretary of State. Hurd called the FBI’s decision to not recommend prosecution “outrageous.”¹⁰

In 2015, Hurd’s bill directing the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to streamline its information technology (IT) systems was signed into law. Over the course of the next two years, he pushed for a major overhaul of the federal government’s technological capabilities through his Modernizing Government Technology (MGT) Act. Folded into the National Defense Authorization Act of 2018, the legislation established an IT modernization board and a $100 million fund, addressed vulnerabilities in federal systems, and banned Russian cybersecurity products in the wake of that nation’s cyberattacks during the 2016 presidential election.¹¹

Immigration also remained a priority for Hurd during his House career. But when other Republicans, including President Donald J. Trump, called for the construction of a wall along the 2,000-plus mile southern border, Hurd opposed the idea calling it “a third century solution to a 21st-century problem.” Hurd favored what he termed a “smart wall” consisting of technological upgrades including fiber optic cable to detect and report threats remotely and provide high-speed internet in rural border regions. By 2019, Hurd was the only Republican representing a district along the southern border. He was one of 13 Republicans who joined the Democratic majority in their resolution rejecting President Trump’s declaration of a national emergency to redirect funds towards construction of the wall.¹²

Hurd also worked to shape legislation granting permanent legal residency to immigrants brought into the country as minors. In 2018, Hurd sponsored the USA Act of 2018 in the House, pairing increased border security with new paths to citizenship. Despite bipartisan support, Republican leadership rejected the bill as lacking funding for physical wall construction along the southern border. Hurd signed a discharge petition to force a vote on a full range of immigration proposals, including his own, but the effort fell short by two votes. Hurd continued to push his compromise after Democrats regained the majority in the 116th Congress.¹³

Hurd occasionally broke with his party on certain issues. Although he had criticized the Affordable Care Act—the health care reform measure passed during the Barack Obama administration—and had voted for its repeal during the 114th Congress, Hurd voted against his party’s alternative, the American Health Care Act, in May 2017, insisting the bill did “not address the concerns of . . . my constituents.” “My boss is not the president,” he observed later in his House career. “My boss is not the speaker. My boss is not the minority leader. My bosses are those 800,000 people that I represented and sent me up here.”¹⁴

As one of two Black Republicans in the House, Hurd attracted considerable attention from his party and the press. Unlike his GOP colleague Mia B. Love of Utah, Hurd did not join the overwhelmingly Democratic Congressional Black Caucus. “They’d have to have a meeting with me in it and then have a meeting without me,” he explained. And then I’d have to put out a dissenting opinion.” Hurd routinely demurred when asked to comment on issues of race and the Republican Party, particularly during President Trump’s administration. “Have people in my party said racist things? Yes,” he said in a 2020 interview with the New York Times. “But that doesn’t define the broader party.” Hurd sought to transcend the actions of those he called “outliers,” and worked to keep the focus on his message of empowerment. “If you do not think someone cares about your community, it’s hard for you to evaluate whether they’re doing something that’s actually helping you.”¹⁵

In 2019, amid revelations that President Trump had pressured the government of Ukraine to prosecute Hunter Biden, the son of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., at the time a potential 2020 Democratic presidential nominee, the House Democratic majority opened impeachment proceedings against the President. Hurd noted that the President’s actions would lead to “long-term implications on our foreign policy.” Ultimately, Hurd voted against impeaching President Trump, saying, “Throughout this process, Americans have learned of bungling foreign policy decisions. But we have not heard evidence beyond a reasonable doubt of bribery or extortion,” the criteria for conviction in the Senate.¹⁶

Hurd routinely faced close re-elections. In 2016, more than $12 million was spent in the district during his rematch with former Representative Pete Gallego, making it the most expensive U.S. House contest in Texas’s history. That year, in a presidential election year with double the previous voter turnout, Hurd won another narrow victory over Gallego with 48 percent of the vote and a 3,000-vote margin. During the 2018 midterm elections, Hurd faced Gina Ortiz Jones, a former intelligence officer and U.S. Air Force. Spending on the race nearly rivaled 2016. On election night, media organizations initially called the race for Hurd, but the margin ultimately proved too close to call. Jones conceded two weeks later; Hurd’s final margin of victory was only 926 votes out of 210,069 cast.¹⁷

On August 1, 2019, Hurd announced that he would not seek re-election in 2020. After leaving office in 2021, he joined the board of an artificial intelligence research lab and began work on a book about his experience as a CIA agent and a Member of Congress.¹⁸

Committee Assignments

Committee & Subcommittee Chair