Rep. Jake Auchincloss

10/22/2026

Felix Commonwealth School at Lasell University in Newton is a virtual high school. Students can learn anywhere or choose to congregate at Lasell. Felix, which is a public school – free and open to all Bay Staters – just launched this school year for 9th & 10th graders, and I visited to meet with its leadership, with the Lasell president, and with the students themselves. Experimenting with new forms of pedagogy, curriculum and community in education is healthy, and Lasell is the right host. For 175 years, as President Eric Turner explained, Lasell has been trying new things in education; in 1851 that was higher education for women, in 2000 that was Lasell Village, the first retirement community in the country to require ongoing education for its residents.

10/21/2026

This week, I commuted into Boston & Cambridge for a day-long to engage with Eds & Meds leaders, first at the groundbreaking of the Lavine Bekenstein Cancer Hospital at Dana-Farber, then at the MedTech Conference at the Menino Center, and finally with the Kendall Square Association Board. Across all three engagements I emphasized how federal policy must support the medical innovation that creates for Massachusetts hundreds of thousands of jobs and tens of billions of dollars of economic activity, and generates for the world a bounty of treatments.

The federal government must be a:

Impact investor – increase funding for curiosity-driven research & strengthen the meritocracy of science grants

Smart regulator – restore competence & credibility to the FDA and modernize clinical trials to make them faster & more responsive to new treatment modalities

Good customer – through Medicare & Medicaid, reimburse innovative products for their value to patients and the health system; ensure that competition drives down prices without undue delay; and prevent middlemen from sponging up profits that inflate health premiums & co-pays.

10/20/2026

I spoke to the New England Council, the region’s business & public policy organization, about AI & energy policy. I expressed my support for both regulation, like the FRONTIER Act, and liability, like my own Deepfake Liability Act. I also reviewed how the Senate's energy legislation, the Bipartisan American Affordability & Jobs Act, could impact ratepayers if it passed Congress during the lame duck session. This bill, which like the pro-housing law that Congress passed this summer is in the vein of the Abundance agenda, would expedite the build-out of generation and transmission, cut permitting times, and get stricter on utility companies. I believe these efforts could lower energy rates for Bay Staters.

10/19/2026

As co-chair of the Massachusetts STEM Advisory Council, I am always working to understand up close the Bay State's education & workforce system for technical talent. Last week I saw three successful phases: STARBASE Academy at Hanscom Air Force Base, which offers STEM enrichment for K-12 students and teachers; Bristol Aggie, an agriculture trade school in Dighton; and MIT Lincoln Lab, a federally funded research & development center.

From elementary students seeing themselves as scientists after a week of fun instruction, to high-schoolers running their own automated dairy farm, to elite researchers pioneering quantum computing, Massachusetts always gets a big return on STEM investment. I support enhanced funding for the Department of Defense's STARBASE educational enrichment and for federally funded research centers like MIT Lincoln Lab; I also have legislation to fund the construction of more trade schools like Bristol Aggie by taxing the social media corporations.

10/18/2026

Rehoboth's local leadership and I met to discuss PFAS remediation. The town has no public water system, so it is not eligible for the two most impactful federal & state clean-water programs. We talked through other ways I can help with federal funding, and I will stay in close partnership with Rehoboth as it addresses the leeching of PFAS into groundwater near its fire stations.

This small town's experience with PFAS from firefighter foam is another example of why I am pressing so hard in Washington for an essential-use framework for PFAS, similar to how ozone-depleting chemicals were phased out in the 1980s with the Montreal Protocol. In this framework, PFAS would only be permitted for essential products where it is non-substitutable, like medical devices, and those producers would be responsible for on-site mitigation. Other, non-essential, products that use PFAS, like skis and cookware, would be required to phase out the chemicals.

It's much cheaper & easier to get PFAS out of its bio-accumulation cycle at the factory site, with clear corporate accountability, rather than digging it out of the soil and groundwater years later, when responsibility ends up on the taxpayers.

10/16/2026

“Massachusetts lawmakers should boldly promote the [biotech] industry, which plays a crucial role in the state’s economy, Auchincloss said ... 'What makes us great, [he said], is high [...] standards paired with the world’s best talent getting funded to pursue curiosity-driven research.'"

Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-Mass.) has some advice for fellow lawmakers: unapologetically support the biotech industry.

10/09/2026

South Weymouth Naval Air Station was established during WWII as the Navy's northeastern-most station for airship operations and research. Massive blimps surveilled the waters for German submarines. In 1995, the base was closed. The state and host communities Weymouth, Rockland and Abington then grappled with three failed developers over 25 years.

Finally, right before the pandemic, the fourth (and hopefully final) master developer took over. I visited the site, now called Union Point, to see the progress. It's impressive: financial & legal clean-up, land assembly & zoning permits, and infrastructure approved & funded. Shovels will soon go in the ground for 6,000 new homes, a walkable downtown, large commercial properties, new roads, and walking & biking paths to complement the hundreds of acres of preserved green space and recreation areas.

While Union Point is not in the district, I visited because it's the most ambitious single project in the commonwealth for solving our biggest economic challenge: the price of housing. I have written and spoken frequently about how developing new towns can improve both affordability and productivity, so I was fascinated to learn about this development up close. Most critical for its success will be water; Union Point needs an MWRA extension to provide millions of gallons.

10/08/2026

Eliya Cohen was held hostage in Hamas' terror tunnels for 505 days. He was chained, starved, and beaten. Every morning, he and his fellow captives prayed in Hebrew so that their captors would know that their Jewish spirit was unbroken. His girlfriend, Ziv Abud, was with him at the Nova Music Festival. She escaped a bomb shelter in which their family and friends were murdered by terrorists using grenades & guns.

Eliya & Ziv were honored guests at Temple Shalom in Newton on October 7th to share their story (he learned English from a book that Hersh Goldberg-Polin gave him to pass the time in the tunnels) in commemoration of the third anniversary of the Hamas attacks. I joined hundreds of others to bear witness, memorialize the thousands slain, and take inspiration from the indomitable spirit of Eliya and Ziv. Sustaining Americans' memory of October 7th is an homage for the victims, a tribute to the heroes, and a powerful way to strengthen the resolve of the Jewish community.

10/05/2026

The shipping company Maersk opened a massive fulfillment center in Hopedale. This warehouse – the size of multiple football fields – will be a distribution hub for the northeastern United States & support high-volume fulfillment operations, employing approximately 1,000 people when fully running. I toured the warehouse and met with its leadership to learn more about this major new employer in the district and establish lines of communication.

10/05/2026

Congress for the New Urbanism invited me to address their New England summit. What an honor to speak to an audience that includes Jeff Speck, whose book Walkable City has been a major influence on me.

I spoke about how Democrats should adopt localism as a defining theme of our platform — not just a tool of resistance to MAGA when we’re out of power, but an instrument of better housing & mobility policy, through measures like Street Votes for zoning and by devolving the federal Dept of Transportation to the states.