Watchtower stories on House Armed Services votes, defense contractor money, JBLM, PFAS cleanup, and the public record around WA-10 defense oversight.
H.R. 7515 is a good and overdue bill. The missing piece is the same one DOI flagged in public: the Tribe operates the hatchery, USFWS holds the infrastructure title, and the Army still owns the JBLM land under it.
This is the general defense-oversight ledger, separate from the Defense Money Record story. Public FEC and Congressional Record data can help voters understand how defense oversight, local aerospace jobs, and campaign finance intersect. Watchtower presents th...
Endorsements are useful to voters only when the underlying record can be inspected. Watchtower's endorsement-accountability frame now compares labor and environmental examples: the AFL-CIO/CLARITY vote record, the campaign's Sierra Club and League of Conserva...
The 2024 Point-in-Time count, the federally required annual census of unsheltered people, found 59.4 percent more Pierce County residents sleeping outside than the same count one year earlier. Joint Base Lewis-McChord, known locally as JBLM, is a major federa...
H.R. 8357 starts the right kind of federal work on toxic tire runoff and coho salmon. The bill deserves credit. The task force still needs visible public guardrails because it includes required industry seats and a FACA exemption.
On April 17, 2024, the political action committee of AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, made its first three contributions ever to Representative Strickland's campaign, totaling 3,750 dollars. That same April 17, Strickland voted yes on thre...
This is the defense-money story, not the general defense-oversight ledger. Nine defense contractors that lobby Congress for billions of dollars in federal contracts gave Representative Strickland 73,250 dollars in campaign donations in one election cycle. She...
From January 2025 to April 2026, Representative Strickland reintroduced the Basic Allowance for Housing Restoration Act (the BAH Restoration Act, the bill that would have raised the federal housing stipend for military families), questioned the Secretary of t...
The raise is real. The cover is too. Marilyn Strickland helped move H.R. 8800 in committee, where oversight mattered most, and CBO says the troop/personnel increase is only a small slice of the defense increase.
Pierce County's kidney cancer rate is 19 percent above the Washington state average. PFAS, the forever chemicals tied to firefighting foam, remain a documented cleanup issue around Joint Base Lewis-McChord. Representative Strickland toured cleanup sites in 20...