Jeanne Shaheen is focused on making a difference for the people of New Hampshire, no matter what it takes. As concerns over the coronavirus grew across the country, Jeanne took action to raise the alarm over the virus. When it hit the United States economy, she was part of the bipartisan “gang of four” charged with designing a congressional relief package that would help small businesses survive. In 2019, when President Trump tried to divert funding for construction projects at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard to pay for his border wall, she brought Democrats and Republicans together to stop him. Originally, New Hampshire received the same amount of federal support to combat the opioid epidemic as every other state, despite being significantly harder hit than most of the country. Jeanne worked across the aisle to change that, so that the hardest-hit states got more and ultimately increased opioid response funding for New Hampshire tenfold, to $35 million in 2019.
As Governor, Jeanne expanded affordable health insurance to tens of thousands of New Hampshire children, expanded kindergarten for thousands more children, took on the big utility companies to lower rates, rescinded an outdated law making abortion a felony, and never implemented statewide sales and income taxes, balancing the state budget without them.
As a leader on bipartisan legislation to preserve our open spaces and wildlife, she has secured increased federal funding to preserve New Hampshire’s waterways, public and private forests, wildlife habitats and recreational areas that bring an estimated $8.7 billion in tourism dollars to the state each year. She worked to get the Nashua River protected with a federal scenic river designation, safeguarding the resources of this river and its tributaries for future generations.
Jeanne has long fought to bring federal dollars back to New Hampshire to invest in critical transportation and infrastructure projects to fix Granite State roads, rail, bridges and ports. She has introduced legislation to address the more than 47,000 structurally deficient bridges across the country and secured tens of millions of federal dollars to replace the Sarah Mildred Long Bridge connecting New Hampshire and Maine, the I-89 Lebanon-Hartford bridges connecting New Hampshire and Vermont, and for a new bridge on the Connecticut River near Keene.
When Granite Staters need help cutting federal red tape and bureaucracy, Jeanne gets action. Her work to expand health services for veterans allows New Hampshire veterans to get care through the VA or private providers closer to home. She elevated local concerns to national action from harmful, man-made chemicals known as PFAS that have been found in drinking water, and created the first-ever nationwide health study on the potential health impacts of these contaminants to ensure the health and safety of New Hampshire communities.
A former small business owner, Jeanne has helped small businesses get tax cuts and other resources to expand and create jobs. And she’s worked to help them get the skilled workers they need. She brought the Job Corps program to New Hampshire to prepare vulnerable youth with the skills and necessary training to then be placed in a job or pursue higher education.
Jeanne has repeatedly prevented the Trump administration from imposing the costly at sea monitoring fee on Granite State fishermen, and she has secured necessary funding to prevent the burden from being imposed on fishermen. And when Hampton Harbor was getting too shallow for fishing boats to use, Shaheen secured the funding to have it dredged, and now it’s once again fully operational.
