Sen. Mark Warner has represented Virginia in the Senate since he was first elected in 2008, where he now serves as chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence and as a member of the Senate Finance; Banking, Housing & Urban Affairs; Budget; and Rules & Administration committees. In an interview with Northern Virginia Magazine, Warner shares some of his favorite things about living in NoVA, plus his future political goals.
What are your favorite things about Northern Virginia?
I live in Old Town Alexandria — it’s a block from the river. So, I love having access to the Potomac and the fact that I can get to know my neighbors, I can walk to great restaurants in five minutes in Old Town, yet on a personal basis, of the 535 members of Congress, I live closer to the Capitol than any of them. … I’m a bit of a foodie, and the great thing about Northern Virginia is we’ve got a huge diversity in population, which also means that huge diversity in food choices. One of the cool things about Northern Virginia is it literally matches parts of New York City in the variety of restaurants you might see in a strip center in terms of different cuisines and different cultures, which I think is always really cool.
What do you like to do when you’re not working?
I’m a biker — I’ve got a gang of guys that I bike with. I take the W&OD or sometimes we will go down south — bike from Old Town and then take the Mount Vernon Trail, go down south to Fort Belvoir and bike around. I would have never figured this relationship, but I ended up becoming biking buddies with Steve Mnuchin, Donald Trump’s treasury secretary, and part of the last COVID bill was negotiated biking around Mount Vernon.
What are some of the biggest challenges that NoVA faces?
Our growth rates have slowed over the last decade. I think we still do great in terms of corporate headquarters — attracting Boeing, and the fact that we’ve got so many defense firms. We’ve had some great technology companies, but we’ve not had the kind of technology wins the way that AOL or MCI were 20 and 30 years ago. So, I think we still have that challenge.
What can we expect for your future in politics?
I’m chairman of the Intelligence Committee, and one of the things that’s cool about Northern Virginia, we are clearly the heart of the intelligence community for the United States. Kind of my goal in politics now is to try to make the case that national security in 2024 is not just who has the most tanks and guns, but really, who’s going to win the battle for different technology domains. It keeps me on the cutting edge of technology development, and the fact that it falls within the national security umbrella makes it all very bipartisan, which I particularly like.
I make the joke that I work with the only place in America where being a gang member is a good thing, because every time there’s a bipartisan group that comes together in the Senate, it’s called the “gang of” — the gang of this, the gang of that. So, I’m a bipartisan Senate gang member.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Feature image courtesy Mark Warner
This story originally ran in our August issue. For more stories like this, subscribe to Northern Virginia Magazine.
