Three CEOs in the Senate

In January, a hedge fund manager, an aerial firefighter, and a car salesman walked into the U.S. Capitol, ready to represent their states. Within a week, the three senators were thrust into a world not of governing but of choosing carpet colors and measuring drapes … for offices they weren’t yet allowed to move into.

Sen. Tim Sheehy’s temporary space until June was located in an out-of-the-way hall next to the Senate ID office. Desks were crammed in so tightly that visitors (including this reporter) sometimes opened the door right into the senator himself.

“How can it take this long to move into an office?” mused Sheehy, a Montana Republican. “This is just a physical manifestation of government bureaucracy.”

Sens. Dave McCormick, Tim Sheehy, and Bernie Moreno fulfilled major political goals last November when they flipped Senate seats in Pennsylvania, Montana, and Ohio to the Republican Party, adding consistent votes for Trump’s agenda. But life in the upper chamber is a far cry from their recent jobs as CEOs. With a personal mission to get the nation’s budget in order, the three senators promise to continue Elon Musk’s mission of saving taxpayer dollars. But they’re finding, as Musk did, that Washington resists being treated like a business.

IN THE PRIVATE SECTOR, Dave McCormick, 59, ran one of the world’s largest hedge funds, Bridgewater Associates. He ran for Pennsylvania’s open Senate seat in 2022, but in the Republican primary, Trump endorsed television personality Dr. Mehmet Oz, who later lost to Democratic candidate John Fetterman. Last year, Trump did throw his support behind McCormick, who in a repeat campaign ousted incumbent Democratic Sen. Bob Casey Jr.

“I ran on the very same policies that President Trump ran on. Now we’re just talking about how to implement them successfully,” McCormick told me. He supports tax cuts and said he’s taken tariff concerns from Pennsylvania businesses to trade representatives to ask for more clarity from the administration.

McCormick credits his business success to keeping results top of mind. In the Senate, he keeps a whiteboard of campaign promises he made and tracks how he’s trying to accomplish them. There are still some holes.

Progress can be difficult in the upper chamber of Congress, especially when you only spend three days per week in session. And half of them are taken up by policy luncheons.

“When you’re a CEO, there is a black-­and-white scoreboard which shows success or failure. [The Senate] has none of those things,” said McCormick. “It’s designed to be a check on the emotion of the moment. So how do you be effective and drive those results while recognizing that the very institution is designed to go slowly?”

BERNIE MORENO, 58, WAS BORN in Colombia and immigrated to the United States as a child. After earning a business degree, he worked at several car dealerships, then bought some of his own. In 2018, he started a blockchain-based tech company. He ran for a Senate seat from Ohio in 2022 but dropped out after a meeting with Trump, paving the way for J.D. Vance to win the seat. In return, Vance and Trump stumped for Moreno last year.

“When I ran a company, every day the comment was, how do we do more and deliver better service for less money?” Moreno said. “That was a daily conversation. In this place it’s a never conversation. It’s always more money, more people equals better results.”

Moreno viewed November’s election as a clear mandate: Back Trump and get the nation’s finances back on track. But he thinks some of his Senate peers suffer from “manageritis”—his term from the car dealer world when a salesperson was solely focused on a managerial promotion but failed to develop the customer-­service skills needed to earn it.

“When you’re a successful businessperson, you fear losing the respect and trust of your clients. I want to do a good job because if I don’t, my clients will leave me,” he said. “Elected leaders don’t fear their voters at all.”

Tim Sheehy (left) and Bernie Moreno Tom Williams / CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

TIM SHEEHY IS THE CURRENT second-­youngest senator at age 39.

“I’m definitely the odd man out,” Sheehy said. “Sometimes the guards still mistake me as a page or an aide, so I’m still getting over that.”

Sheehy’s most recent gig was managing his ranch in Montana and running his aerial firefighting company. After six years of service as a Navy SEAL, Sheehy built a company to apply military technology to domestic wildfires.

Now his days consist of 15-minute increments with staffers hurrying him from hearings to lunches to constituent meetings to interviews. Photos on his office wall show him piloting a plane dumping retardant on a wildfire. Another shows him and his daughters leaning on a fence. I asked why he wanted to be the one to bring change to the Senate.

“To be quite frank, I don’t,” he replied. “I want to be right there in that picture, standing with my daughters on my ranch. I want to be in that plane fighting fires. … But a number of people I deeply respect came to me a couple years ago and said, ‘We really need to flip this seat.’”

In his first few months, Sheehy was surprised to find his expertise was just what Congress needed when wildfires devastated Los Angeles. He has his fingerprint on more than a dozen bills to address infrastructure to deal with natural disasters. And he and Moreno both push for business deregulation regularly in Commerce Committee meetings.

TO FIX FINANCIAL BLOAT, all three senators told me any businessman would scrutinize the books and make cuts. When the books are actually taxpayer dollars, they view it as a moral imperative to steward the funds well.

Yet the recipients of Washington funding are real people, and not all spending is waste, fraud, and abuse. The Democratic Party has protested that it’s trying to care for vulnerable Americans—or starving people overseas, in the case of recently slashed foreign aid—while the Trump administration reputedly cares only for the bottom line.

But the three freshman senators say trimming the budget is about protecting future generations.

“I would love for every American to have free healthcare, our military to have unfettered spending, and Social Security for everyone as soon as they need it until the day they die,” Sheehy said. “But none of these programs will exist in 10 to 20 years because all our federal revenue will be going to service our national debt.”

McCormick says he’s learning how to fill out his whiteboard while also abiding by the founding rules for the Senate, which was deliberately set up to require working across the aisle.

“There’s a healthy tension,” he said. “I feel a responsibility to get the balance right.”