By Mac Deford
Public service has defined my life.
I served the Lowcountry in the United States Coast Guard, enforcing federal law on the waters, securing our port, protecting our waterways, and pulling people out of the ocean who needed saving.
After I left active duty, I used the GI Bill to earn my degree from The Citadel and my law degree from Charleston School of Law. I built a career here, am raising my family here, and have spent the better part of two decades putting that education and that service to work for Lowcountry communities.
As Associate General Counsel for the Town of Mount Pleasant, I advised town leaders navigating an unprecedented COVID public health crisis while working on environmental protection and public safety.
As General Counsel for the Town of Hilton Head Island, I helped lead the town’s flagship workforce housing project, which is now under construction. I worked to create a community development corporation for the Gullah Geechee community, an organization that provides legal and financial resources to families fighting to hold onto land their ancestors were promised. And when FEMA tried to shortchange Hilton Head on critical beach renourishment funding, I fought back and recovered millions for our community.
That is the work I know how to do. That is what I will take to Congress.
The people of the Lowcountry are paying more for everything, and Washington is making it worse. Gas, grocery and construction costs are all up. Small businesses are watching their supply chains collapse in real time. The cause is tariffs which are a tax on American families. The people paying that tax are not the president’s donors. They are the families filling up cars and shopping carts in Beaufort and Bluffton and Hilton Head Island.
The administration’s decision to go to war with Iran without congressional authorization has made the cost of living more expensive. Energy prices respond to conflict. Our military families bear the consequences of decisions made without the deliberation the Constitution requires. The executive branch does not get to make war on its own. That is not a partisan position. It is the law.
Meanwhile, the corruption is impossible to ignore. The administration is trying to give $1.8 billion to convicted felons, including individuals with direct ties to the president’s political network. The president’s family has promoted a cryptocurrency scheme that has generated enormous personal wealth.
I will seek a seat on the House Oversight Committee. That committee has the authority to investigate executive branch conduct, compel testimony, and demand accountability. It is where this work needs to happen, and I intend to do it.
I am also asking Beaufort County voters to look carefully at one of my opponents, Nancy Lacore. As Chief of Navy Reserve, she signed the memo cancelling DEI programs and eliminating sexual harassment and retaliation protections for the 60,000 sailors under her command. That decision helped pave the way for the politicization of our military that Pete Hegseth has since accelerated. The Trump-Hegseth agenda degrades military readiness and puts our national security at risk.
The large majority of Lacore’s campaign funding comes from outside South Carolina, including from billionaire donors with direct financial interests in AI data centers. That matters here in Beaufort County, where a proposal to site a massive data center in the ACE Basin is already raising serious concerns about one of the most ecologically significant and irreplaceable landscapes on the East Coast.
She has lived in the Lowcountry for less than a year. The challenges facing Beaufort County, from heirs’ property and Gullah Geechee land rights to coastal flooding and workforce housing, are not issues you absorb in a few months. They are issues you work on for years.
Beaufort County has already had nearly six years of absent and negligent representation from Nancy Mace, a congresswoman who treated this district as a platform and its people as an afterthought. We cannot afford to send someone to Washington who is still getting their bearings here.
The Lowcountry does not need a manufactured politician parachuting in with talking points written by consultants in Washington. It needs someone who has spent the last 16 years here, who has sat across the table from FEMA and fought for what this community was owed, who has worked with Gullah Geechee families trying to hold onto land that is rightfully theirs, and who helped put workforce housing in the ground on Hilton Head Island when it would have been easier to do nothing.
Washington is full of people who arrived there to find themselves. I am running because I already know who I am and what I am here to do. The Lowcountry raised me as a professional and as a public servant, and I intend to return the favor.
Mac Deford is a U.S. Coast Guard veteran and Lowcountry attorney. He lives in Mount Pleasant with his wife, Caroline, their son, Willie, and yellow lab, Duke.