This is part of a recurring series on what former members of Congress are doing in their post-congressional careers.
If you want to know how former Rep. Peter A. DeFazio is doing now, ask about his summer.
First, there was a trip to southern France, which included two days in Toulouse and 10 days hiking in the Pyrenees, followed by a couple of days in Mirepoix, where he went to see some of the first known cave drawings available to the public.
Then it was back to D.C., where he stopped by his boat and did some laundry. Then to Maine, where he hung out with Charlie Papazian, the founder of the Association of Brewers and the Great American Beer Festival. DeFazio and Papazian have been friends since the 1990s, when Papazian sought out congressmen who were into home brewing. (DeFazio and then-Rep. David Skaggs of Colorado were it, at least at the time.)
Then it was off to an event for Rep. Rick Larsen, D-Wash., at the northern tip of Washington state. Finally, a family reunion in Cape Cod. “And in a couple of days, I’ll be going to my cabin on the other side of the mountains,” DeFazio said in a late-August interview.
Before you judge, consider this: DeFazio, a Democrat, spent 36 years in Congress, shuttling back and forth between D.C. and his Oregon district, a trip that took 11 hours door to door on a good day —and no, the former chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee did not have a direct flight.
Even when he was home, he often wasn’t. His district was a seven-hour drive from the northeast corner to the southwest tip. In the final days before his retirement, he’d been working around the clock on the transportation provisions of a pending bill.
On the day in 2023 that his replacement was sworn in, he said, “I just crashed.”
It took about six months for him to recover.
“I was just sprinting up to the last moment, and then suddenly it’s the end of the race,” he said.
It was not an easy transition, at least not at first.
“They always say don’t retire in the winter, and particularly, don’t retire in the Pacific Northwest in the winter because it’s gray,” he said. “I had no choice.”
Settling in
But now, two years into that retirement, DeFazio has hit his stride.
He serves as a senior fellow at the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics at the University of Oregon, where he gets to interact with college students and may soon teach a class.
He’s doing fundraising for his archives and working with an archivist to determine what should be kept and what should be discarded. “We just have massive, massive piles of irrelevant stuff,” he said. Still, they ended up with 75 boxes and “a couple of terabytes of digital.” The university hopes to make it available by next May.
U of O is also trying to develop an annual DeFazio lecture. This year was columnist E.J. Dionne. Next year, it’ll be journalist Nicholas Kristof. “They want to have enough money set aside to perpetuate those lectures indefinitely,” DeFazio said.
He’s also involved in his political action committee, Progressive Americans for Democracy. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, it raised $114,546 in the 2023-24 cycle and spent $274,562.
“Ninety percent of the focus is getting the House back to Democrats,” he said. “I contributed significantly in 38 races last year. Twenty-nine of them won, I think, and four or five others were within 1 point or 2 points. So I’ll be doing that again.”
He’s still involved in policy too.
According to OpenSecrets, which tracks political spending, DeFazio works as a lobbyist for five clients as of 2025: the American Trucking Associations, the Carpenters and Joiners Union, the Association of Flight Attendants-Communications Workers of America, the Dawn Project and the Tri-County Metro Transportation District of Oregon.
All are related in some way to transportation or labor, two passions of his. The Dawn Project, for example, aims to make computers safe for humanity and is currently fighting the self-driving technology popularized by Tesla.
But he’s also serving as an adviser for the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, including working on the substance of the new air traffic control system.
Beyond that, there are also side projects. He’s long been passionate about protecting the spotted owl, and he’s been critical of a proposal by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to kill roughly half a million barred owls to protect the spotted owl, calling it impractical and expensive.
He’s also continuing his work to protect gray wolves from being delisted from Endangered Species Act protections. Both battles date back to his years in Congress.
In Congress, he said, he had to focus so much on transportation and infrastructure policies that he would tell his staff he felt like he was in graduate school studying those issues.
“But I also had other interests. You know, I’d been on [House Natural] Resources, and I had to be on the issue of the spotted owl and the wolf reintroduction, so I continued those interests,” he said.
Ready to retire
When he decided to retire at the end of 2023, he’d wanted to for a while, but his staff cautioned him that another Democrat might not win his district if he dropped out.
“And I said, ‘Well, we got redistricting, you know, let’s make the district better,’” he said.
The district went from an R+3 to a D+4, dropping one of the most conservative counties.
Then he recruited a friend of his, fellow Democrat Val Hoyle, then the Oregon labor commissioner, to run to succeed him.
“She had previously told me she’d never run for Congress. And then I told her I really wanted to retire,” he said. “I told her, you know you’re going to be the minority. She said, ‘Yeah, I know, but I’m Irish and I like to fight.’”
He’s happy to focus on a few issues of his choosing, rather than everything under the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee’s jurisdiction and more.
“I would say, I guess I miss my committee, but I don’t miss the overall Congress and the unbelievable amounts of wasted time on, you know, spurious side tracks and issues and ‘gotchas’ that are going on that would have driven me nuts,” he said “I’m happy to be an outside critic and influencer.”
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