Paul Ryan

Politician

• Born: January 29, 1970
• Place of Birth: Janesville, Wisconsin

A member of Wisconsin's Congress by age twenty-eight, and the 2012 Republican vice-presidential nominee by forty-two, Paul Ryan’s rise in national politics was both spectacular and unanticipated. More a self-described “policy wonk” than a politician, Ryan has exerted enormous influence on his party by sticking to fundamental conservative principles—lower taxes, smaller government—with scant regard for the political consequences. His visionary, policy-over-politics approach led him to present a version of the federal budget in 2008—radically curtailing popular entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare—that was initially regarded by all but a few of his colleagues as too hot to touch. However, it won the hearts of conservative ideologues and opinion makers, and by 2011, the “Ryan budget” had become party orthodoxy, embraced by the overwhelming majority of Republicans in Congress as well as Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who ultimately selected Ryan as his running mate in a strong though ultimately unsuccessful bid to unseat President Barack Obama in 2012. Despite his first-ever electoral defeat, Ryan continued to wield extraordinary influence in the Republican Party in Congress, and in 2015 was elected speaker of the House of Representatives, the head of that body.

Background and Education

Paul Davis Ryan was born and raised in Janesville, Wisconsin, the youngest of four children in an Irish Catholic family with deep local roots. His great-grandfather established an earthmoving company in Janesville in 1884, and today Ryan Incorporated Central is a national concern. Paul Ryan’s branch of the family, however, left the family business, his grandfather and father becoming lawyers instead.

A formative experience early in Ryan’s life was the death of his father from a heart attack when Ryan was sixteen. “It was just a big punch in the gut. I concluded I’ve got to either sink or swim in life,” Ryan told Ryan Lizza for the New Yorker (6 Aug. 2012) of the event. “I grew up really fast.” He dove into his schoolwork and extracurricular activities and was elected class president his junior year. He also began cultivating his lifelong habit of consuming thick volumes of literature that appealed to him, discovering the works of twentieth-century Russian American novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand, a radical exponent of laissez-faire capitalism. “What I liked about her novels was their devastating indictment of the fatal conceit of socialism, of too much government,” he told Lizza. In 2005, speaking before a group of Rand devotees called the Atlas Society, he said, “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.” (Ryan has, however, been careful to distance himself from Rand’s atheist beliefs.)

In 1988, Ryan enrolled at Miami University in Ohio, where he double majored in economics and political science, delving deeper into the works of libertarian and free-market philosophers such as Rand, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman. The summer before his junior year, he got his first taste of national politics when he secured an internship in the office of Wisconsin senator Bob Kasten. Ryan reported to Republican staff director Cesar Conda, who told Stephen Hayes for the Weekly Standard (23 July 2012), “Paul at age nineteen was the exact same person he is today. Earnest, personable, and hard-working, with an insatiable appetite for discussing policy ideas.” The following summer, he returned to intern with the House Small Business Committee, on which Kasten sat.

Early Career

After graduating in 1992, at the invitation of Conda, Ryan briefly joined Kasten’s staff as an economist with the Small Business Committee. The following year, he took a job as a policy analyst and speechwriter with Empower America, a think tank run by conservative activists Jack Kemp and William Bennett, who both became important mentors for Ryan. During this time, Ryan supplemented his income by waiting tables at Tortilla Coast, a Tex-Mex restaurant on Capitol Hill.

In 1995, following the Republican takeover of Congress under House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Ryan, at the young age of twenty-five, was hired as legislative director for freshman congressman Sam Brownback of Kansas, and he immediately began making his mark as a policy expert. Brownback recalled to Hayes that the young Ryan “was very puritanical on economic policy,” consistently advocating for a small-government approach with little appreciation for the give-and-take of practical politics. “It’s all policy to him,” said Brownback. “People don’t appreciate just how much of a policy guy Ryan is and how little of a politician he is.”

Ryan was not a politician at all until 1997, when Republican congressman Mark Neumann of Wisconsin’s First District decided to run for Senate and suggested that Ryan run to fill his seat. With five years of policy and staff work behind him, Ryan took up the challenge, running in the 1998 election and winning the House seat he has held ever since. At twenty-eight, he was at the time the second-youngest member of Congress.

First Years in Congress

Of Ryan’s new job, Jennifer Steinhauer and Jonathan Weisman wrote for the New York Times, “He did not arrive in Congress as a superstar, but he did possess a skill that would make him one: a genuine interest in the federal budget.” Assigned to the House Budget Committee, Ryan set to work in his junior position. Former Democratic representative John M. Spratt Jr. of South Carolina told Steinhauer and Weisman, “When he first got there, he did his yeoman’s work as a backbencher. He mastered a lot of budget.”

Hayes wrote in the Weekly Standard, “Ryan was regarded as a quiet policy wonk in the early stages of his congressional career—a respected conservative reformer but not necessarily someone his colleagues envisioned as a party leader. He brought to office the same interest in economics and spending that had driven him as a staffer and quickly acquired a greater appreciation of the trade-offs involved in pushing for free-market policy outcomes while also seeking to serve constituents.”

Ryan made many such trade-offs during the administration of President George W. Bush, including voting for Bush’s Medicare prescription-drug benefit in 2003—a vote he justified by saying the president was intent on signing some version of the plan into law, so Ryan backed a bill containing amendments with free-market reforms he supported. In 2008, he also supported the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), the multi-billion-dollar bank bailout launched in response to the subprime mortgage crisis. Ryan later told Lizza that votes such as these made him “miserable” and that he had vowed “to do everything I can to make sure I don’t feel that misery again.”

But as he made these compromises, Ryan also set about putting his core principles into action. During Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign, Ryan worked on a plan to privatize Social Security—one of the most enduringly popular entitlement programs and therefore, despite its tremendous cost, long considered a third rail of domestic politics. Since 1935, the program, financed by payroll taxes, has guaranteed government payments to the elderly and disabled, keeping millions out of poverty and making proposals to alter it extremely politically risky. Ryan’s plan, the premise of which had been bandied about in conservative think tanks but had not entered mainstream political discourse, involved allowing workers to keep a portion of their payroll taxes and invest them in private retirement accounts. Conservative activists from Kemp to Gingrich loved the idea and put pressure on the president and reluctant congressional Republicans to back it. In 2005, Bush released a watered-down version of the plan that was savagely attacked by Democrats and failed to win widespread public support. In the 2006 midterm elections, Republicans lost their majority in Congress. “What some might interpret as the failure of an unpopular idea Ryan insisted was mostly a communications problem,” wrote Lizza, quoting Ryan as saying the proposal was poorly received because the Bush administration “did a bad job of selling it.”

Roadmap for America’s Future

Undeterred, Ryan returned for his fifth term and persuaded then–house majority leader John Boehner and other party leaders to make him the ranking Republican on the House Budget Committee, leapfrogging over twelve other Republicans with more seniority. This position gave him a larger staff and access to the Congressional Budget Office, which could crunch the numbers of any budget proposal Ryan came up with.

In 2007 and early 2008, Ryan and his team worked on crafting an alternative to the Democratic budget. He named it the Roadmap for America’s Future and introduced it as legislation in May 2008. “When I wrote this, I didn’t ask the leadership for permission,” Ryan told Hayes. “I figured, ask for forgiveness later and not permission first.” Ryan’s Roadmap read like a conservative manifesto.

In particular, summarized Lizza, “Ryan recommended ending Medicare, the government health-insurance program for retirees, and replacing it with a system of direct payments to seniors, who could then buy private insurance. . . . He proposed ending Medicaid, the health-care program for the poor, and replacing it with a lump sum for states to use as they saw fit. Ryan also called for an end to the special tax break given to employers who provide insurance; instead, that money would pay for twenty-five-hundred-dollar credits for uninsured taxpayers to buy their own plans. As for Social Security, Ryan modestly scaled back his original proposal by reducing the amount invested in private accounts, from one-half to one-third of payroll taxes.”

A Rising Profile

Conservative think tanks and commentators lauded the Ryan plan, but Republicans in Congress backed away from it. Later that year, Barack Obama won the presidency. As the country battled an economic crisis and Obama pushed through an economic stimulus package, Ryan shelved his budget plan until early 2010. In January, he produced an updated version of the Roadmap, and his profile began to rise as he engaged the president directly on budget issues, first at a retreat for House Republicans in Baltimore at which Obama was a guest and again at a health-care summit hosted by the administration in February. Here was a relatively young congressman, not even in his party’s leadership, matching wits with the president of the United States over major budgetary issues.

While most congressional Republicans remained skeptical about the political viability of the Roadmap, Ryan’s ability and willingness to engage the Obama administration with facts and figures garnered increasing support from conservative opinion makers, and pressure began to grow on elected leaders to back the plan. In the November 2010 elections, the Republicans recaptured the majority in the House of Representatives, with many seats going to upstart “Tea Party” candidates who swept into office on a tide of red-state alarm about federal deficits and government spending. Ryan seemed to have just the plan these incoming freshmen were looking for, and he worked hard to sell it to them, as well as to party leaders facing new pressure for dramatic change. “I think the validation of the 2010 elections gave [Republican] leadership the courage to proceed—2010 woke people up,” Ryan told Hayes. “The eighty-seven new freshman were a welcome burst of energy, and I think leadership understood that they had two choices: They could lead the parade, or they could get out of the way.”

Steinhauer and Weisman wrote, “Whether Mr. Ryan helped galvanize the Tea Party with his tough-medicine budget ideas or simply rode its wave is a matter of debate. But there is no question that the rising concern over the deficit and the arrival in 2010 of eighty-seven Republican freshmen who were loyal to Mr. Ryan’s ideas made him the intellectual leader of the House’s majority party.”

The Path to Prosperity

As if to confirm his new stature, in January 2011, Ryan, now chairman of the House Budget Committee, was selected to deliver the Republican response to Obama’s State of the Union Address; in his speech, Ryan said the national debt is “out of control” and that “what was a fiscal challenge is now a fiscal crisis” that must be met with serious spending cuts. In April, he rolled out an updated version of his budget plan, titled the Path to Prosperity. The Ryan budget, many of whose central proposals his colleagues had deemed unworthy of consideration only three years earlier, was now the official Republican budget proposal for fiscal year 2012. This version dropped the modifications to Social Security but retained plans to scale back Medicaid and Medicare and added provisions for the repeal of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Obama’s national health-care law, widely denounced by Republicans as akin to European-style socialism. Ninety-seven percent of the Republicans in both houses of Congress voted in favor of the budget (which failed in the Democrat-controlled Senate). An updated version was submitted again in March 2012 as the Republican proposal for fiscal year 2013.

With congressional Republicans in full support of the Ryan budget as of spring 2011, the slate of 2012 Republican presidential candidates could not avoid taking a position on it; the prestige it had attained was demonstrated by the implosion of the campaign of Newt Gingrich, attributed in part to his characterization of the Ryan budget in May 2011 as “right-wing social engineering.” The eventual Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, went further than endorsing the budget; in a bold move, he selected Ryan as his running mate in early August 2012.

Vice-Presidential Candidate

“Vice Presidential nominees rarely shape the course of a campaign,” Michael Crowley wrote for Time magazine (22 Oct. 2012). “But Romney’s selection of a Congressman famous for budget blueprints so austere that President Obama called them ‘social Darwinism’ stirred unusual passions from the start. The Obama campaign called Ryan ‘radical’ and ‘extreme,’ while conservatives saw something closer to deliverance and geared up for an epic clash of policy visions.”

The Romney and Obama campaigns did clash over unemployment, social issues, and Medicare, among other issues—although the Medicare debate seemed to hover around which side’s plan would damage it more, the Ryan budget or the Obama health-care law—but both sides avoided dwelling in detail on the specifics of their own plan to rein in spending on the popular entitlement program. Some conservatives wanted to hear a full-throated defense of Ryan’s approach, but Republican strategists considered that too risky.

“Liberals say there’s an obvious reason for muffling the Ryan message,” Crowley wrote. “The public doesn’t support balancing the budget through huge spending cuts. Columnists may extol Ryan’s budgets as visionary and hardheaded, but their particulars have never been popular. For instance, only 18 percent of Americans would support major cuts to Medicare to reduce the deficit, according to a June 2011 Kaiser Family Foundation poll.”

Policy details aside, Ryan’s youth, good looks, and folksy Midwestern demeanor were also considered an asset to the Romney campaign. In October, less than a month before the November election, Ryan met Vice President Joe Biden for the campaign’s only vice-presidential debate. The candidates locked horns over US policy in the Middle East as well as taxes, health care, and entitlement programs. Public opinion following the debate gave a slight edge to Biden, but Ryan’s respectable showing against a man who had been in national politics since Ryan was a toddler earned widespread admiration as well.

On November 6, however, Barack Obama was reelected convincingly, leaving Republicans to sort out what went wrong. For Ryan, who was also elected to an eighth term in the House, it was his first-ever electoral defeat; he told Bill Glauber for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (12 Nov. 2012) that it was “a foreign experience; it’s tough to describe.” Questions immediately arose about whether Ryan himself might consider a run for the presidency in 2016, but he brushed aside such speculation. “Right now, I look at what I’ve just been reelected to do, to represent Wisconsin, to be the chairman of the Budget Committee, to deal with these budget and fiscal and economic issues,” he told Juana Summers for Politico (12 Nov. 2012). “I’m going to throw myself back to that work because it’s work that needs to get done.” Following his return to the House, Ryan was elected as the leader of the Ways and Means Committee.

Speaker of the House

On September 25, 2015, Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner announced that he would be retiring at the end of the following month, following a loss of support from the most conservative wing of his party. Republicans in the House struggled to find a candidate willing to replace Boehner, but after weeks, with support from the conservative Freedom Caucus that had pushed for Boehner's ouster, Ryan was elected on October 29. He was the youngest speaker of the House in 140 years. He took the position of vowing to wipe the slate clean and work to fix what he viewed as a broken House.

The following year, amid a highly contentious and divided GOP presidential primary that saw the relentless rise of the campaign of billionaire populist outsider Donald Trump, Ryan firmly resisted calls for him to step into the race. His support for Trump, however, was only ever lukewarm at best, even after the businessman and reality television star secured the Republican presidential nomination. Ryan did ultimately endorse Trump, reasoning that more Republican goals would be met under a Trump administration than that of his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton; however, Ryan repeatedly spoke out against the drumbeat of Trump scandals, from racist comments about a US federal judge to allegations of sexual assault, and relations between the two were never warm.

Following Trump's election and his inauguration the following January, the Republican Party controlled the White House and both houses of Congress for the first time in a decade. Ryan, reelected speaker in January 2017, was eager to move forward with the Republican agenda of tax reform and repealing and replacing Obamacare. However, these goals proved suprisingly difficult to achieve: while Ryan shepherded the American Health Care Act, the GOP's answer to Obamacare, to a narrow passage in the House in May 2017, the bill got hung up in the Senate. Amid divisions between conservative and moderate Republicans in Congress, and between congressional Republicans and the president, Ryan faced an unexpectedly daunting challenge in trying to enact the conservative principles he had backed for his whole career.

In 2018, Ryan unexpectedly announced that he would retire at the end of his term in January 2019. Although Ryan said he was stepping away to spend more time with his family, wanting his kids to know him more than as a “weekend dad,” political speculation held that he was growing tired of keeping a balancing act between Republicans who were aligned with Trump and those who opposed him.

After leaving Congress, Ryan served in the business sector on several boards of directors. He also remained outspoken in his political views, appearing on numerous television news shows. He remained a vocal opponent of Donald Trump, who lost the 2020 presidential election but ran again in 2024. Ryan said that Trump was a political burden on the Republican Party, and he would never vote for him for president.

Personal Life and Family

In 2000, Ryan married Janna Little, a Washington lobbyist from a prominent Democratic family in Oklahoma. A lawyer and tax specialist who has represented major firms such as PricewaterhouseCoopers and Blue Cross Blue Shield, Janna Ryan gave up her Washington career to join her husband in Janesville and raise a family. Though their families are on different sides of the political divide—Janna’s first cousin is former Oklahoma Democratic congressman Dan Boren—Paul and Janna Ryan share midwestern conservative values and a love of hunting and fishing. They have three children, Liza, Charlie, and Sam.

Paul Ryan is a well-known fitness buff, a lifestyle choice he attributes to his father’s and grandfather’s deaths from heart attacks at relatively young ages. Ryan’s devotion to the P90X intensive cross-training fitness program was well documented during the 2012 presidential campaign.

Suggested Reading

Andrea, Lawrence. "Paul Ryan Says He Won't Vote for Donald Trump: 'Character Is Too Important'." USA Today, 8 May 2024, www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/05/08/paul-ryan-donald-trump-2024/73616325007/. Accessed 4 Oct. 2024.

Chait, Jonathan. “The Legendary Paul Ryan.” New York Magazine, 29 Apr. 2012, nymag.com/news/features/paul-ryan-2012-5/. Accessed 4 Oct. 2024.

Crowley, Michael. “The Phenom.” Time Magazine, 22 Oct. 2012, time.com/archive/6596198/the-phenom/. Accessed 4 Oct. 2024.

Gilbert, Craig. “Ryan Shines as GOP Seeks Vision.” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 25 Apr. 2009, archive.jsonline.com/news/statepolitics/43705712.html. Accessed 4 Oct. 2024.

Mascaro, Lisa. "Speaker Ryan to Retire, Leaving Big Election-Year GOP Vacuum." Associated Press, 11 Apr. 2018, apnews.com/article/819e75f7fb634531936c8416bf860344. Accessed 4 Oct. 2024.