There’s something appropriate about meeting Mark Sanford for the first time on Pearl Harbor Day.
I was fresh out of college and still very much a small-town boy, working my first job in Washington, DC. I had this image of members of Congress being serious and formal, caught up in the ceremony of the job.
Then I met Mark Sanford, and he changed all that.
Jurassic DOGE
In 1994, I landed a job in government affairs at Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW). I was in my early twenties, working in Washington during the Clinton years, when the city was torn between “reinventing government” and Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America. This is where I met the infamous Joe Winkelmann, Director of Government Affairs.
CAGW was born out of the President’s Private Sector Survey on Cost Control, a sweeping private-sector audit of the federal government launched by President Reagan in 1982. Led by industrialist J. Peter Grace, the Commission pulled together more than 2,000 business professionals and consultants. The group would be forever known as the Grace Commission, certainly easier to say than the PPSSCC was.
After two years of digging, they produced a 21,000-page, 47-volume report containing 2,478 recommendations to eliminate waste, inefficiency, and abuse. The report estimated potential savings of $424 billion over three years and up to $1.9 trillion by the year 2000 if everything was implemented. Congress adopted just a fraction of the proposals, about 17 percent, and quietly shelved the rest.
Undeterred, Grace and syndicated columnist Jack Anderson launched CAGW in 1984 to carry the mission forward. When I joined a decade later, the organization had a reputation for naming names and roasting sacred cows. Our annual “Pig Book” was part exposé, part roast, and part dare, highlighting absurd congressional earmarks like the indoor rainforest in Iowa or studies on methane emissions from cows.
It Was the Best of Times
I was responsible for tracking legislation, briefing Hill staff, pushing for program cuts, and occasionally trying to keep a straight face while explaining why taxpayers shouldn’t fund blueberry research in Maine. I learned to read appropriations bills like a thriller novel, full of plot twists, hidden villains, and occasionally, buried treasure in the form of an unobligated balance no one wanted to talk about.
CAGW gave me more than a crash course in budget policy. It taught me how deeply institutions resist change, how reformers are treated like party crashers, and how even the most well-documented recommendations can be ignored if they threaten the wrong ox. But more than anything, I came to understand that government waste isn’t just about dollars. It’s about public trust. When people see their money used for pet projects and favors, they lose faith in the whole system. We weren’t just trying to cut spending. We were trying to hold the system accountable in plain English, with facts, humor, and just enough outrage to make people pay attention.
Thirty years later, people still believe that wasteful government spending exists and should be stopped. Washington lives in constant conflict with itself, resulting in tens of trillions of dollars in national debt and no end in sight.
To quote a famous earmark abuser, “One man’s pork is another man’s bacon.”
A Day That Will Live in Infamy?
On December 7, 1994, CAGW hosted a reception for the incoming members of the 104th Congress, famously known as the Republican Revolution. The reception was part of the 10th anniversary celebration of the Grace Commission Report and included a gala with former President Ronald Reagan. After 50 years in the minority, the Republican Party took control of the U.S. House of Representatives on the promises of the Contract with America, a 10-point plan to reform government and balance the budget.
As the new guy, my job was to check in guests, hand out name tags, show them where the coat rack was, and eventually, maybe go inside to mingle among the staffers and members of Congress. The first guest at the event was Mark Sanford. He was wearing what I learned was his calling card, a blue blazer and one of five pairs of dress pants. He gave me his name and I nervously stuck out my hand.
“Congressman-elect Sanford, thank you for joining us.”
He reached out, shook my hand, and said, “Call me Mark.”
I handed him his name tag, and off he went to see the important people.
A Model Revolutionary
In 1994, Mark Sanford was a political rookie with a young family and a thing for fiscal restraint. Running in South Carolina’s 1st Congressional District, he crisscrossed the district on foot, introducing himself as a conservative outsider with no political baggage and no appetite for federal debt. His bumper stickers were simple and blunt, the word “Deficit” with a red circle and a slash through it. No PAC money, no handlers, no frills.
His wife, Jenny, was his campaign manager. It was just Mark, a stack of policy handouts, and a pledge to serve no more than three terms. He meant it, too. His disdain for career politicians was matched only by his obsession with reducing the national debt. When he launched his bid for Congress, he and his supporters came out in hunting gear, declaring an “open season on career politicians.” Somehow, he emerged from sixth place in a six-person field to win the Republican nomination.
Sanford beat Democrat Robert Barber in the general election, part of the GOP’s 1994 wave. He had a young family, and campaign life often blurred into parenting life. On election night, with a packed room and victory nearly certain, Sanford was greeting supporters and the press when someone realized his young son Marshall was nowhere to be seen. After a brief panic, a family friend emerged from a hallway with a sheepish grin and a relieved toddler.
“Sorry, Mark. Marshall needed to go, and I figured you’d want to win before you changed any diapers.”
He seemed unpolished, awkward, earnest, and authentic. The voters loved his personal touch, his family-friendly campaigning, and how he lived out his rhetoric. When I first met him, I had no idea how important he would become in my life.
Shrimp and Grit
When I was finally able to go inside the reception, I saw Sanford standing alone, snacking furiously on shrimp. Over time, I learned there’s an innate awkwardness to Sanford that he used politics to overcome. He could work a large room when he was the speaker and engage one or two people intensely. Otherwise, not so much.
I walked over and said, “Hey, Congressman Sanford, I wanted—”
“It’s Mark,” he replied. “I don’t really do formalities.”
He was cool and relaxed. He hated wasteful spending and deficits as much as I did. I pitched our wares and he listened intently. He was fishing for ideas to cut spending. He wanted to hear my ideas and then asked for my business card. For the guy at the bottom of the CAGW food chain, it was really cool to have a member of Congress treat you like you mattered. You don’t forget that.
What I later realized is that I fell for the gimmick.
The Sanford Theory of Relativity
Years later, after I got to know Sanford well and became the guy who cleaned up his messes, I came up with something I called the Sanford Theory of Relativity.
Here’s how it works: your importance to Mark Sanford is directly proportional to your distance from him, both geographically and philosophically.
If you didn’t work for him, he’d find your insights fascinating. You’d walk away thinking he thought you were a genius. Sometimes, he actually did. He’d offer someone a job on the spot, bring them to the office, and throw them straight into the mix. Then, like clockwork, he’d lose interest. I’d get the call to show them the door. What followed was usually a little psychological torment for the poor soul who thought they had a special bond with Mark. They didn’t. Not anymore.
If he showed up to an event where 200 people loved him, he’d zero in on the five protestors out front. He’d engage, charm, and try to win them over. And usually, he did, at least enough to earn some begrudging respect. Then he’d walk away convinced he’d converted them.
For those of us on staff, it was a different experience. You could spend weeks working on a detailed proposal, shaping an idea he seemed to love. Then he’d casually mention the next day that he called a random friend the night before, and they thought it was terrible. Just like that, your work was dead. He had a habit of answer-shopping, letting someone else confirm what he already felt and calling that wisdom. In the end, this other person torpedoed your idea, not him. At least that’s what he wanted you to think.
After two years of watching this pattern play out, I did something very few people managed to do. I cracked the code on the Sanford Theory of Relativity.
But we’re getting ahead of the story. It would be almost two years from when I first met Mark before I joined his staff. It took getting fired and a well-timed phone call to the Sanford World before I set foot on the road to the Appalachian Trail.
From Shrimp to Strategy
Looking back, that night at the reception was the first breadcrumb on a strange and winding trail. I didn’t know it yet, but I was stepping into the orbit of someone who would become one of our time's most unconventional and complicated political figures, and somehow, my future boss.
Washington is full of people who chase power or proximity. I didn’t really do either. I wanted to do meaningful work that might actually make a dent. That’s what CAGW gave me. That’s what Sanford, for all his quirks, seemed to want too. And maybe that’s why we eventually collided again, under much different circumstances, with much higher stakes.
But that story? That’s another chapter. One that involves a pink slip, a second chance, and a crash course in the politics of the improbable.
I'll never forget the wee time I spent with you and the Governor. It was intoxicating to take a call out of the blue one day from a guy I had begun to think had real political legs, reaching out to ask for my help. Didn't take long to determine that not only were his political legs shorter than I had seen from afar, but the staffing processes and issues he wanted looked at were all reflections of him. But boy, he could make you feel important.
It was fun to read this article. I was a peon in his administration when he was governor. I was always so excited to attend the annual Christmas party at the Governor's Mansion. I had worked for other governors, and none of them had ever invited the peons to the Christmas party. He made a point of talking with us while we were there - making us feel as important as the senior staffers. Now, I know why he invited us. LOL. Hope you are doing well, Scott. You were my General to whom I reported every Friday for mail meeting.