Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), the top-ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, said Monday he will retire from Congress after 26 years.
Thornberry will not stand for re-election in 2020, but will serve out the remainder of his term, slated to end Jan. 3, 2021, he announced on his website and Twitter. He will leave Congress after reaching perhaps the zenith of his influence in the House GOP Conference, which limits its members to three consecutive terms as a committee leader.
Thornberry is now in his third term as the Republican leader on the House Armed Services Committee, which sets policy and spending limits for Department of Energy defense nuclear programs each year in the annual National Defense Authorization Act. His 13th Congressional District covers a key site in the DOE nuclear complex: the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Pantex Plant weapons assembly hub.
Thornberry assumed the Armed Services chairmanship in 2015 and remained the panel’s top-ranking Republican after Democrats won the House majority in the 2018 midterm elections. In his time at the helm, he helped shepherd through the Barack Obama administration’s 30-year nuclear arsenal modernization and maintenance plan, and the Donald Trump administration’s relatively modest additions to it: the W76-2 low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead, and an extended round of life support for the B83 megaton-class gravity bomb.
Thornberry was first elected to the House in 1994, six years before Congress created the semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration to oversee DOE’s active nuclear weapons and nonproliferation programs.
In his statement Monday, Thornberry gave no reason for his planned departure.
“It has been a great honor to serve the people of the 13th District of Texas as their congressman for the last 25 years,” Thornberry wrote. “They have given me opportunities to serve the nation in ways I could have never imagined, including as Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.
“We are reminded, however, that ‘for everything there is a season,’ and I believe that the time has come for a change. Therefore, this is my last term in the U.S. House of Representatives.”
