Mike Gallagher

Mike Gallagher is a distinguished fellow at Hudson Institute.

Dr. Gallagher represented Wisconsin’s Eighth District in the United States House of Representatives from 2017 to 2024. In the 118th Congress, he served as the founding chairman of the Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, as chairman of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Cyber, Information Technologies, and Innovation, and on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. From 2019 to 2021, he served as cochairman of the Cyberspace Solarium Commission.

Dr. Gallagher is the author of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which forces TikTok to divest from Chinese ownership. Under his leadership, the Select Committee produced the definitive report on the future of selective decoupling from China and groundbreaking investigations into the Chinese Communist Party’s subsidization of the fentanyl crisis, the American financial industry’s subsidization of the CCP’s military industrial complex, illicit China-linked biolabs operating in the United States, and the role of Chinese fast fashion companies in abetting the Uyghur genocide. In Congress he was a leading voice on the need to restore conventional deterrence and maritime primacy in the Indo-Pacific, the decline of warfighting focus within the Pentagon, the nature of the Chinese Communist Party, and how to reform the legislative branch.

As a result of his bipartisan approach to solving national security problems, Dr. Gallagher received the Navy’s Distinguished Public Service Award, the highest award bestowed on an individual outside of the Department of the Navy. He also received the Panetta Institute’s Jefferson-Lincoln Award and the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress’s Eisenhower Award.

Prior to Congress, Dr. Gallagher served for seven years on active duty in the United States Marine Corps as a counterintelligence/human intelligence (CI/HUMINT) officer and regional affairs officer for the Middle East and North Africa, earning the rank of captain. He deployed twice to Al Anbar Province, Iraq, as a commander of intelligence teams and served on General David Petraeus’s Central Command assessment team. He also spent three years working in the US intelligence community, including tours in the National Counterterrorism Center and the Drug Enforcement Administration. He subsequently served as the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s lead Republican staffer for the Middle East, North Africa, and counterterrorism and as the national security advisor for Governor Scott Walker’s presidential campaign. He also worked in the private sector at an energy and supply chain management company in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

Dr. Gallagher earned a PhD in international relations from Georgetown University, a master’s degree in security studies with honors from Georgetown, a master’s degree in government from Georgetown, and a master’s degree in strategic intelligence from National Intelligence University, where he won the award for academic excellence. He earned his bachelor’s degree from Princeton University with a focus on Near Eastern studies and Arabic and attended Middlebury’s Arabic immersion school. He was the honor graduate from Marine Corps Officer Basic School, the honor graduate from Marine Corps CI/HUMINT Basic Course, and the honor graduate from the Marine Air-Ground Task Force (MAGTF) Intelligence Officers Course.

Dr. Gallagher is a seventh generation Wisconsinite who was born and raised in Green Bay, where he now lives with his wife (and Packers owner), Anne, and daughters (and Packers owners), Grace and Rose.