Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez brands expanded health care access a top priority, yet campaign records and a former shop employee show she has not provided that coverage at home.
Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez has spent years telling voters that expanding health care access and driving down costs sit at the center of her work. Campaign emails and interviews hammer the same line. The records behind her own payroll tell a different story.
The Washington Free Beacon reviewed Federal Election Commission disbursements and found her campaign has paid for liability insurance and workers’ compensation, but made no direct payments for a group health plan. The same pattern held in her 2022 and 2024 campaigns. Her campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
That gap lands hard against the message she sends donors and constituents in Washington’s Third Congressional District.
In a Feb. 6 fundraising email, Gluesenkamp Perez framed the stakes in personal terms.
The email stated:
"No one should have to choose between groceries and medicine, or delay care because they're worried about the next bill,"
The next month, another fundraising email carried the subject line “Expanding health care access.” She wrote that she “won’t stop fighting to expand access and lower costs... across Southwest Washington because all of us deserve access to affordable, quality health care.”
She gave the Washington State Standard the same priority list in plain language, saying bringing down costs, including for health care, “is my top priority.”
FEC filings show the campaign uses the human resources platform Gusto, which can manage benefits such as health coverage. The records do not show what services Gusto actually provided. What they do show is the absence of direct group health plan payments alongside the liability and workers’ comp line items that did clear.
The contradiction is not limited to campaign payroll. Gluesenkamp Perez co-owns Dean’s Car Care with her husband. Former mechanic Colton Stender worked there full-time from 2016 to 2019 and described the benefits package he saw.
Stender told the Free Beacon:
"When I was there we did not have health care," "I'm pretty d*** sure that no one else was."
A 2021 job listing for a full-time service writer at the shop named Gluesenkamp Perez as the contact. It did not list health insurance as a benefit. Federal records also listed Dean’s Car Care as “NonUnion,” even as she has presented herself as a vocal supporter of organized labor and collective bargaining.
She has suggested she owned a business in southwestern Washington. The shop sits in Portland, across the state line in Oregon. Campaign ads have leaned on auto shop imagery. A portion of the shop website later deleted described her role as “mostly behind the scenes managing the business side of Dean’s” and said she “enjoys making spreadsheets and burning the cookies for our holiday gift boxes.”
Gluesenkamp Perez has cast her path as scrappy and self-made. She has said her father cut her off financially in college after she stopped going to church, and that she worked as a barista, a nanny, and in what she called an “iPhone case factory”, described elsewhere as a boutique artisanal workshop. She has also described a bicycle trip from Portland to Quito, a ride that typically takes three to six months.
Personal financial disclosures paint a softer landing. They show her father loaned her between $24,000 and $47,999 to help buy her first property about two years after she graduated from college. In 2016 she reported owing her father-in-law, her grandmother, and a family friend as much as $47,999, plus up to $23,999 more to her grandmother. By the 2018 disclosure, only the debt to her father remained among those entries. None of her disclosures show student debt, even though Reed College cost about $46,000 before room and board around the time she attended.
A former roommate, unnamed in the report, put the branding in blunt terms, saying the congresswoman is “definitely cosplaying as a poor person.”
Oregon’s minimum salary threshold for staff not eligible for overtime sits near $35,600. Washington’s equivalent figure is $80,172 a year. Those state rules set the backdrop for how small employers structure pay and benefits. They do not explain why a member of Congress who calls health care access her top priority has left her own campaign without a recorded group health plan and, by a former employee’s account, ran a shop the same way.
Gluesenkamp Perez is fighting to hold a difficult seat. She sells affordability and access as moral basics. FEC disbursements, a 2021 job posting, and a mechanic who worked the bay for three years all point the other direction on the coverage she controls.
She has not closed the gap in public. The campaign stayed silent when asked. The shop’s later benefit status after 2021 is not spelled out in the available records. What is spelled out is the repeated pitch to Southwest Washington that “all of us deserve access to affordable, quality health care,” paired with payroll and shop practices that left her own people outside that promise.
Politicians who make health coverage a rallying cry should start with the people on their own roster. Anything less is a slogan, not a standard.
