Ro Khanna
Rohit Khanna is an American politician and attorney serving as the U.S. representative from California's 17th congressional district since 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he defeated eight-term incumbent Democratic representative Mike Honda in the general election on November 8, 2016, after first running for the same seat in 2014. Khanna also served as the deputy assistant secretary in the United States Department of Commerce under President Barack Obama from August 8, 2009, to August 2011. Khanna endorsed Bernie Sanders for president of the United States in 2016 and co-chaired Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign.
Khanna was born in Philadelphia to Indian parents. A self described "progressive capitalist," Khanna has called for a "new economic patriotism" as a governing philosophy. Khanna has championed the abundance agenda.
Early life and education
Rohit Khanna was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 13, 1976, into an Indian family. His parents immigrated to the United States from the Indian state of Punjab in the 1970s. His father is a chemical engineer who is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology and of the University of Michigan, while his mother is a former schoolteacher.Khanna's maternal grandfather, Amarnath Vidyalankar, was a politician, social worker, and journalist. Born in Bhera, in the Shahpur District of British Punjab, he was part of the Indian independence movement and spent two years in jail in the pursuit of Dominion status for India.
Khanna is a graduate of Council Rock High School, a public school in Newtown, in 1994. He then received a Bachelor of Arts degree with honors in Economics from the University of Chicago in 1998, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa. He received a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in 2001.
Political, legal, and academic career
As a student at the University of Chicago, Khanna worked for William D. Burns walking precincts during Barack Obama's first campaign for the Illinois Senate in 1996. Khanna interned for Jack Quinn when Quinn served as the chief of staff for Vice President Al Gore. As a sophomore, he interned at former president Jimmy Carter's Carter Center. President Carter made a rare primary endorsement supporting Khanna's Congressional campaign in 2016.After graduating from law school, Khanna clerked for federal appeals judge Morris S. Arnold in Little Rock, Arkansas. In private practice, he specialized in intellectual property law.
In 2009, President Barack Obama appointed Khanna deputy assistant secretary of the United States Department of Commerce. In that role, Khanna led international trade missions and worked to increase United States exports. He was later appointed to the White House Business Council.
Khanna left the Department of Commerce in August 2011 to join Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, a law firm in Silicon Valley.
As part of a pro bono legal team, Khanna filed an amicus brief on behalf of 13 of the country's leading social scientists in the Supreme Court case Fisher v. University of Texas. That brief included research on how a diverse educational environment benefits students and cited studies showing that race-conscious admissions policies used by institutions such as the University of Texas result in a more diverse student body.
Khanna was a visiting lecturer of economics at Stanford University from 2012 to 2016, taught law at the Santa Clara University School of Law, and taught American jurisprudence at San Francisco State University. In 2012, he published a book on American competitiveness in business, Entrepreneurial Nation: Why Manufacturing is Still Key to America's Future. Governor Jerry Brown appointed Khanna to the California Workforce Investment Board in 2012. Khanna served on the board of Planned Parenthood Mar Monte from 2006 until 2013 while on leave from the Obama Administration.
In 2014, Khanna left Wilson Sonsini for his first campaign for California's 17th congressional district seat. Khanna finished second in the top-two primary behind seven-term incumbent and fellow Democrat Mike Honda. He lost a close general election to Honda, but garnered substantial support from the Silicon Valley tech industry. Khanna then took a job as Vice President of Strategic Initiatives at Smart Utility Systems.
In 2016, Khanna challenged Honda again. He narrowly finished first in the top-two primary over Honda, then defeated him in the general election by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, with significant support from venture capital firms and tech companies. Khanna was reelected in 2018, 2020, 2022, and 2024.
As of August 13, 2025, Khanna is working with YouTubers "Schlep" and "KreekCraft" to exercise Roblox's child safety after "Schlep" was terminated and sent a cease and desist letter for catching child predators on the site.
U.S. House of Representatives
Climate change
As chair of the House Oversight Subcommittee on the Environment, Khanna presided over the "Big Oil hearing", bringing the CEOs of ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP to appear before Congress under oath to investigate their spreading of disinformation about climate change. The hearing took place on October 28, 2021. As late as 2000, Exxon advertised in The New York Times that "scientists have been unable to confirm" that burning fossil fuels causes climate change. The Big Oil hearings were the first time oil executives were compelled to answer questions under oath about whether their corporations misled the public about the effects burning oil, gas, and coal have on raising the Earth's temperature and extreme weather patterns such as intensifying storms, deadlier wildfires, and worsening droughts. During the hearing, Khanna called on the executives to "Spare us the spin today. We have no interest in it... Spin doesn't work under oath." In an interview with Yahoo Finance, Khanna described the oil industry's role in obfuscating climate science: "We will have scores of evidence that these big oil companies misrepresented to the American public the threat of climate change. They cast doubt and uncertainty, even though they had scientists in their own company telling them that climate change and climate crisis was going to be catastrophic. And that they continue to engage in a pattern of deception." Khanna led the House Committee on Oversight and Reform's two-year investigation, which uncovered documents showing how Big Oil continues to mislead the public about its commitment to climate goals.Khanna played a key role in year long negotiations with Senator Joe Manchin to secure the $369 billion climate investment in the Inflation Reduction Act and bring House progressives and environmental groups on board.
Khanna criticized oil executives for increasing their oil production on October 28, 2021; conversely, in March 2022, he called for an increase in production after gas prices increased. In a Wall Street Journal piece, Khanna laid out a comprehensive strategy to increase production and supply in the short term to dramatically lower prices for the working class and to have a "moonshot" in renewable energy for the long run to diversify energy sources and stabilize prices. In a New York Times piece, Khanna called on President Joe Biden to do "way more" to lower gas prices by having the Strategic Petroleum Reserve buy and sell oil cheaply to stabilize prices.
Khanna called climate activist Greta Thunberg to testify in a hearing on eliminating fossil fuel subsidies and worked with executive director of Greenpeace Annie Leonard to lead the campaign to stop new fossil fuel permitting in California.
In 2018, Khanna signed on to then Representative-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's "Green New Deal" proposal, which seeks to form a climate change plan with a goal of a 100% renewable energy economy.
In March 2019, Khanna was one of 14 members of the House to cosponsor the PFAS Detection Act, legislation intended to provide $45 million to the U.S. Geological Survey for the purpose of developing advanced technologies that can detect PFAS and afterward conduct nationwide sampling for PFAS in the environment.
In a December 2019, New York Times op-ed, Khanna and former Secretary of State John Kerry laid out a plan for how America should win the "green energy race", analogizing it to the space race. Khanna and Kerry called for expanding the electric vehicle tax credit to make it fully refundable at the time of purchase. This would mean that a person would receive money back immediately when buying an electric vehicle rather than waiting a year for a tax refund. They also called for an exponential increase in the Advanced Research Projects Agency's budget and for doubling the budgets for the Energy Department's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy and Office of Science, which they say would support renewable energy research to foster the sort of innovation necessary to meet the scale and urgency of the climate challenge. Kerry and Khanna also called for the creation of an infrastructure bank to finance a high-speed rail system to relieve congestion, reduce pollution, increase energy efficiency, and provide alternatives to regional air travel. Finally, Khanna and Kerry called for the U.S. to match China's annual investment in public-private partnerships, noting that China spent $126 billion on renewable energy investments in 2016, while the U.S. spent just over $40 billion.
Khanna has said that creating a select committee in the House of Representatives that is specifically dedicated to a Green New Deal would be a "very commonsense idea", based on the recent example of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, which proved effective in developing a 2009 bill for cap-and-trade legislation.
Internet Bill of Rights
In April 2018, Nancy Pelosi asked Khanna to draft the Internet Bill of Rights in wake of Cambridge Analytica's breach and Mark Zuckerberg's testimony to Congress. In October 2018, Khanna released a set of principles for an Internet Bill of Rights, including the right of U.S. citizens to have full knowledge of and control over their personal online data, the right to be notified and consent when an entity seeks to collect or sell one's personal data, and the guarantee of net neutrality.The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, has endorsed Khanna's principles for the Internet Bill of Rights, saying, "This bill of rights provides a set of principles that are about giving users more control of their online lives while creating a healthier internet economy."
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised the efforts to establish an Internet Bill of Rights in her keynote speech at Mansfield College, Oxford, saying, "it is past time to demand that all nations and corporations respect the right of individuals to control their own data... There is important work now being done by technologists like Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, and Ro Khanna, the U.S. Congressman representing Silicon Valley. They are trying to develop guidelines for how this could work."