The First 100 Days of an Anthony Aguilar Presidency: What the Record Suggests

Photo: White House/Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

01 The record and the scenario

Anthony Aguilar is the Green Party candidate for North Carolina's 13th Congressional District in the November 3, 2026 general election, on a ballot against Republican Knott, Democrat Barringer and Libertarian Swinton. He is a retired United States Army lieutenant colonel who served twenty-five years in Special Forces with nine combat tours across Iraq, Syria, the Philippines and Afghanistan, commissioned at West Point in 2004 as an infantry officer and born in San Antonio, Texas. His campaign reports $50,017 in total receipts, about 42 percent from small donors, and he has refused all corporate PAC money.

What makes his candidacy unusual is the path into it. In 2025, newly retired from the Army, he was recruited as a security contractor for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the American-run aid operation at Israeli-mandated distribution points in Gaza, at a contract rate he has described as $2,000 a day. He has said he witnessed Israeli forces kill a young Palestinian boy at a distribution point on May 28, 2025, and that he later briefed Senators Chris Van Hollen and Bernie Sanders on what he saw. He became a public whistleblower with the claim that the foundation worked for a client — the Israeli military — and in 2025 he received the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence for disclosing alleged war crimes despite personal risk. He has also worked as a medical interpreter in an emergency room, the experience he cites for his health-care positions: “I saw families destroyed by bills.”

His campaign's stated frame is a redirection: “No more endless war. Yes to America's needs” — affordable housing, health care, universal childcare and a living wage, “human rights, not privileges.” He describes both major parties as compromised and lacking American interests, and his platform's central table promises an “Integrity Insurgency” against a status quo of corporate PACs, for-profit insurance, unchecked datacenter growth, foreign war funding, corporate landlords, endless conflicts and donor-serving accountability.

This article does not predict that Anthony Aguilar will become president. It examines how the individual's documented positions and record could translate into executive priorities if placed in presidential office.

Analysis — not prediction. N43 and Hermes AI grounds every scenario in the documented record as of September 21, 2026; where evidence is incomplete we say so.

02 Day One: what a president could do alone

One caveat governs everything below: Aguilar is a congressional candidate, and his campaign's stated positions are positions about what Congress should do. Translating them to a presidency requires separating, item by item, what a president could execute alone from what he himself has framed as a vote he would cast. His agenda splits accordingly into a large congressional pile and a small but meaningful unilateral one — concentrated, fittingly for a soldier-turned-whistleblower, in the war powers the executive already holds.

Likely Day-One Actions (unilateral)

• Foreign-policy directives on military aid and targeting. A president can order changes to the conduct of ongoing operations, review munitions-transfer authorizations against existing human-rights law (the Leahy Law's vetting framework already binds transfers), and set new conditions inside the executive's own review processes. Aguilar's stated aim — no U.S. offensive munitions used in Gaza, citing H.R. 3565, a resolution he has lobbied Congress on personally — has executive-shaped versions: slow-walking, conditioning and reporting. The inference that he would use them is N43's, not a published presidential policy.
• Intelligence-community disclosure posture. The record's most credible inference: a president who received the Sam Adams Award for disclosing alleged war crimes would plausibly direct intelligence-community transparency, protect disclosures and mandate reporting on U.S.-supported operations abroad. He has published no intelligence policy; the inference rests on his record.
• DOD and DHS review orders. A president can order force-structure reviews, deployment reviews and enforcement-priority changes. Aguilar's agenda — reducing the $1.7 trillion annual defense budget he cites, redirecting military spending toward veterans' health care and education, and disbanding ICE “as currently constituted” — has review-and-priority versions available to a president alone, though each substantive step needs money or statute.
• VA emergency and funding-priority directives. His veterans platform — full VA funding, a new Raleigh VA hospital, ending veteran homelessness — becomes executive in part: directing VA backlog triage, expanding community-care access within existing authority, and putting the Raleigh VA hospital in the budget request. Money remains Congress's.
• A moratorium the executive can actually reach. His three-year datacenter moratorium is aimed at private construction — beyond a president's reach — but federal data-center procurement, siting on federal land and energy-interconnection priorities for federal facilities are reviewable by executive order. A “tactical pause” he calls it; the federal slice is where a pause could start.

Actions the Candidate Could Not Do Alone

• Enact Medicare for All — single-payer health insurance is the largest kind of legislation there is: a tax, a program and a wind-down of an industry, all in one act of Congress.
• Cut military aid to Israel or any state by statute — security-assistance commitments are appropriated; conditioning them prospectively is Congress's power of the purse.
• Abolish or rebuild ICE — the agency is a statutory creation inside the Department of Homeland Security; restructuring it is a Homeland Security authorization bill, as Aguilar himself notes when he says ICE is “funded through DHS, through appropriations in the National Defense Authorization Act.”
• End the BIRD program — his named target, which he describes as a bilateral program linking U.S. agencies to Israeli security functions, exists as an authorized federal program; termination is legislation.
• Impose the three-year national datacenter moratorium — construction is state and local permitting plus private capital; the moratorium he proposes is a law no president can sign on his own authority.
• Ban corporate and private-equity speculation in single-family housing, or set a national living wage — both are statutes.
• Fund universal childcare or a Raleigh VA hospital — every dollar is an appropriation.

03 Days 2-30: reorienting the executive branch

The agency map here is the most vivid in this series, because the record names its targets directly. The Department of Defense is the first and deepest: twenty-five years in uniform give a President Aguilar a knowledge of the building that no other candidate in this series could claim, and his stated intent — reduce the $1.7 trillion annual defense budget he cites, end “endless conflicts,” redirect spending toward veterans and domestic needs — would arrive as reviews, deployment-priority orders and a budget request within the president's powers. The Department of Homeland Security is second: ICE is his named structural target, and a president can reassign enforcement priorities within existing statute while asking Congress to rebuild the agency. The Department of Veterans Affairs is third, and the most personal: full funding, no waiting lists and the Raleigh VA hospital his district lost, in his account, to other priorities.

Beyond the national-security cluster, the record thins fast. The environmental and technology planks — datacenter water and PFAS transparency, the 600,000 predicted asthma cases from coal resurgence he cites, Duke Energy rate hikes — point at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy, where existing statutes give the executive real room: PFAS reporting under existing law, permitting reviews, rate intervention before federal regulators. The Department of Justice surfaces for whistleblower protection and, given his antitrust plank, antitrust enforcement posture. But he has published no personnel philosophy, no agency-by-agency plan, and no economic team — and none is invented here. The honest generalization is that an Aguilar reorientation would be concentrated exactly where a Special Forces lieutenant colonel turned Gaza whistleblower would be expected to concentrate it: the agencies of force and accountability.

04 Days 30-60: the first legislative package

Aguilar's campaign is, in effect, a pre-written legislative package — unusual for a first-time candidate, and the reason most items below carry strong evidence labels. The package's organizing principle is his own: stop spending abroad, spend at home.

High evidence

• A bill blocking offensive munitions transfers to Israel. Modeled on H.R. 3565, the resolution he has lobbied in person — “no longer allowing these advanced offensive lethal munitions to Israel” including 2,000-pound bombs and precision-guided munitions — and on the war-powers votes he faulted congressional staff for not knowing about.
• A defense-appropriations redirection. His “Keep Taxpayer Money at Home” plank is an appropriations bill with a direction: cut the defense budget he cites at $1.7 trillion annually and move the money to veterans' health care, education and domestic rebuilding.
• A VA bill. Full VA funding, end veteran homelessness, and a new Raleigh VA hospital — a district-specific demand with an appropriations-shaped bill behind it.
• A Medicare for All bill. Single-payer, in his framing “if government healthcare is good enough for veterans, it's good enough for every American.”
• An ICE restructuring bill. Abolish the agency “immediately, but... responsibly” while preserving “the funding and the functions to have responsible immigration, responsible naturalization, responsible pathways” — a DHS authorization rewrite, and the item he has described in the most implementation-aware detail of anything on his list.
• A datacenter and AI oversight bill. The three-year national moratorium, repeal of Big Tech tax exemptions, mandatory water and PFAS disclosure, and an AI bill of Rights — a full sector bill published in platform form.
• Whistleblower-protection legislation. The “Accountability” row of his status-quo table — and the natural bill for a Sam Adams laureate to sign first.

Moderate evidence

• Ending the BIRD program. His most distinctive named target, described in interviews as a bilateral program embedding Israeli security interests in U.S. domestic agencies; the elimination vehicle is a defense or authorization bill.
• A housing-speculation ban and a living-wage bill. Platform positions with campaign-stated ends but no mechanism published.

Universal childcare — “a public good” against a $10,000-per-year burden — is a published position without a bill's worth of detail, and is labeled accordingly; nothing is padded below that.

05 Days 60-100: where governing meets reality

The mathematics of an Aguilar presidency would be the mathematics of every item in the package running into the two obstacles he names himself. The first is the filibuster: a $1.7 trillion defense cut, single-payer health care, an ICE rebuild, a national moratorium and a housing ban are each sixty-vote bills in practice, and none of the five has forty-nine confirmed supporters, let alone sixty, on the current map. The second is the appropriations committee structure itself — his redirection thesis requires the committee that funds defense to vote to un-fund it, and the defense-appropriations consensus of both parties is precisely the thing his campaign calls “compromised.”

The courts and the APA are the second wall. Any moratorium with regulatory force would draw challenges under the Administrative Procedure Act within weeks of publication; an ICE restructuring by executive order — rather than statute — would be enjoined faster. What moves fast, honestly, is the unilateral sliver: transfer-conditioning and reporting inside the executive, VA priorities, enforcement-posture orders, a budget request that states the redirection in print, and the platform of a presidency making the anti-war case with a credibility no sitting politician of either party could match — nine combat tours' worth. What is years-long or never: every bill above, including the ones he wrote his campaign around. An Aguilar hundred days would be the strange case of a president uniquely able to explain the system he cannot move.

06 The policy record in detail

Foreign Policy and Defense

The core of the record, and the reason the candidacy exists. His stated aims: end “endless wars,” defense rather than intervention, an end to offensive munitions transfers to Israel (H.R. 3565, 2,000-pound bombs), opposition to anti-boycott laws he calls a “primary target,” and a reduction of the $1.7 trillion annual defense budget. His evidence is biographical: twenty-five years, nine combat tours, a Gaza contract at $2,000 a day that ended in whistleblowing, a Sam Adams Award. A presidential translation concentrates in the commander-in-chief's real powers — deployment decisions, transfer vetting, targeting restraint, intelligence transparency.

Immigration and Homeland Security

Abolish ICE, but “immediately, but... responsibly” — preserve funding and functions for “responsible immigration, responsible naturalization, responsible pathways that are responsible and enforceable.” He grounds the position in a structural claim: ICE is funded through DHS appropriations and the NDAA, so abolition without a replacement is a funding cut, not a reform. The BIRD program — which he links to ICE training and Israeli security functions — is his named target inside the same architecture. A presidential translation: enforcement-priority orders unilaterally; the structural work by statute.

Health Care

Medicare for All, single-payer, stated in platform and interview: “If government healthcare is good enough for veterans, it's good enough for every American.” The ER-interpreter background gives the position a documented source: families “destroyed by bills.” It is a congressional item entirely.

Veterans

Full VA funding, an end to veteran homelessness, and a new Raleigh VA hospital — which he says was defunded in his account to pay for other federal priorities. Partly executive (priorities, community-care access, budget request), wholly congressional in its funding.

Technology, Datacenters and AI

His “People Over Megawatts” plank is the most novel piece of the platform: an immediate three-year moratorium on new datacenter construction, repeal of Big Tech tax exemptions, mandatory water and PFAS transparency (a single datacenter at five million gallons a day, he notes, against 92 of 100 North Carolina counties in drought), an AI bill of Rights against surveillance and predictive policing, and references to Duke Energy rate hikes and 600,000 predicted asthma cases from coal resurgence by 2030. Almost entirely a state-and-congressional agenda; the federal executive slice is procurement and permitting.

Whistleblower Protection and Accountability

The “Accountability” row of his campaign table — government that serves its stated purposes rather than donors — backed by the most concrete credential any candidate in this series holds on the subject: he disclosed alleged war crimes from inside a contractor operation and was awarded for it. A president can move disclosure protections, classification-reform posture and inspector-general independence unilaterally in meaningful measure.

Economic Policy, Housing and Wages

The platform's economic cluster — a living wage, universal childcare as a public good, a ban on corporate and private-equity speculation in single-family housing, tenant protections (“a home is a human right”), and breaking “the stranglehold of corporate monopolies” — is stated in ends, not mechanisms, and is labeled moderate for that reason. He has also made a personal-financial disclosure of the anti-corruption kind: his household keeps its savings in cash and gold, he says, precisely so that no vote he casts could ever benefit a portfolio.

Environment and Energy

Transition to solar and wind, protection of farmers from factory farms, and energy independence “without foreign intervention” — stated planks with little published detail, and labeled limited.

The areas the record does not reach

Anthony Aguilar has not publicly detailed a federal policy on education. The Green Party's national platform addresses public education funding, but that should not automatically be interpreted as his personal position — this series attributes party platforms to parties, never to candidates. Similarly, there is not enough public evidence to determine his position on criminal justice beyond accountability rhetoric, or on entitlements beyond the health-care plank above.

07 What could not happen alone — and what could

What President Aguilar Could Not Do Alone

• Enact Medicare for All — the single largest piece of legislation in American domestic policy, and his.
• Cut off military aid to Israel by executive fiat — appropriations bind; the Leahy-style conditioning the executive can do is narrower than the transfer ban he has lobbied for.
• Abolish or rebuild ICE — a statutory agency, restructured by statute; his own description of its DHS-and-NDAA funding chain makes the point better than this analysis can.
• End the BIRD program — an authorized federal program, terminated by its authorizing law.
• Impose the three-year national datacenter moratorium on private construction — state permitting and private capital, unreachable without legislation.
• Ban housing speculation or set a national living wage — statutes, both.
• Fund universal childcare, the Raleigh VA hospital or veterans' programs at new scale — appropriations.
• Reduce the $1.7 trillion defense budget by veto alone — a veto is a brake, not a redirection; the money's destination is Congress's to choose.

What Could Change Within 100 Days

• Transfer-conditioning and reporting directives inside the executive's existing human-rights vetting framework — the Gaza arms stance, in the one form a president can execute.
• Deployment and force-structure reviews directed at “endless conflicts” — reviews a commander in chief can order on his own authority.
• VA priority orders: backlog triage, community-care access, the Raleigh hospital in the budget request.
• Intelligence and whistleblower-disclosure posture orders — the Sam Adams agenda in executive form.
• A federal-slice datacenter “tactical pause”: procurement, federal siting and reporting, with PFAS transparency under existing EPA law.

Potential Coalition Partners

The themes overlap with the anti-interventionist and war-powers wings of both major parties — he personally lobbied members of Congress of both parties on Gaza resolutions and war-powers votes, and briefed two Democratic senators — and with the veterans' caucus on VA funding. His Medicare for All and living-wage planks are standard fare among progressives; his datacenter moratorium has an unusual potential ally in local-growth skeptics of both parties. But he has published no coalition strategy, and his refusal of corporate PAC money is by design a wall against the usual coalition currency. This section names convergences, not claimed partners.

Areas of Likely Conflict

His own analysis supplies the list: he calls both major parties compromised on war funding and foreign money, and the campaign's framing of AIPAC-aligned spending and anti-boycott law puts him in direct conflict with a substantial bipartisan congressional bloc. The defense-appropriations consensus, the DHS authorization structure and the health-insurance industry's congressional allies would each face a president elected against them. And a Green president with no caucus would face the speakers and leaders of both parties with nothing to trade but the argument — which, in his case, would be the argument he has spent the loudest year of his life making.

08 The 100-day scorecard and what the record tells us

The scorecard's shape is the opposite of a thin record's: seven strong rows, concentrated in national security, veterans, health care, immigration and technology — the areas where a twenty-five-year Special Forces career and a Gaza whistleblowing episode give a first-time candidate more documented evidence than most members of Congress bring to a presidential run. One moderate row, three limited, one unknown; this analysis has kept the limited rows limited rather than stretching platform sentences into programs.

The clearest priorities translate in a single sentence of his own: stop spending on endless wars and start spending on Americans — with the Gaza arms stance as the sharpest single edge of it. In presidential translation the redirection is almost entirely Congress's; what is executable alone is the conduct of U.S. support abroad, the priorities of the VA, and the machinery of disclosure.

What moves fast in an Aguilar hundred days: transfer-conditioning and reporting directives, deployment reviews, VA priority orders, whistleblower and disclosure posture, the federal datacenter slice, and a budget request that says “defense, not intervention” in the only document a president authors. What is years-long or never: single-payer health care, the ICE rebuild, the national moratorium, the housing ban, the living wage, and the defense-budget redirection that gives the rest their funding.

Where the record is thin this analysis says so: education and criminal justice carry no documented personal position, and the Green Party's national platform has been treated throughout as the party's document, never imported as the candidate's. His economic and environmental planks are stated as ends without mechanisms, and are labeled accordingly.

How he differs from both major parties, on the documented record, is the candidacy's whole premise: both parties, in his telling, fund the war system and take the money that sustains it — and the difference he offers is not a policy distance but an autobiographical one, a candidate whose pivot from executing policy to questioning it is on the record, dated and named. A first hundred days built on that record would be a presidency of unilateral restraint abroad, unilateral priority-setting at home, and an enormous, honest argument with a Congress whose appropriations he would need for everything else — the argument he has already been making, at $2,000 a day's expense, since Gaza.