Bio

Ken Vaughn is a professional traffic engineer who became politically active during the 2008 financial crisis. His engineering background led him to conduct his own research into the causes of the financial crisis, and he has since become even more concerned about the financial state of our country. His Christian roots have shaped his strong conviction that it is immoral for our government to enter into a debt without a plan to pay it off.

The third of three children, Ken was raised in Texas. His dad, a reserve Marine Corps officer, started his own construction company when Ken was just entering school, and his mom was a music teacher. As he grew up, Ken mowed lawns and delivered newspapers to earn spending money, and as he grew older, he spent summers working in the trenches -- literally and figuratively -- for his dad's construction company.

Ken earned his bachelor's degree in civil engineering from Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. While at Tulane, he took advantage of the Junior Year Abroad program and spent a full academic year in Dundee, Scotland as he continued his course of study. After graduation in 1989, he briefly considered entering the Navy, but the end of the Cold War and the subsequent downsizing of the military ultimately convinced him to pursue a civilian career instead. He took a position as an Assistant Traffic Engineer in the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works.

After a marriage and the birth of his twin sons, Ken returned to school to obtain a master's degree in engineering from Texas A&M. In 1992, Ken and his family moved to metropolitan DC, where he took a job with a private engineering firm that specialized in applying information technologies (IT) to transportation, a field now known as Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Ken became an internationally known leader in this industry; he has authored several major industry standards and still volunteers his time to serve on multiple international working groups to standardize communications among ITS equipment. In 2000, he started his own corporation working as a consultant within the ITS industry.

He and his family watched in 2005 as the reports of Hurricane Katrina came in from his old home of New Orleans. As a civil engineer who studied in the city, he was painfully aware of the dangers of the storm and then saw them realized. Over the next 4 years, he organized 8 mission trips to the region to help those affected by the storm. These activities led to his involvement in the Missions ministry at his church -- Columbia Baptist Church in Falls Church, Virginia. When Columbia launched the Spend Yourself hunger ministry in 2008, Ken became an active participant and was appointed to be one of the leaders for the statewide outreach effort, a role in which he continues to serve today.