Downing didn’t let his family’s financial situation stand in the way of getting an education. This was in pre-internet days, so he poured through a massive, printed book to find grant and scholarship opportunities. “You had to go through that and submit to everything you could.” Downing says. “It was loans, it was scholarships, it was Pell grants. I did everything I could to squeeze through and basically lived on onion soup and rice for my first couple of years.”

He attended New York University (NYU) and stayed on as a research scientist and teacher at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. Downing left NYU to form a tech startup company called WebCal. “It was web-based groupware like calendars, schedulers, address books, and contact managers,” he says. “At the time, Yahoo was going from being a manually input directory to becoming a portal.”

To make the transition, Yahoo brought in a company that provided White Pages and Yellow Pages directories as well as an email client called Rocketmail, which became Yahoo Mail. They also merged with an online retail company.

“Then, they brought in my company, which was the glue with personal information management,” Downing says. “We did a pooling of interest merger at the time when Yahoo was transitioning from being a directory to being basically the first version of an internet media company, which we called a portal at the time.” The merger with Yahoo took place in 1989 while Downing was involved in other tech ventures as well, investing in startup businesses while funding and advising other small companies.

Only in his 30s, Downing’s successful merger gave him a level of prosperity that allowed him to do the things he loved, such as hunting and fishing. He also loved flying and bought a twin-engine plane. In September 2001, he was on a moose hunting trip in Alaska with his guide and good friend, Gerry. The two were dropped off in the wilderness by a bush pilot in a Grumman Goose. They would be picked up days later and returned to Downing’s plane, a Piper Seneca V parked a few hundred miles away in Dillingham. They landed on a remote lake, unloaded their gear, and watched the Goose as it disappeared over the horizon.

The two hunters got a moose, so the hunting trip was successful, but something seemed off. It was typical to see bush planes and the trails of commercial jets fairly frequently, even in the wilderness. However, after a few days, the two noticed that they hadn’t seen any planes at all. They had no communication with the outside world other than an aviation radio that could relay a message back to the tour company. With no planes flying, there was no one to connect with. “It started to become an issue,” Downing says. “We knew something was wrong.”

The men decided that if they weren’t picked up on the 16^th, which was their extraction date, they would have to hike to Anchorage. “It was 350 miles of mountains and glaciers,” Downing says. “It could take us a year.”

They started packing up camp. “I told Gerry, ‘I don’t know what happened, but we’re not gonna repopulate the Earth,’” says Downing. “We got ready to start hiking south, and then the bush pilot came, landed on the lake, tailed up to shore, shut down the engines, and told us they’d blown up the World Trade Center.”

He hadn’t witnessed the event on TV, so Downing pictured the towers falling and completely taking out lower Manhattan. “I was the last person on the planet to find out about the attack on the World Trade Center,” he says. “That hit me in the gut. I was hit with the sadness of the loss, the danger of being attacked, and the violation of being attacked on our own soil.”

Downing thought about his humble beginning compared to where he was then, on a costly hunting trip in Alaska, flying his own plane and considering retirement in his 30s. “I asked myself, ‘What have I ever done to deserve this?’ I got into my plane and flew it to Ketchikan, on the Canadian border, where trans-border flights had been stopped. I waited for the airspace to open, flew home, and then walked into a recruiter’s office.”

When meeting the recruiter, Downing said, “I used to teach at NYU. I’ve got a pilot’s license. What can you do with me?” The recruiter asked his age, and he replied that he was 34. “The recruiter said, ‘Good. Thirty-five is the cutoff,’” Downing recalls. “I was sworn into a combat search and rescue squadron, and next thing you know, I’m off at boot camp.”

Because of his job with Air Force Special Operations, he was required to complete Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (SERE) training, a grueling program where he endured beatings that resulted in a couple of broken teeth as well as being locked up in a box. “I was at a high risk of capture,” Downing says. “SERE school teaches you how to survive being a POW (prisoner of war) and how to survive interrogation and torture without betraying state secrets.”

Downing served eight years in the U.S. Air Force and Air National Guard in a Combat Search and Rescue (CSAR) squadron. He completed two tours of duty in Afghanistan and participated in Operation Enduring Freedom. Downing ventured “beyond the wire” numerous times to rescue wounded soldiers on the battlefield. When he wasn’t forward deployed (stationed in a foreign country to further national interests) or on alert, he volunteered at the U.S. military hospital in Kandahar or on outreach missions.

While serving at home in the National Guard, Downing used his off-duty time to venture into real estate, trying his hand in various sectors. “I did some multifamily, some vacation rentals—every flavor you can imagine,” he says. A friend Downing had worked with on other projects introduced him to someone raising money for a self-storage development. “At the time, I was dealing with a multifamily issue, trying to evict a tenant,” he says. “I got an unlawful detainer, but they filed bankruptcy.” It took a year to evict the tenant; by this time, the renter had sliced up the carpets, put cement in the toilet, and punched holes in the walls.

“So, the guy doing the self-storage deal is telling me about it,” Downing says. “I said, ‘OK, let me get this straight. If they’re a day late, I can lock them out. If they’re 30 days late, I can auction off their stuff, sweep it out, and rent to somebody else. And there’s no sheetrock, no carpeting, and no toilets.’ Eureka!”

He came in as a limited partner on the deal and soon began looking for his own self-storage opportunities. Downing founded AC Self Storage Solutions. “We would do blind pool, Reg D fundraising,” he says. “We put together groups of investors and started buying self-storage.” The company completed a few expansions but no ground-up projects. They focused mostly on acquisitions.

Downing says the company’s value was in turning the management around. “We had a lot of opportunity to buy these small, one-off deals, put these into portfolios, and then sell them off to one of the REITs since they wanted to have larger transaction sizes,” he says. “We had a lot of success this way, so we kept our portfolio smaller.”

The most properties AC Self Storage held at one time was 77. When the portfolio became sufficiently large, the company looked at doing their own property and casualty insurance to reduce their premiums. Downing also saw the benefits in what Bader Insurance was doing with mandatory insurance programs, so they also created their own tenant policies.

He formed SAGE Insurance Servicing, a nationwide commercial insurance company that offered tenant insurance. “We started out as a captive and then had a couple of different programs,” Downing says. “We had a commercial liability program with Great American out of Indianapolis.”

While building his business, Downing moved to Montana in 2009; he, his wife Heather, and their four grown children live in Helena today. He ran for various offices in his adopted state and had just started the tenant insurance business when he was elected as state auditor for Montana, which oversees the Commission for Insurance and Securities. “When I got sworn into that four and a half years ago, I sold my insurance company interest to my partners because I didn’t think it looked right to be the insurance commissioner and own an insurance company,” he says.

In his first legislative session in Montana, he worked with the SSA to pass the Self-Storage Insurance Act. It allows self-storage operators to sell insurance to tenants but protects the consumer as well as the business by clarifying the programs. “I’m pretty proud that we got that passed,” Downing says.

It wasn’t only local legislation that concerned Downing. For more than a decade, when issues he cared about came before Congress, he would get involved. “I would come out here and I’d bang on desks and make my thoughts heard,” Downing says. “And I thought, when I sit in these rooms, the person I’m trying to convince is not always the smartest person in the room, and they don’t always have the best team. There’s an opportunity here to actually give again.”

Downing believed his business experience and unique perspective on how to solve problems would make him an asset in Congress. In a June 2024 primary, he won an eight-way race to seize the Republican nomination for eastern Montana’s 2^nd congressional district. He then won the seat handily in the November election with 66 percent of the votes.

After being sworn in this January, the new Congress hit the ground running and Downing describes things as getting “kind of crazy” from that point. “But we’ve got a great freshman class,” he says. He finds the time to meet up with other House members, including a comrade in the storage industry. In the alley behind the Capitol Hill Club, he says there’s a house where Republicans meet up. “I got Jefferson Shreve to come over, and we have a little self-storage ghetto,” he jokes.

Downing’s regulatory experience as state auditor, combined with his business experience, will be advantageous in his new role. He is a new member of the House Financial Services Committee and House Committee on Small Business. His technology experience will prove invaluable as well as he serves on the Digital Assets, Financial Technology, and Artificial Intelligence Subcommittee.

Downing hopes to put all his experience to work in Washington. “I want to put together teams of smart people to come up with better solutions,” he says, “and in that way, give back to this great nation.”

Downing also wants to protect, for all Americans, the kind of opportunities he was given so freely. “I want to make sure that’s not being squandered,” he says, “so that a poor kid born of an unwed teenage mom has the same opportunities I did and can have the same success that I did.”

Like stepping down from his insurance business while serving as state auditor, Downing had to relinquish any managing position within his self-storage business due to House ethics rules. He is now a limited partner. “Every time I get elected to something, I have to get rid of something else,” Downing says. AC Self Storage Solutions still holds a small portfolio, but the company is not currently buying or selling.

Although he is no longer managing a portfolio, Downing believes self-storage is a resilient industry and a good place to invest. “It was really interesting going back to the big financial downturn in 2009, when Merricks was posting the numbers of all the real estate sectors,” he says. “It was a giant sea of red from multifamily to commercial to industrial, except for the one little blip of green that was the self-storage industry. It does well in down economies; it does well in growing economies. We, as Americans, accumulate stuff and need a place to store it. That’s not changing anytime in our lifetimes.”

Downing believes the industry provides a lot of opportunity for success. “There isn’t a lot of secretiveness,” he says. “If you surround yourself in an industry with a lot of good people, you can do incredible things.” What he appreciates most about self-storage owners collectively is their tendency toward cooperation and allowing access to information. “It’s been kind of an open book,” he says. “Everyone helps for the good of the order.”

From Downing’s viewpoint, success in the industry is pretty straightforward. “I agree with the time-proven axiom that the secret to overnight success is turning a crank for 10 years,” he says. “You just have to be in the game and keep turning the crank. If you’re doing things the right way, paying attention to your revenue management, your expenses, and your deferred maintenance, you can do really well because time generally cures all evils or all ills.”

Downing believes the tendency to cooperate he’s seen among self-storage operators is the same way to get things done in Congress. He says things should be accomplished through working with others and understanding that it’s a team sport, rather than propagating heated battles over every issue.

“I’m hoping I can actually get rid of people who are standing on mountains and yelling,” Downing says, “and start putting together groups of folks who are here to do the work and here for the right reasons.” He can imagine a cultural change in Washington where legislators are getting work done instead of trying to get likes on social media. It’s a lofty ambition, Downing acknowledges, but something to strive for.

His hope is to surround himself with smart people who want to do the right things. While improving the way House members work together is Downing’s short-term goal, his ultimate goal is smaller government. “I want more markets in play, more people in play, and less government in play,” he says.

Protecting free markets is sacred in Downing’s view. He is generally opposed to legislation that caps prices, whether in self-storage or elsewhere. “The government should never be in the place of telling any market how they should price,” Downing says. “The role of government in a free market is just to make sure people don’t lie. As long as they’re honest about how they’re doing their pricing, the markets should decide.”

Downing views his responsibility as a member of the House of Representatives as an extension of his obligations to his country. “I went into the military because this country’s been really good to me,” he says, adding that the success he’s had after growing up without family money or connections was a result of grit and work ethic. “I was very successful, and when September 11^th happened, I looked at my life and what I was able to do just because of the random luck of being born in this nation.”

For Downing, giving back to the country is just a given. He says the Air Force’s CSAR motto resonates strongly with him: “These things we do that others may live.” Downing plans to continue serving in the future in any capacity where his knowledge and experience is useful.