The Lake Placid certified public accountant, financial advisor and businessman was thrust onto the national scene in 2009 when he ran in the NY-23 congressional district’s special election to fill a seat that had been vacated by John McHugh, who was tapped to serve as Secretary of the Army by then-President Barack Obama.

While Hoffman didn’t win the seat, his efforts were seen as helping ignite the nationally known Tea Party movement — a fiscally conservative political movement within the Republican Party.

On April 9, Hoffman sat down with the Enterprise to discuss the cuts to federal spending from President Donald Trump’s Administration, the Department of Government Efficiency and tariffs.

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Growing up

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Hoffman grew up in Saranac Lake and was one of four children to a single mother. Money was tight, and he worked throughout his teenage years to support his family, which he said included paying off his mother’s mortgage. Hoffman said, despite a tight financial situation, his mentality was upward-looking.

“I never saw myself as poor,” he said. “I always found a way if I wanted something to earn the money to make it.”

Hoffman was awarded four scholarships when he graduated from high school.

“That was my encouragement to go to college and make something of myself,” he said.

He initially pursued engineering at SUNY Canton, but then changed his field of study. He transferred to North Country Community College before enrolling at SUNY Plattsburgh, where he studied accounting. It was something he excelled in academically, graduating with a 3.96 grade point average.

“It was probably the best decision I made in my life,” he said. “I’ve been doing that now for 50 years. I started my practice in 1977, and during that time, I think I helped clients to develop good bookkeeping and accounting systems, and saw a lot of success there — from a sole proprietorship to a partnership with four offices around the North Country.”

Hoffman was also the CFO of the Lake Placid Olympic Organizing Committee during the 1980 Games here.

“It was the most exciting thing I ever did in my career,” he said. “I would do it over again in a minute.”

Hoffman said from an economic standpoint, the benefits that the Olympics have brought to Lake Placid and the broader region are “indescribable” — both at the time and to this day.

“The success that the North Country has had in the last 40 years, I think, is attributed to the Olympics,” he said. “And the fact that it’s continuing today and we’ve rebuilt all of the facilities, we’re looking at another hopefully 40 years.”

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The 2009 special election

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Following McHugh’s vacancy in 2009, the NY-23 congressional district held a special election to fill its House seat.

The Democratic Party nominated Plattsburgh attorney Bill Owens and the Republican Party chose Assemblymember Dede Scozzafava. The Conservative Party — which, in New York, oftentimes doesn’t endorse the same candidate as the Republicans — balked at Scozzafava’s selection. Its leaders at the time said she was too liberal. The Conservatives instead opted to nominate Hoffman, who tried to get the Republican nod, and was seen by many, back then, as holding more staunchly conservative fiscal and social viewpoints.

The nominations exposed a glaring rift between the Republican Party’s more moderate establishment and a base that was sprinting rightward at the time. Hoffman’s campaign received a string of endorsements from national conservative figures, such as Sarah Palin, while others called him a spoiler for the race as a third-party candidate. Hoffman initially trailed Owens and Scozzafava in public polling, but his campaign picked up steam down the stretch — cutting into Scozzafava’s numbers.

Polls at the end of October showed Hoffman eclipsing Scozzafava, who had fallen behind the Democratic and Conservative candidates. She later suspended her campaign and threw support behind Owens — a move that drew jubilation from Democrats and fury from Republicans. Owens won the special election with 48.3% of the votes to Hoffman’s 46%. Scozzafava, who remained on the ballot because she missed the deadline to withdraw in time, garnered 5.7% of the vote.

Even though Hoffman lost the special election, his meteoric rise was widely seen as helping ignite the Tea Party movement nationally. Hoffman said that while some aspects of the Tea Party’s platform at the time may have been more conservative than what he believed, he was “definitely on the fiscal conservative side of it.”

Hoffman ran again in 2010. He ran in the Republican primary but lost to Matt Doheny in the primary election. Hoffman won the Conservative Party’s nod once again. Hoffman ran as a third-party candidate for a time, but dropped out on October 5, 2010, and endorsed Doheny. The decision came too late for Hoffman’s name to be removed from the general election ballot.

Owens was reelected with 47.5% of the vote to Doheny’s 46.4%, with Hoffman garnering 6.1%. Owens would go on to be reelected once again in 2012 — running in the NY-21 congressional district following redistricting — before declining to run again in 2014, the year in which current North Country Rep. Elise Stefanik was elected to her first term in Congress.

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Political world

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Hoffman first started eyeing a run for public office in the throes of the 2008 Great Recession. He was alarmed by the amount of money he saw the federal government spending to try to stimulate the economy that already had an approximate $13 trillion debt load.

“They were bailing out the banks, they were bailing out the motor companies,” he said. “They were flipping around trillions of dollars like it was … monopoly money.”

Hoffman says he understood the reasoning for the bailouts — namely, further economic collapse and job losses if the various large companies that received the bailouts had instead shuttered — but they made him worried about continued deficit spending.

“(It) prompted me to say, ‘You know, I’m not the smartest person in the world, but common sense tells me you just can’t keep accumulating debt and just not pay it back,'” he said.

Hoffman blamed political incentive structures for getting the country into that situation, something that he said had not changed in the 16 years since he first ran for office.

“I saw it firsthand — the easiest way to get elected is to promise something,” he said. “And when they promise something, it costs money. And not having a way to pay for it is what’s incurring the debt.”

Hoffman said it is something that both major parties are complicit in. He said Trump’s campaign promises to abolish taxes on tips and Social Security were an example of that.

“I blame both (major) parties,” he said. “I mean, every year, they have to pass a budget. … If you keep kicking the can down the road and saying, ‘Well, it’s not my problem — I’ve got two more years and I want to get reelected (so) I’ve got to promise some more money,’ and it’s unfortunate that America can’t see through that.”

Hoffman attributed the problem to policymakers deciding what to do with other people’s money.

“If it came out of their pocket, they’d be a lot more careful than spending funny money that they have no concept of where it comes from or what it means,” he said.

Hoffman said another part of the problem is future discounting, which he said politicians take advantage of in belittling the repercussions of continued deficits into the future. These, he said, can result in rampant inflation and subsequent economic collapse. Hoffman said history provides similar examples in other nations, such as Germany, Argentina and Greece.

“By doing the excess spending, you’re causing inflation,” he said. “And inflation will devalue the money that you get back if the interest isn’t appropriate, so, unfortunately, you don’t even have to have a default to have that happen and if you look at some of the countries around the world, sometimes their inflation is double or triple digits.”

Hoffman said that it’s a mistake to think that this couldn’t happen in the U.S. — although he emphasized that the country isn’t at that point today.

“I’m not crying that the sky is falling and that it’s going to be a disaster tomorrow,” he said. “I’m saying, ‘Wake up, America and let’s do something about it while we’re still strong and able to do something about it.'”

Hoffman supports the cuts that have been made or are being proposed to federal spending from Trump’s Administration, while acknowledging the pain they are inflicting.

“I’m sure the cuts are very hurtful,” he said. “But, if you can’t afford it, you can’t afford it. … The unfortunate thing is you see the microcosm in the paper, but you don’t see the macrocosm, or the big picture from 30,000 feet and the big picture is last year, you brought in $4.9 (trillion), you spent $6.7 (trillion). That’s almost 50% more than what you brought in.”

The U.S. Government had revenue of about $4.92 trillion and expenditures of about $6.75 trillion for fiscal year 2024, according to data from the U.S. Treasury Department.

While he supports the cuts, Hoffman said their sudden nature was not an ideal way to carry them out.

“I think the problem you see today is instead of gradually getting into it, they’re ripping off the band-aid, and it really hurts,” he said. “I would have preferred that over the last 15 years to correct this situation.”

Hoffman predicted that unless public approval for the Trump Administration’s spending cuts increases, the Republicans would lose the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2026 midterm elections.

“The House (of Representatives) comes up in a year and a half,” he said. “Whatever (Trump) is doing here has to have a positive effect within the next six months, or he’s going to lose the House.”

Hoffman hopes the administration will find a way to make the spending cuts politically attractive. He said Republicans losing the U.S. House of Representatives in the midterms — even if they retained control U.S. Senate — would block much of Trump’s agenda.

Hoffman said when it came to the tariffs, they needed to be fine-tuned by industry sector and nation.

“They’re doing it on a macro basis, and not a micro basis,” he said. “It’s not going to be right until they start tinkering it and adjusting it.”

Hoffman believes it’s crucial to bring more manufacturing back to the U.S., but said that wouldn’t happen overnight, and that business leaders would need to have a stronger degree of policy certainty before making significant investments. He said if those do happen, increasing domestic manufacturing would still be a process that would take several years.

“You’re not going to do it in six months,” he said. “It will take two to four years to build the plant and five to six years to develop the labor force.”

Hoffman said there might have to be other business incentives and industrial policies paired with tariffs in order to effectuate change, but emphasized his belief that more manufacturing in the U.S. was needed, and that the losses have been especially devastating for the North Country. He cited the General Motors and Alcoa plant closures in Massena as particularly gutting.

“The manufacturing jobs that we’ve lost due to lower and cheaper labor overseas has decimated our manufacturing ability,” he said. “One thing that I made a mistake on in my campaign is not using that as a campaign issue.”

Hoffman said not having a strong manufacturing base posed a national security concern.

“We won World War II because of our manufacturing infrastructure and skilled labor,” he said. “What would happen if we got into a war now? We’re certainly not going to have China build for us.”

He said COVID-19 demonstrated the dangers of relying so heavily on overseas manufacturing.

“(It) was a great example that we were dependent on China for our medical equipment and apparatuses and even the masks — and they didn’t come,” he said. “They had to force General Motors to stop production and build respirators because we had nobody in the United States to build them.”

Hoffman said part of the difficulty is increased business costs to domestic manufacturing compared to foreign nations, which he felt tariffs could be a tool in combating, but said that regulatory policies should be lessened. Hoffman favors keeping environmental protections in place.

“Have regulations that are more business-friendly, but environmentally protected,” he said. “I think you can come up with a compromise that works that way.”

In the 16 years since Hoffman first ran for Congress, he said it’s “really unfortunate” that the U.S. annual deficits and the debt have continued to grow. The U.S. debt stood at $35.46 trillion at the end of fiscal year 2024, according to the U.S. Treasury Department.

Hoffman said it’s easy to feel despondent about the debt continuing to balloon. It’s something he continues to speak out on, motivated in large part to do so by those closest to him.

“The point I’m trying to make: if not now, then when?” he said. “I love my children and I love grandchildren. I don’t want to leave them a legacy of debt — which unfortunately my generation is going to be known for.”