WASHINGTON — Georgia Republican Barry Loudermilk, who arrived in the House in 2015 as a tea party-style conservative before becoming a staunch ally of President Donald Trump, said Wednesday he won’t seek a seventh term.

A senior member of the House Administration Committee, Loudermilk joins a wave of GOP lawmakers who won’t be returning to the House next year. They include his fellow Georgia Reps. Earl L. “Buddy” Carter and Mike Collins, who are both seeking the Republican nomination for Senate. Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Trump acolyte turned critic, resigned her northwest Georgia seat last month.

Loudermilk, 62, said in a statement that he always viewed his time in Congress as “a service, not a career” and that he intends to spend more time with his family.

“While serving my constituents in Congress ranks among my greatest honors, being a husband, a father, and a grandfather holds even greater importance to me,’’ he said.

Loudermilk is leaving behind Georgia’s red-leaning 11th District, which stretches northwest from the Atlanta metro area. An Air Force veteran and former state legislator, he defeated former Rep. Bob Barr in a 2014 primary runoff in his first race for Congress. He’s comfortably won reelection ever since, including a 35-point win in 2024.

Republicans will be favored to hold the 11th District, which backed Trump by 23 points in the last election, according to calculations by Inside Elections with Nathan L. Gonzales.

Loudermilk was among the House lawmakers present at a practice session of the Republican congressional baseball team in 2017 when a gunman opened fire and shot four people, including Steve Scalise, then the chamber’s majority whip.

In recent years, Loudermilk has become known for his efforts to pick holes in the work of the select committee established by House Democrats to investigate the Jan. 6., 2021, attack on the Capitol. He’s argued that the panel, which held 10 televised hearings and conducted interviews with more than 1,000 witnesses, pushed an anti-Trump narrative instead of seeking the facts of what happened that day.

Loudermilk’s own name turned up in the select committee’s final report, earning a brief mention for leading a tour group through House office buildings on Jan. 5, 2021. But Capitol Police concluded that the tour was not suspicious.

After Republicans took control of the House in 2023, Loudermilk led a push to investigate what he said was the “politicization” of the Jan. 6 panel. He now leads a new House Judiciary select subcommittee tasked with investigating the “remaining questions surrounding Jan. 6, 2021.”

“We’re not any better off today, especially when it comes to the security of the Capitol, than we were before that,” Loudermilk said in an interview last month. “How did this Capitol get breached in the way that it did? No one’s ever addressed that.”

While slow to get off the ground, his Judiciary select subcommittee held a hearing last month related to how the FBI handled its probe of pipe bombs placed near the offices of the Democratic and Republican national committees the night before the Capitol attack.

_____

(Noella Kertes contributed to this report.)

_____

©2026 CQ-Roll Call, Inc., All Rights Reserved. Visit cqrollcall.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.