Wes Moore is on the TIME100 Next 2024 list

INWhen the Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed in March, killing six workers and closing the Port of Baltimore, Maryland Governor Wes Moore prepared to respond to the crisis, accelerating recovery efforts and reopening the port in just 11 weeks. Elected in 2022, Moore says that as an Army officer in Afghanistan, he used his experience leading military forces to care for people, learn what needs to be done and not get distracted. His mother told him to understand when patience was a virtue and when it was patience. His generation of leaders moves with a “sense of impatience,” he says. “I don’t like wasting time.”

He says he has applied this urgency to his work in Maryland to reduce child poverty and make communities safer, supporting measures to raise the minimum wage, combat gun violence, increase housing affordability and a June executive order pardoning tens of thousands of marijuana low level of belief. Widely viewed as a future Democratic presidential candidate, he keeps a clock on his desk that counts down the days until the end of his first term – a reminder of all he still hopes to accomplish.