Brian R. Rouleau, an independent candidate who is seeking to represent northern New York in Congress, would like to see the U.S. House dramatically grow from just 435 voting members to more than 6,600.

Rouleau, 44, who works as a developmental disabilities secure care treatment aide at the Sunmount care home run by the state Office for People with Developmental Disabilities, said that he believes that Congress has become too distant and is now too small to represent the roughly 342 million people living in the U.S.

He wants to put forward a plan in Congress that would reverse century-old legislation that caps the House at 435 members, and start tracking the number of members to the number of people living in the U.S. — 50,000 people per representative.

He sees this year’s election, when voters in New York’s 21st Congressional District are set to pick someone who has never been a representative before, as a perfect opportunity to make big changes in Washington, D.C. Rouleau said that with the very tight margins between the parties in the House that could carry through next year, a truly independent lawmaker will have an opportunity to drive policy in an unprecedented way.

“We need someone better, someone outside the two-party system,” Rouleau said in an interview. “I was looking for literally anyone better to come along, and nobody has, so I decided it had to be me. If we get into a situation where the House is closely split, with me as the one independent, I become a kingmaker for the North Country.”

Rouleau’s plan fits with the agenda of “Uncap the House,” a civic activism group that advocates for growing the number of representatives in Washington. He argues that if lawmakers only represented 50,000 people, they’d be more responsive to their constituents and it would be easier for the average person to win an election. He said that the small districts would also make gerrymandering, where district maps are drawn to give a particular political party an advantage, nearly impossible.

The plan would make the U.S. House the single largest elected body in the world, more than twice the size of China’s National People’s Congress. But it would put the U.S. Congress more closely in line with the original plan of the Founding Fathers. In the Constitution, the House had no cap on members, and districts were meant to have 30,000 residents, with at least one per state.

The one-per-state rule still stands, but now the average congressional district is closer to 761,000 people per representative. That’s one of the lowest lawmaker-to-resident ratios in the world, and the lowest among Western-style representative governments. Some lawmakers have backed efforts to expand the body, but no serious proposals have gained steam in many decades.

Rouleau has two other priorities, part of what he calls the “Trident Plan.” Besides increasing the number of lawmakers, he also wants to reform the Social Security program by ending the statutory cap on Social Security contributions. Currently, anyone earning more than $168,600 per year stops contributing to Social Security once they hit that number.

Rouleau said he thinks that’s unfair; it forces lower-income people to contribute the entirety of the year, while higher earners stop putting money in before the year ends. Under his reform plan, the cap would be removed entirely and the tax rate would be dropped to 6% from 6.25% for both the individual’s contributions and their employer’s.

Rouleau said he sees this as a bipartisan solution to what’s become a deeply divisive issue in Washington.

“Progressives have always felt the cap should be scrapped, and that the rich should pay their fair share, but what they’ve always wanted was also a higher tax rate,” he said. “Conservatives, of course, don’t want that. So if we can get a tax cut for most people while keeping the program solvent, it’s a win for everyone.”

The third part of Rouleau’s “Trident Plan” is what he calls the “North Star Compact,” a $20 billion federal spending scheme that would build out significant new infrastructure across the North Country.

Rouleau wants to see a new Watertown-to-Plattsburgh interstate highway put down, with fiber-optic networking cabling laid underneath it. He wants to see a small modular nuclear reactor open in Massena, near the current Moses-Saunders Power Dam and New York Power Authority facilities, plus a housing initiative that would bar investors or private equity groups from buying up the properties.

He also wants to see a new water treatment facility in Tupper Lake at the former Oval Wood Dish plastic fork factory. Finally, he wants to see something similar to a sovereign wealth fund established for the region; by selling excess power and internet bandwidth to downstate users, reverting some of that cash into the fund and then issuing annual dividend checks out to North Country residents.

Many of these projects would be done with public-private partnerships, Rouleau proposes. And he would like to see the federal government own the assets like the nuclear plant and lease it out to an operating company.

Rouleau said this is the way to reverse decades of disinvestment. He described the North Country as being treated like a “resource colony” by downstate New York without seeing the profits of its own labor.

He said that his politics lean to the left; he’s a member of the Working Families Party, a progressive third party that regularly works with the New York Democratic Party. But Rouleau said that he didn’t think running as a WFP member, or a Democrat, was the right move.

“The electorate is so fractured, if I ran with a ‘D’, an ‘R’ or a ‘WFP’ by my name, that limits my appeal to everyone,” he said.

But he said his personal politics are largely irrelevant to his campaign. Voters should pick him based on his Trident Plan alone, he said, adding that he would not seek to inject his own personal politics into his job as a representative if elected.

“I’m first and foremost an agent for NY-21,” he said. “I’m going down there to get the Trident Plan, and once we get all parts of that, we can talk about the remainder of my two years.”

Rouleau said he only wants to be in D.C. for two years — after achieving his Trident Plan he has said he’d like to return to working at Sunmount.

He’s facing steep odds, even before getting to the intricacies of enacting his plan in Washington. Rouleau, as an independent, is running a small campaign operation against at least six other candidates who all want the same job. There are two Republicans, one with millions of dollars of cash he gave his own campaign, and three Democrats, one whose been fundraising tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per quarter. Another independent, Christopher Schmidt, is also seeking to get on the ballot.

“I’m running this thing on a shoestring because you shouldn’t have to buy your congressional seat,” Rouleau said.

As an independent candidate, Rouleau has to circulate petitions and get at least 3,500 signatures on those petitions to secure a spot on the November ballot. The first day for that process will be April 14.

If he successfully makes the ballot, Rouleau will appear under a party name of his own choosing, against at least one Democrat and one Republican, plus potentially two additional candidates for the Conservative and Working Families parties, as well as any other independent candidates who could make the ballot.