Brendan Bechtel

Brendan Peters Bechtel (born 1981) is an American businessman who is the chairman and chief executive officer of Bechtel, the second largest construction company in the United States, which has operations in 160 countries. and is the fifth generation of the Bechtel family to lead the privately owned company since 1898. Bechtel chairs the infrastructure committee of the Business Roundtable,

Early life and education Brendan is the son of Riley P. Bechtel and the eldest of three children. At the age of three, he lived with his family in a trailer at a Bechtel construction site in Borneo. He first worked at Bechtel as a paid summer intern when he was 14, the minimum legal working age in California, in the corporate IT group. he pursued his post-graduate studies at Stanford University, earning both a Master of Business Administration degree and a Master of Science in Engineering degree with a focus on construction engineering and construction management. In an interview that year with the Washington Business Journal, he stated that he had no interest in taking the company public, preferring instead to retain more control and focus on profitability without the pressure to achieve "growth for growth's sake".

Board memberships Brendan Bechtel is on the board of directors of the Business Roundtable and is the chair of its infrastructure committee.

More recently, he joined the board of two regional business groups, including the Federal City Council and The Economic Club of Washington, D.C.

Lobbying According to ProPublica, Brendan Bechtel was able to write off $64 million in taxes in 2018, due to a last-minute change in the wording of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which allowed private engineering companies to benefit from pass-through deductions. Speaking on behalf of the Business Roundtable, he said that he and other business leaders were in discussions with the Biden administration and with members of Congress, advocating alternative ways to pay for new infrastructure, including user fees, deficit financing, and public-private partnerships. When taking time off, he enjoys skiing and fishing in California and the Rocky Mountains.