Pete Seat has been the frontman in the public eye for the state GOP and also worked in the White House under President George W. Bush. Now he is taking his first crack at running for public office.

Seat has filed to run as a candidate for state treasurer on the GOP ticket. He’s hoping to take over for fellow Republican Kelly Mitchell, who will be leaving the office in two years once her second four-year term expires.

Seat has big plans for the office if he is elected, telling Indy Politics he wants to be on the front lines in helping “elect good people to office.”

One focus he has is to bolster and expand Indiana’s College Choice 529 Program, which the treasurer is in charge of managing in order to ensure that Hoosier parents who invest in the program get as much of a return as they can to help their children pay for an education beyond high school.

“There is so much more room for growth there for parents, for students, and families,” Seat said. “The sky is the limit in terms of new accounts and new investments. It’s really an opportunity for families to give themselves a scholarship.”

Seat said right now there are over 400,000 open accounts in the College Choice 529 Program and he hopes to increase that number and with it, opportunities for Hoosier families to get a bigger bang for their investment.

Seat is also hoping to expand access for Hoosiers to the ABLE Program, which is a federal program that allows Americans 26-years of age and younger who become disabled to save money through tax-advantaged saving programs, such as a 529 program, to help them pay for disability expenses.

Seat believes that the eligible age for these benefits should be much higher.

“I would join with state treasurers across the country, in a bipartisan fashion, to encourage Congress to expand that from 26 to 46,” he said. “What that would do is open the doors to financial freedom to another six million Americans. Including an estimated one million disabled veterans.”

Seat joins Daniel Elliot on the Republican side who have put their name in the hat for treasurer. So far, no Democrats have come to the surface to challenge on the other side of the ticket.