On December 13, 2024, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg reflects on his time at the department before the new administration change.
Outgoing Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has revealed the first things he’s looking forward to doing as a civilian now that President-elect Donald Trump will soon install his replacement. While Buttigieg is proud of the things he accomplished as the first out gay cabinet member ever to serve throughout a full presidential administration, he also shared some of his regrets in a recent exit interview with Politico.
Buttigieg said he has spoken with his incoming replacement, Sean Duffy, and believes he can do a good job; though he adds that his position’s effectiveness was “largely put in the hands of… state or local or tribal or regional authorities” who are overseeing projects funded by President Joe Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure law. Many of these authorities aren’t necessarily Republican, Buttigieg notes, and the secretary is expected to deal with them equally.
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“I’m absolutely convinced that we are leaving America’s transportation system in much better condition than we found it,” Buttigieg told the aforementioned publication, noting that the infrastructure law helped get 72,000 projects underway, 22,000 of which are now complete.
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Biden recently complained to USA Today, “We would’ve been a hell of a lot better off had we been able to go much harder at getting some of these projects in the ground quicker.”
Buttigieg said he thought Biden “was getting at is an impatience we all feel about the recognition and credit that this work deserves,” adding, “The nature of the beast with this infrastructure work is that it takes longer than a political cycle to get it done.”
He noted that one the biggest transportation projects that he’s responsible for, the tunnels between New York and New Jersey, won’t be completed for anywhere from three to five presidential terms (roughly 12 to 20 years). He compared the benefits of the infrastructure bill to those of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), the massive health insurance overhaul spearheaded by President Barak Obama in 2010.
“Think about the political life of the ACA, to go from being an albatross to being our winning issue in eight years,” Buttigieg said, mentioning how the ACA is now touted as a Democratic achievement and used against Republicans who have repeatedly sought to repeal it (even though millions of GOP constituents and voters depend on it). “And even then you have to do all the finessing for folks who don’t think of the ACA and ‘Obamacare’ as the same thing. There’s a lot of that here with this stuff.”
Buttigieg also said that news of his department’s accomplishments rarely ever made headlines or viral waves on sociala media because “we were competing with a lot of other things for attention” and, “Good news is no news: That [is,] unambiguously and uncontroversially good things command less attention.”
After lamenting the problem of viral disinformation on social media — something he called a “massive challenge,” noting that it makes governance, conversations, and good decision-making much harder — he mentioned his pride at helping reduce roadways deaths by over 5.6% since 2021.
Buttigieg then discussed his next plans now that he’ll be out of his old job. He said he’s looking at possibly enrolling into Northwestern Michigan College, a local community college, to get his pilot’s lisence under its flight program.
“I got what I asked for for Christmas, which is a splitting maul and a new axe. So I’ll be chopping a lot of wood and being outside a little more,” he said. “I want to spend more time engaged with ideas and with students. I’m looking at ways to make that possible. The biggest thing, obviously, the family pays a pretty big price when you’re involved in politics and public life. Looking forward to making up for some lost time.”
He said he hopes that, in the future, he’ll be able to point out different pieces of infastructure to his children that resulted from his work, that his children will benefit from their construction and that he’ll tell them, “I worked on that, and that’s one of the reasons why I was working so hard back when you were really little and we were getting to know each other.”
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