Nam Y. Huh/AP Photo
Mayor Pete Buttigieg talks with a reporter in his car in South Bend, Indiana, January 2019.
Introducing him as a barrier-breaker, President-elect Joe Biden formally announced Pete Buttigieg Wednesday as his nominee to head the Department of Transportation and, if confirmed, to be the first openly gay man to head a Cabinet department. Biden has adopted a Friends of Biden approach to his Cabinet, basing a range of appointments on his personal rapport with nominees and on pacifying noisy constituencies, whatever those nominees’ pertinent qualifications might be.
There’s Obama West Wing civilian Denis McDonough at Veterans Affairs, foreign-policy guru Susan Rice helming theWhite House Domestic Policy Council, and House Agriculture Chair Marcia Fudge shunted off to Housing and Urban Development instead of Agriculture.
During the Clinton years, FOBs (Friends of Bill)—both longtime associates and new members of his circle—were everywhere in Washington, their entrées into the corridors of power smoothed by their proximity to the president.
Biden has similarly reeled in both longtime advisers and new faces like Buttigieg’s which have obtained an almost familial level of trust.
The pick of Buttigieg for DOT is one more FOB appointment—and a problematic one. Instead of choosing someone who can hit the ground running to cleanse a department that’s become a grifter’s paradise under Trump, and grapple with a sector of the economy that’s in unprecedented free fall, Biden has tapped a man with no federal-agency experience or history of significant work with transportation.
In so doing, Amtrak Joe defied expectations that he would pick one of theWhatever his virtues, Buttigieg does not exude the transportation, bureaucratic, or legislative expertise that could convince and cajole Senate Republicans to support infrastructure deals they’ve historically opposed, or that could restore a mammoth federal bureaucracy to good working order. He has, however, exhibited substantial political savvy, heading for the exit in the Democratic presidential race immediately following his dismal showing in the South Carolina primary to deliver a crucial endorsement for Biden, for whom he then campaigned effusively, while lobbing verbal fusillades at Trump and other Republicans on Fox News.
Buttigieg does not exude the transportation, bureaucratic, or legislative expertise that could convince and cajole Senate Republicans to support infrastructure deals they’ve historically opposed, or that could restore a mammoth federal bureaucracy to good working order.
Easily emerging as the primary season’s most corporate-oriented Democratic presidential candidate (other than those, like Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer, who ran as businessmen), Buttigieg become one of the top fundraisers among the Democratic presidential contenders—a distinction in which his star-power smarts and looks played no small part. He was caught out accepting lobbyist donations (which he sent back) but continued to reel in big bucks from sources that other candidates eschewed.
An investigation by the Revolving Door Project, an arm of the Center for Economic and Policy Research that tracks executive branch appointees, found that individual board members of Boeing, JetBlue, and American Airlines contributed to his campaign and a former Uber lobbyist was one of his key fundraisers. In their remarks Wednesday, both Biden and Buttigieg underlined the importance of public-private partnerships going forward.
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As the Action Center on Race and the Economy, a national advocacy group working on racial justice and Wall Street accountability issues noted, “If his past positions and policies are any indication, we should expect a race blind, pro-corporate Secretary of Transportation who is cozy with big tech and big business and, at best, clueless on issues of racial equity, labor and environmentalism.”
“The Department of Transportation is at the intersection of some of the most ambitious plans to build back better,” Biden said in his remarks yesterday. The president-elect’s $2 trillion infrastructure proposals include public-transportation investments, auto industry job creation tools, and strategies to replace decaying bridges, roads, and other artifacts of American decline. Candidate Buttigieg’s own $1 trillion plan would have pumped money into transit, electric-vehicle charging infrastructure, and the like by repealing Trump tax cuts and reforming capital gains and estate tax frameworks. But his proposal to return the Highway Trust Fund to solvency ignored the fact that the fund has outlived its usefulness as the automotive industry moves into a clean-energy era, with new levies based on actual road usage rather than taxes on gasoline and diesel.
Biden’s pick isn’t a complete infrastructure novice. Since 2017, Buttigieg has displayed a keen interest in the topic, which helped his prospects for the Cabinet slot. He has worked with Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti on Accelerator for America, a nonprofit group that brings together municipal and corporate leaders to kick-start transit and infrastructure investments that the federal government could not find the funds for. The organization was co-founded by Garcetti and his former deputy chief of staff Rick Jacobs, who faces sexual harassment allegations, charges that helped push his former boss out of contention for the Transportation slot.
Like nearly all mayors, Buttigieg championed improvements to the infrastructure in his city, which in South Bend consisted of a small bus system and an airport. But as is sometimes the case with Buttigieg, his responses to local tragedies were inadequate. An 11-year-old boy died in early 2017 after being hit by a car at a busy intersection where a traffic light had been covered up as part of a “traffic calming” project that the mayor championed. The intersection was in transition: The city decided to add more traffic lights and residents also insisted on replacements, but the lights had not yet been activated at the time of the accident.
Asked to comment on the initiative at a news conference, the mayor emphasized the merits of the policy more than the tragedy that had unfolded. “What we know is when you calm down traffic, you have an economically healthier downtown and a safer environment overall,” he said at a press conference. “But that doesn’t mean it’s the end of traffic accidents. It doesn’t mean that it’s the end of traffic fatalities, and yesterday morning, two little boys ran across the street and one of them didn’t make it.”
The inadequacy of that answer fits a pattern that Buttigieg’s South Bend critics have observed. Black Lives Matter of South Bend responded to Buttigieg’s appointment by criticizing Biden’s decision, citing the mayor’s involvement in a neighborhood redevelopment project that demolished homes in Black and Latino neighborhoods and his callous response to residents after the fatal shooting of Eric Logan by police.
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If the presidency remains Buttigieg’s ultimate goal, a Department of Transportation perch will not necessarily improve his standing among African Americans, a constituency that failed to be moved by his earnestness and quick wit. In the South Carolina primary, he won only 2 percent of the Black electorate. On questions of racial equity, Buttigieg has quite a bit to prove. Is he the man to grapple with questions of racial disparities in transportation? Can he embark on strategies to heal the psychic and physical breaches in the communities of color ripped in two by mid-20th-century highway urban-renewal projects, and speak out against transit gentrification when projects that place new rail stops in communities of color lead to higher rents beyond their means? How does he plan to address communities that deliver state-of-the-art rail options to white communities while forcing others to make do with buses?
Federal bureaucracies like the DOT are generally impenetrable, with ways of doing things that here-today-gone-tomorrow secretaries like Buttigieg can usually only grasp at if they manage to make it through a four-year term. Passing over experienced bureaucrats and more qualified practitioners for political stars is an everyday occurrence in Washington. But as the pandemic crisis continues in the transition from the Trump fiasco to the Biden reclamation project, the next administration would do well to be mindful of the caliber of his advisers.
This article is part of our ongoing series on sustainable mobility, transportation, and climate.
