Charles Rex Arbogast/AP Photo
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel responds to a question during a news conference about new police procedures, December 2015.
For inside-the-Beltway glitterati, the Department of Transportation lacks the high gloss of first-tier posts like State, Treasury, or Defense. The secretary is often an aviation, transit, or highway sector policy practitioner who can geek out over minutiae like state-of-the-art air traffic control systems, new levies to replace declining gas tax revenues, or the greenhouse gases emissions crisis—all problems that will land with a thud on President-elect Joe Biden’s pick. That’s after the new secretary rescues public transit and the airlines from COVID-19 revenue losses, restores public confidence in safety, and performs CPR on infrastructure investment after four years of White House and congressional neglect.
Since these are the sector’s critical issues, why is Rahm Emanuel the solution? What is it about the former mayor of Chicago that springboards him past more capable candidates for the USDOT slot? The prospect of an Emanuel sojourn at DOT has elicited head-scratching from transportation watchers and outright hostility from just about everyone else.
You’d think the former mayor’s role in suppressing for nearly a year the video showing the 2014 murder of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald by a Chicago policeman would be sufficient to disqualify him from contention. While it’s difficult to imagine how Biden could completely undermine all the African American goodwill that he’s cultivated over the past year, sending Emanuel’s name to the Senate would do it. (The Chicagoan’s name has also been floated for the Department of Housing and Urban Development and U.S. trade representative.)
Emanuel presided over a grim chapter in Chicago history. The city withheld the body camera footage of McDonald’s death until well after Emanuel secured his re-election in 2015. When the footage was made public after the election, months of protests followed, and Emanuel dithered over police oversight reforms. The officer who fired the 16 shots that killed McDonald was ultimately convicted of second-degree murder, and the Illinois attorney general had to sue the city to assure federal courts’ oversight of a consent decree after President Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, declined to provide ongoing scrutiny by the Justice Department.
The wayback machine doesn’t offer much solace either for those concerned about Emanuel’s record. For decades, many Democrats have viewed Emanuel as a creature of Wall Street and a prime beneficiary of the financial firms’ largesse. After a short, highly lucrative stint in investment banking, millions of dollars poured into his campaign coffers during his successive House runs. A proponent of “too-big-to-failism,” Emanuel lobbied hard for the bailout that sent billions to the financial firms that shredded the economy in 2007 and 2008 and hurtled the country into the Great Recession. Many Democrats were dismayed when President Obama tapped him to serve as his chief of staff.
What are Emanuel’s transportation qualifications? The former mayor got sucked into Elon Musk’s tunneling vortex, embracing the entrepreneur’s vision of a high-speed tunnel to provide a quick ride from downtown Chicago to O’Hare Airport “inside sealed pods riding on electrically-powered ‘skates’” (later modified to use Tesla electric cars instead). Musk pledged to cover the entire $1 billion cost, a claim that appealed to Emanuel, who supported the plan. Not too many others did, however, including nearly all of the 14 people who ran to replace the mayor in 2019 after he declined to run for re-election. Lori Lightfoot, the current mayor, remains dubious about the Musk panacea, which has pretty much killed the idea.
Emanuel did get bike lanes installed downtown, which he thought might help to lure Pacific Northwest techies to Chicago’s high-rent districts. He supported high-speed rail and launched several Chicago Transit Agency projects that managed to get federal dollars. Not nothing, but not exactly the credentials desired of someone Biden is going to have to fight very, very hard for should he get the nod.
Environmental and transportation justice have emerged as crucial areas for the next secretary, who will oversee the sector that is the top producer of greenhouse gases. As mayor, Emanuel managed to shut down two coal plants, but was criticized for cutting back on environmental enforcement against pollution in Chicago’s low-income neighborhoods. A 2019 investigation by the Better Government Association, an Illinois watchdog group, and Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism found that the number of environmental inspections and the ranks of inspectors both dropped precipitously during his two terms in office. Hazardous materials and solid-waste inspections also fell sharply. Exasperating the many Chicagoans concerned about their polluted neighborhoods, the city shut down a dedicated environmental hotline and directed residents to call 311, which handles all manner of complaints rather than focusing on pollution and hazard reduction.
A South Side environmental activist gave Emanuel a D˗ for enforcement, and another called his burnishing of his environmental credentials “all fluff.” Meanwhile, polluters have been emboldened by the scaling back of environmental oversight on the city’s South and West sides (some of Chicago’s most polluted areas) in order to resume dumping debris like construction waste.
Where is Emanuel’s support? The former mayor hasn’t been shy about wanting to return to Washington and may have at least one fan on the transportation transition team. Gabe Klein, a former Washington, D.C., transportation director, left the District in 2011 to serve as Emanuel’s transportation director for two years. Ray LaHood, Obama’s first secretary of transportation and a Republican from Illinois, is a longtime Emanuel friend.
In a nod to Emanuel’s role during the Great Recession, LaHood told the Chicago Tribune in mid-November that “there’s nobody better than Rahm” to get a COVID-19 relief bill passed. “He has a lot of friends on the Republican side, and obviously a whole lot of friends on the Democratic side,” he said. But LaHood also admitted that the Musk tunnel scheme was pointless, telling the Chicago Sun-Times last year: “The environmental impact statement that would have to be done on that will take years. I don’t see it happening. I don’t think it’s a bad thing [that it’s dead] because there are limited resources in the country and other things.”
Moreover, the president-elect puts stock in his longtime connections. Biden has had decades of interactions with Emanuel, not all of them good, but enough to know what’s he’s getting. He surely also knows that the former mayor is a prickly individual detested or distrusted by a fair number of people in his own party—and that’s before one gets to the hometown disgust over his policing and environmental records.
There are candidates who do not carry baggage as heavy as Emanuel’s, and three of the most promising are women with previous experience at DOT. One is already on the transition team: Polly Trottenberg, who resigned her post as commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation on Monday. A highly regarded sector professional, she returned to New York after her tenure as a DOT undersecretary of policy, the department’s number three post. On Capitol Hill, she worked for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and former Sens. Barbara Boxer of California and Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York.
Janette Sadik-Khan, Trottenberg’s predecessor in New York, is an internationally known transportation expert with Bloomberg Associates, an urban-policy consultancy of Bloomberg Philanthropies, Michael Bloomberg’s charitable venture. Beth Osborne is director of the advocacy group Transportation for America and a former Obama administration DOT policy official. Last week, she tweeted, “The only mistake a Biden-Harris Administration can make is appointing someone as a consolation prize or to fit someone in to the cabinet. That will communicate a very low status for DOT and little opportunity for change.” Any one of these three wouldn’t likely raise many confirmation problems.
Eric Garcetti, the Los Angeles mayor and another top contender for DOT, is headed for a rough patch, courtesy of sexual harassment allegations against a longtime aide. Attorneys for the police officer bringing the lawsuit want the mayor to testify, which will probably knock him out of contention. A different transit sector favorite is Phil Washington, a native of Chicago’s South Side who heads the Biden-Harris transportation transition team, and is the CEO of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (L.A. Metro).
Washington garners high praise in transportation circles for his stewardship of the city’s ambitious multibillion-dollar effort to expand its rail and highway networks and its successful campaign to persuade a supermajority of L.A. voters to finance this mega-project through Measure M, a 2016 sales tax ballot question. He also earned kudos for steering an ambitious light-rail and commuter rail initiative during his tenure at Denver’s Regional Transportation District.
While it’s difficult to imagine how Biden could completely undermine all the African American goodwill that he’s cultivated over the past year, sending Emanuel’s name to the Senate would do it.
Another possibility from the industry side of the ledger is John Porcari, a managing partner at 3P Enterprises, an international consulting firm. The former Obama administration deputy secretary of transportation is a former Maryland secretary of transportation and an interim executive director of the Gateway Development Corporation, which oversees the New York–New Jersey rail megaproject that President Trump thwarted early on. His rail experience might appeal to longtime Amtrak commuter Biden.
During the Obama administration, BikePortland.org toyed with the idea of Rep. Earl Blumenauer as transportation secretary. More than a decade later, his name is on their list again, and he occasionally pops up on others’ lists, too. The Oregonian hails from a safe Democratic district. However, with a seat on the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, the bike-loving progressive may also see the virtues of his staying put. (Nancy Pelosi may see them, too.)
Biden has expressed interest in adding Republicans to his Cabinet, and Transportation is a traditional safe space for reasonable Republicans, as LaHood was in Obama’s Cabinet. (For that matter, Norman Mineta, a former Democratic representative from California, served as George W. Bush’s transportation secretary for five years.) Another Republican possibility is Mick Cornett, the former Oklahoma City mayor who is well respected among urbanists and transit experts.
One name that has been bandied about in some quadrants of the Twitterverse is Arnold Schwarzenegger, the climate-friendly, infrastructure-loving former governor of California. Should Biden nominate this Biden-supporting Republican, it likely would throw Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell off-kilter and make this RINO’s confirmation hearing a must-watch event.
Biden’s selection of Rep. Cedric Richmond of Louisiana and Steve Ricchetti to White House staff positions shows that Biden is willing to ignore progressive objections to at least some of his appointments. However, Biden would almost have to want fierce blowback from progressives, African Americans, and Chicagoans were he to nominate Emanuel for any significant position. Emanuel may be the insider’s insider, but there are more where he comes from who don’t bring so many problems with them. After the first long hot summer of the George Floyd era, nominating Rahm Emanuel to his Cabinet would open up a Pandora’s box of recriminations that Joe Biden and the Democratic Party can clearly do without.
BANNER
This article is part of our ongoing series on sustainable mobility, transportation, and climate.
This post has been updated.
