J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo
Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao in 2019
The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.
Several years ago, CNN declared that readers probably couldn’t name President Donald Trump’s transportation secretary, also noting that it “says something about the profile of the average transportation secretary. It’s low.”
But for the past two years, Biden transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg’s profile has been anything but low. His presidential ambitions are no secret; in the early 2020 Democratic primaries, he had a good showing for a mayor of a city the size of South Bend that no one had ever heard of before. Today, some polls even show him ahead of a 2024 field including President Biden. Some political gossips openly speculate that he should resign post-midterms to maximize his 2024 presidential chances.
But before 2024, there’s another election to worry about. Tomorrow’s. And for two years, Mayor Pete has declined to use the best arrow in his quiver to advance administration and party interests.
In particular, Buttigieg has declined to shine a light on the key role that Trump’s transportation secretary, Elaine Chao, played in fostering the nation’s ongoing economic woes. Chao was the Trump official most responsible for the supply chain chaos that led to spiking inflation, and with it, Democrats’ greatest political liability. She is also the personification of the corruption of the modern Republican Party and actively made ordinary Americans’ lives worse.
If Buttigieg really wanted to be a team player and help the Biden administration and broader Democratic Party, he’d make sure the whole world knows about Elaine Chao. Instead he’s just kept to the knockoff Obama rhetoric and Midwestern “aw, shucks” shtick.
Chao called the shots at the Department of Transportation during one of the most spectacular logistical breakdowns in modern history, which planted the seeds of our current inflation predicament. At one point, Biden did target ocean shipping giants for their price-gouging, but he has since pulled back on that narrative. The problem persists despite spot rates’ recent drop because much shipping is conducted on long-term contracts, and the ones negotiated during the supply chain entanglement are still in effect.
But it’s a lot harder to tell a story where the antagonist is a faceless corporate sector (the shipping industry) rather than a genuinely culpable human. Elaine Chao could and should have been the face of our shipping crisis. She is the daughter of the founder of the international shipping company Foremost, which her sister runs. As transportation secretary, she once planned to take her father with her on a diplomatic trip to Beijing, granting him valuable face time with both American and Chinese senior government officials.
The supply chain crisis that began under Trump and Chao resulted in massive windfalls for shipping companies. Foremost doesn’t publicly release earnings reports, but profits for dry bulk shipping—which is their specialty—surged during 2021, at one point tripling compared to 2020. Container shipping, meanwhile, saw profits increase by a factor of seven to $190 billion. In other words, a crisis that enriched ocean shipping owners/executives started to spiral out of control under the eye of someone whose family are ocean shipping owners/executives. It’s hard to ask for more of a messaging layup than that.
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Additionally, Chao and her husband, Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, wield significant influence at the Federal Maritime Commission, the main federal regulator of the shipping industry. The couple has personal ties to multiple commissioners. Elaine Chao’s former colleague and longtime friend Rebecca Dye still serves on the commission, and the chair during 2021, Michael Khouri, was also close with the couple.
And that hardly exhausts the case against Chao. She dedicated DOT staff to specifically funnel infrastructure funds into Kentucky, where her husband was preparing for his 2020 re-election campaign. She took an unusually large amount of time off during the workday, blocking out 190 hours of her calendars as “private time” in just over a year, according to Politico. Either she was simply not working for long stretches of the time or, as one source in a Politico piece theorized, was mislabeling those chunks of time to obscure meetings from the public. No wonder there was an inspector general investigation into her conduct around using the post to benefit her personal connections.
Chao’s policy choices also hurt workers and consumers. She refused to implement congressionally mandated rules that would ban airlines from charging additional fees for children to sit with their parents. A Consumer Reports investigation found instances of children with serious allergies, autism, or as young as one year old being seated away from their parents despite the clear need for dedicated parental supervision.
Buttigieg hasn’t implemented that rule either, but one would think he’d relish the opportunity to campaign this year on ending predatory pricing schemes that have endangered infants.
Chao, of course, is certainly not solely to blame for the systemic supply chain woes, but she did double down on the broken deregulatory approach, which the FMC had warned in 2015 was threatening supply chain resiliency. And while the FMC was responsible for directly supervising the ocean carriers, it was Chao who could have taken steps to strengthen the shoreside aspects of our supply chains.
At a bare minimum, she could have highlighted the incipient crisis and started a discussion about how COVID might pose a massive shock to America’s imports. Better yet, if Chao were not such a deregulatory crusader, she could have taken measures to make shipping by rail more reliable by stressing common-carrier obligations and pushing back on efforts to gut the railroads’ workforce, undermining continued operations. But the biggest thing Chao could have done was not signal a complete commitment to hands-off oversight, which allowed executives and Wall Street to feel comfortable stripping off reserve capacity in the name of efficiency.
That’s certainly a story that Pete Buttigieg—a gifted communicator—could have told.
