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ocated next to a wastewater treatment plant, the River Raisin Bridge in Monroe, Michigan, isn’t photo-op material. The mud is deep and the puddles are enormous on a raw December morning. Still, camera crews and local politicians and union members gather as if Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is giving out gold bars. And in a way, he is. Buttigieg, clad in his standard crisp white shirt and blue tie, is here to announce $196 million in funding to rebuild the bridge before it deteriorates further and forces expensive and unsafe detours through the area.
Buttigieg is on a farewell tour of sorts after the Democrats’ November defeat. He’s trying to connect the dots in his now-home state of Michigan between the Biden administration’s expansive infrastructure program and job creation for a working class yet to feel the post-pandemic economic recovery that long ago reached Wall Street.
“This is a piece of infrastructure that serves 60,000 vehicles per day,” Buttigieg says. “I-75 between Detroit and Toledo [Ohio] is significant to international trade as well as to this region, but was left to deteriorate — but not anymore. This bridge overall and the associated economic activity are expected to support over 4,000 jobs. That includes people designing, building, supplying materials, and the jobs in retail, food service, and other local businesses that are going to be supported by this. We’re thrilled about how we’re not only building bridges, we’re building livelihoods, homeownership, and so much more for families doing this work.”
It was the type of hopeful message that didn’t convince enough Michigan voters to vote for Kamala Harris, who lost the state by 80,000 votes.
The Biden administration’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law — which Buttigieg likes to refer to as “the Big Deal,” as a nod to FDR’s New Deal — has provided more than $568 billion in transportation funding for more than 66,000 projects across the nation, primarily to shore up and rebuild America’s bridges, tunnels, and highways that have been neglected by both Democratic and Republican administrations for decades. The bill was heavy on supporting EV battery manufacturing plants and other high-tech developments that will create good-paying jobs in long-ignored industrial hubs like Monroe and Buttigieg’s hometown of South Bend, Indiana.
While there were significant wins, Buttigieg’s four years in office were not without problems. The administration was slow on at least its public reaction to the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, and Buttigieg was pilloried for not responding quicker to a commercial-airliner crisis, specifically Southwest Airlines canceling thousands of flights around the holidays in 2022. But even within the latter crisis, Buttigieg course-corrected to the point where passenger-rights activists now view him as a strong advocate for their cause.
The former mayor also emerged during the Biden years as seemingly the only national Democrat capable of articulating a positive vision of the administration. He took the fight to Republicans through frequent appearances on Fox News, where he calmly swatted away distortions and provided actual information to Fox viewers, often pithily inserting that he knew what he was saying might be new to them.
I joined Buttigieg on a recent trip through Ohio and Michigan. In addition to celebrating fully-funded projects, Buttigieg had a larger point he wanted to make. America has entered a new phase where many believe government is not only inefficient, but also actually evil. Twenty-four hours with Buttigieg makes a counterargument. There was a stop at a UAW shop in Dearborn, Michigan, where Buttigieg was introduced by an emotional Rashida Tlaib, the congresswoman for the area. She talked of a beloved uncle, recently retired after 30 years as a janitor, who was hit and killed at a notorious intersection in town. Buttigieg heard about it and called her. Now, there’s a multimillion-dollar federal investment to make the street safer for pedestrians. In short, government matters.
I’d covered Buttigieg during his 2020 presidential campaign, when he was still giving off the best and brightest vibes that had his most insane opponents in the activist class suggesting he was some kind of government plant. Four long years later, that skepticism has largely melted away. Buttigieg still has a Midwestern Nice quality to him — it’s hard to imagine an American politician less likely to throw a phone at a staffer. It’s an attribute that has its downsides — the secretary stopped for coffee at an Ohio Turnpike rest stop on his way from Detroit to Cleveland. He wanted hot but he got iced. He let it go, too shy to ask for a new cup.
Still, the 42-year-old has changed. He now has a few new-dad wrinkles to go along with the political scars of four years in the Washington meat grinder. His only misstep on the trip was lamenting to the UAW workers that he was disappointed by the performance of Detroit Lions quarterback Jared Goff on his fantasy football team. (The long-downtrodden Lions are good now. It was met with good-natured grumbling.) He retains a geeky sense of wonder about the world that connects with people, holding up a tour of a Detroit building so he could examine some ancient elevator controls and lighting up like a Christmas tree when I mentioned I’d recently interviewed Veep creator Armando Iannucci.
“Wow, The Thick of It is one of my favorite shows,” Buttigieg says.
We talked twice, first in Detroit and then in Cleveland. We both tried not to use bridges as metaphors, a rhetorical hazard when talking with the secretary of Transportation.
You and the Biden administration have committed so much time to rebuilding transportation infrastructure …
And why aren’t we getting the credit?
Well, I was going to get to that later.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to rush you.
It’s OK. There is the sense that these projects have been delayed for decades, and you guys finally start to crank on it and the term is over. Was it a challenge to get people to see that it’s infrastructure, but it’s also like a public-works project? Conveying that to people seems to have been tough. Did you know from the beginning that the rollout time is going to be beyond the first term?
This is a job where someone else is going to be cutting ribbons on things planned long ago. Early on, I started talking about our projects in terms of cathedrals. Our bigger projects are the cathedrals of our infrastructure. I call them cathedrals because I was thinking about all the examples of actual cathedrals where the people who planned it didn’t even live to see it completed. In fact, that was very much the norm. And I was thinking about the faith that was required to start a great work that you knew you would not live to see finished.
I’m sure you’ve rolled your eyes at the number of Republican congresspeople who had press conferences as the project began who voted against the actual infrastructure bill.
[Smiling.] Oh, yes. It’s hard not to chuckle about that.
Do you think it is harder to convey in the times that we live in now that these are things that benefit everybody?
Yes. We’ve never had more connections, and we’ve never been more disconnected. Just as we’ve never had more information and been less informed. And our connections are in these strange and overlapping circles of belonging. Many of which are online, right? And the whole thing about transportation is it is still about the offline. By definition, if you’re driving or flying to a meeting, that’s a meeting that couldn’t have happened on Zoom. We’re in the business of things still moving and people still moving in the real world, in this offline setting.
You’d been a small-city mayor. I wonder if you felt a little imposter syndrome when you first took the job, running a department of this size.
Yes, the range is dizzying. As a mayor who focused on infrastructure, I knew a lot about streets, for example. But being responsible for the Merchant Marine Academy or licensing commercial space launches or pipeline safety regulations, not to mention running the national airspace, it was just next-level.
In some ways, it becomes more daunting the better you get to know it. It was one thing to visit my first FAA facility. But when you go to your 10th FAA facility and you really begin to grasp the complexity and scope of this one part of the department, or when you just have occasion, flight after flight after flight, to contemplate the physical largeness of the United States of America and realize you’re responsible for things that happen in every part of the country. But you also realize that every job is done by a human, and as a human you have to figure it out.
You had an early crisis with the Southwest Airline meltdown around Christmas 2022, when it canceled thousands of flights. Some activists thought you weren’t tough enough at first, but now see you as an ally in trying to get a fair shake for travelers. Was there an evolution, from your point of view?
I thought of it less as an evolution and more as a chance to make good on the priorities that I always thought were important, and that my motivation developed as I experienced more and more of what was going on in these companies. But I do respect why there would be an evolution in my credibility with some of these groups, because everybody says the right things. Everybody says the right things about safety, about standing up for consumers, about challenging lobbyists and power structures and corporations, so it’s only fair that they’re going to be a little skeptical of you until you actually deliver. But the important thing is I think over time these folks saw that I was serious, not because my rhetoric evolved, but because we started really getting results.
Whether it’s man-made or a natural disaster, an administration or a cabinet secretary is walking a fine line between “I want to go there and see what’s happening” versus “I don’t want to tie up all these resources during an emergency.” Would you have done anything different on that front with the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio?
Yes, of course. The way things unfolded on the ground was very unusual there in terms of timing. The department was there within hours. But then the media firestorm came in about a week later. So, two things I wish I had understood more quickly: The first was that this community was victimized twice, once by the wreck itself, the fire, the smoke, and the spill, and then a second time by what was done in the information space to really terrorize them and make it into this media circus. People were getting very contradictory information about whether it was safe to even be there, images that turned out to be misattributed or false about dead animals. There were real damages too, environmentally, but I’m saying there were also images that were found to be false.
We had a responsibility to deal with the transportation-safety elements, which the department knew how to do, and I would argue did very quickly, but we also had a responsibility to help with the information challenge. That’s where just showing up was very important. And it took longer than it should have to understand those dynamics. It’s very important for there to be lots of kind of support shown, but normally people didn’t look for the secretary of transportation, so I was overly deferential to precedent, where no matter how much they cared about the crash, a transportation secretary wouldn’t normally go to one, largely out of respect for the NTSB [National Transportation Safety Board] and wanting not to mess up the process. But this time was just different.
Both of those lessons served us well in dealing with the direct crisis in Baltimore when the bridge collapsed, but also the information crisis that unfolded with Hurricane Helene. We were able to help sooner on the information crisis because we had learned some of the patterns to watch out for.
[Shortly after Hurricane Helene, Elon Musk wrote on X that private planes were not being given permission to land and drop off emergency supplies. Buttigieg responded by tweeting, “No one is shutting down the airspace and the FAA doesn’t block legitimate rescue and recovery flights. If you’re encountering a problem give me a call.”]
A more public example was my Twitter dust-up with Elon recently, over the FAA. The point being, sometimes we do get in our own way with a lot of elaborate steps, or a lot of chess-match thinking, when you just need to talk to people, and see what happens. And maybe they like what you have to say, and maybe they don’t.
There was much talk about a new rail-safety bill after East Palestine. And it stalled. Obviously, your job is not to pass legislation, but you can be an advocate for what you think should happen. Does it frustrate you that it didn’t happen?
Absolutely. I consider it my single biggest piece of unfinished business at the Capitol. This should have gotten passed more than a year ago. It should get passed right now. We got the Surface bill, that was the infrastructure package. We got the FAA bill, but Congress would not act on the Railway Safety bill. It’s not for lack of trying, not for lack of shouting and yelling on my end, not for lack of bipartisan support, interestingly. After all, one of the lead sponsors of this is JD Vance, which does give me hope that maybe it can still happen.
Who’s the culprit here?
Look, there’s a rail-industry lobby that doesn’t want this to happen. You see it everywhere. Trucking. You see it in ocean shipping. You see it in airlines. But the railroads are the original. They invented this stuff, at least from a U.S. perspective. So, they’re good at gumming that stuff up.
There are a lot of things that could have been done better, especially in terms of getting people good information in those first few weeks. But the biggest thing we can do going forward is to respond to this by improving railway safety.
And that same week I showed up with a list of railway-safety reforms, the former president showed up and handed out cheeseburgers. But he will have a chance to sign meaningful legislation co-sponsored by his soon-to-be vice president if he cares about this.
There was some talk after the election that the Democrats were not open to differences of opinion on issues like transgender women participating in sports …
I think the reality is, almost everything that we have talked about or campaigned on commands about 60-plus-percent support. And when you do see people getting political traction by going after some group, that’s telling you a lot more than anything about one group.
There’s a lot to be learned from Sarah McBride’s masterful handling of this on her way into Congress. Because what she said was: What the speaker’s doing is wrong. But I didn’t come here to fight over that. I came here to make life easier for people in Delaware who elected me. And it immediately demonstrated that it’s people like [House Speaker Mike Johnson] who should be dealing with issues of utmost world historical importance, who are consumed with regulating where his colleagues get to go to the bathroom.
And she took some heat for that, internally. But I think that is instructive, not so much because of the position she struck, but because of the importance of reminding everybody what it means when people in power, or people seeking power, try to get there by stepping on the faces of some disfavored group. This is not some modern phenomenon of the 2020s, but one of the oldest and ugliest tricks in the book.
You’ve said that our tolerance for commercial-aviation fatalities is zero. One or two happens in a year, we need to rethink everything. But we accept roughly 40,000 automotive fatalities in a year. I wonder if you relate that to something like the issue of gun violence, where Americans just feel like it is their inalienable right to drive 85 miles an hour on I-95, pass people in the right-hand lane, and the costs are just the costs.
There is something wrong with our acceptance of this level of carnage, and it has a couple of things in common with gun violence. One, the proportions. In fact, it’s almost the same, roughly 40,000 deaths. The other — though it’s not quite as extreme as the case of gun violence — is international comparisons that demonstrate that it doesn’t have to be this way. It would be one thing if every developed society just faces this the way you do, I don’t know, cancer. It’s not true. And I’ve learned a lot on this job from conversations with my counterparts about that. So, it tells you that we can and should do more.
This is not some back road in that I want you to criticize Elon Musk, but there are a lot of issues with somebody whose rockets are regulated by the FAA having the outsize influence that he’s had in this election.
First of all, our approach has always been to call balls and strikes. Whether somebody was viewed as a friend of the administration or in tension with the administration — some people managed to be both, but regardless — we try to shoot right down the middle. I think here, though, in some ways we’re going to have to relearn some lessons that America or any other modern country has to learn from time to time, maybe every 50 or 100 years.
It’s not unusual for the richest person in a country to be very powerful in that country. It’s a little more unusual for them to have a government or quasi-government role, but not unheard of. What I think hasn’t happened in a while is the concentration of so much wealth and so much power in the hands of so few people. And we’ve talked about that generically as a problem in our politics and economy for the last 20, 30, 40 years. But in the last three, four, five years, we’ve seen whole new forms of it that I think will require us to change and think differently about how we manage the access that some people, who haven’t been elected to anything, get to power over everybody’s life. And I think those are the questions that are at stake when you have very powerful, wealthy people given sweeping, undefined roles in or around government.
You have made a strong reputation as the Democrat who can go on Fox News and hold his own. Is there a technique to this?
I don’t know if there’s any magic to it. A lot of it’s just simply going there. If there is a technique, what I do is I think about people in my life, or people in the community where I came from, who I might jostle with or spar with or disagree with, but I also actually like. And I imagine that’s the viewer, and I imagine I’m talking to them. Because another thing — and I say this without meaning in the least bit to propose that the answer is ideological centrism — it results not only in a lot of ugliness, but something that’s even more dangerous, which is people checking out.
The only time I really spent any length of time under dictatorship was when I was a student in Tunisia. And, I mean, framed pictures of the dictator in your dorm, and on the street, and everywhere. Everything seemed to be named after the 7th of November. The main square, the avenue. I kept asking, “What is this?” And they’re like, “Ah, something historical.” Because that was the day in 1987 when the leader took power. But what you felt wasn’t this overbearing. Well, it was overbearing. A lot of what made that authoritarianism work was that a lot of people were just checked out. Or at least they created the impression of being checked out. The newspaper didn’t have an opinion page. And if you talked to people, even young people, students, they just didn’t want to engage in it. And that’s even more dangerous, and I think that happens when politics is exhausting. And politics is less exhausting if we imagine it as a dialogue.
One of the things that has struck me over the past few years has been the visceral reaction to you on some levels. In 2020, I saw a meme of your head superimposed on the head of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. How do you deal with that kind of visceral opposition?
[Smiling.] First, you learn not to read your clips or replies. Look, it’s two sides of a coin. There are some people who are so loyal and so supportive that you can’t imagine what you could possibly do to deserve it, but you’re glad they’re there for you. And then some people just don’t like your stupid face. There’s nothing you can do about that either.
Buttigieg had to catch a flight, so we said our goodbyes. I mentioned I’d spent summers up on Torch Lake not far from Traverse City, where Buttigieg now lives with his husband, Chasten, and their two kids. “We’re supposed to get another foot of snow tomorrow,” says Buttigieg. He admits he is very ready for a break from the D.C. grind and spending more time with his family and thinking about what he wants to do next, something he insists he hasn’t decided on yet. Like all parents, he laments the push and pull between professional responsibilities and family needs. It reminded me of something Buttigieg said the night before in a speech before Cleveland’s City Club.
“Nothing has helped me maintain my humanity more than having kids,” Buttigieg said. “This job, as you can imagine, it’s just head-spinning sometimes, the intensity and the privilege that comes with being a Cabinet official. But then you have all these little status shifts that come your way because you spend a lot of your time with three-year-olds. I’ve been at the house and I get off the phone, and the phone conversation ends with something along the lines of ‘Let us know any more data you need, sir, before you go to the White House tomorrow.’ This is immediately followed by ‘Papa, come wipe my butt.’ And you know what? That’s what I’m going to do. Because that can’t wait. The memo can wait. The White House will still be exactly where it is the next day.”
Or in 2028.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
