Exit interview: DOT Secretary Pete Buttigieg on Infrastructure Act and the Road Ahead
As President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration approches in less than a week, United States Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg prepares for his return to civilian life.
After managing the dispersal of billions of dollars in legislative funding to the sector as a part of President Biden’s infrastructure legislation, as well as managing crises in air and rail sectors, this return will be quite a shift.
In preparation for this change, Buttigieg spoke with All Things Considered host Scott Detrow about his accomploshments and challenges faced over these years as transportation secretary.
NPR shared some interview highlights,
Scott Detrow: I want to start by talking about the thing that probably got the most attention throughout the course of the administration – all the infrastructure spending. I think that’s a good example of something that seems to do all of the things that a lot of people think that the voters want from government: investing in communities, fixing problems, coming together to fix those problems, spending at historic levels. You and others in the administration spent years getting the message out there, [and] putting this project into place. I know how many airports you visited to tout these accomplishments, and yet a lot of different metrics, including the election results, suggest that maybe voters didn’t quite appreciate, that it didn’t seem to land, it didn’t seem to be a reaching a consensus of, ‘Wow, the Biden administration did this for me.’ I’m wondering how you make sense of all of that.
Pete Buttigieg: Well, a lot of the things that we work on are worth doing, whether they’re getting a lot of political credit or not. We do safety work to save people from losing their lives on our roadways or in the aviation system. We don’t expect people to cheer for us. We just do it because it’s the right thing to do, and our infrastructure is something that should just work. That said, I do think that as more and more of these projects go to completion, we’re going to see more and more of an appreciation for what this infrastructure era has done to make people better off. We’re already seeing levels of employment in construction, building, trades, and manufacturing that we haven’t seen in my lifetime. Think about the Affordable Care Act. Took years before people fully appreciated them, and the very nature of infrastructure work is, it takes some time. That said, I’m going to keep telling the story and waving the flag, because it is extraordinary what we did and what will continue to happen in this country. It didn’t happen on its own. It was a bipartisan achievement at a time when anything bipartisan is pretty rare in this town. And I think we’re going to be benefiting from it for the rest of our lives.
