On the way out: Transportation Sec. Buttigieg looks back on achievements, challenges
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Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has been one of the most public figures of the Biden administration. We need to build our economy back better than ever, and the Department of Transportation can play a central role in this. That's Buttigieg in 2021 speaking at a Senate confirmation hearing.

Once he assumed the role, the nation would often see or hear Buttigieg on various news programs coming to the defense of the administration's policies, goals and efforts to address voter issues. Like in 2022, Buttigieg defended Biden's efforts to ease inflation at a time when the economy was still recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic.

If we hadn't rescued the economy through the American Rescue Plan, we would not have had the 10 million jobs that were created under this president. We wouldn't be seeing some of the lowest unemployment numbers in the history of the republic. Buttigieg dealt with his share of crises in the job. Supply chain backlogs, widespread airline delays and cancellations, collapsing bridges, freight train derailments. Through it all, he kept doing media and kept making public appearances, but

which was notable in a carefully scripted administration. - There's two kinds of people who show up in the aftermath of a disaster. People who are there because they have a specific role to play and they're there to play their role and do the work and help the community. And people who are there because they want to be seen being there and they want to look good. When I'm there, it's going to be about action. Buttigieg was also a point person for some of the White House's biggest policy pushes.

like the infrastructure spending that will ultimately build half a million electric vehicle charging stations along U.S. highways. The most important thing is that the EV revolution will happen with or without us, and we've got to make sure that it's American-led. And that's what the president is focused on. We don't want China—look, under the Trump administration, they allowed China to build an advantage in the EV industry. But—

Under President Biden's leadership, we're making sure that the EV revolution will be a made-in-America EV revolution. Consider this. From handling crises in the rail and airline industries to overseeing the distribution of billions of dollars in funding, Pete Buttigieg has taken on a lot over the past four years. And now his tenure is coming to an end. Coming up, my conversation with the outgoing Transportation Secretary about what the Biden administration accomplished and didn't accomplish

and what he's taking away from an election where voters resoundingly called for something different. From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow.

It's Consider This from NPR. In the last days of the Biden administration, there are some loose ends to tie up, and one of those is the bipartisan infrastructure law. Earlier this week, the Department of Transportation's Federal Aviation Administration announced more than $330 million for airport grants across 32 states.

Infrastructure spending is something that got a lot of attention throughout Biden's time in the White House. So that is where I started my conversation with outgoing Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. You and others in the administration spent years getting the message out there, putting these projects 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.

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 on doing that. 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, 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.

That being said, this idea that Americans wanted to see their government working for them more was such a concrete thesis of the Biden administration. It's something that you you campaigned and wrote about before you joined this administration. Given where we are at this point in time, the transition of power that's happening, has that made you rethink anything, whether it was the way that this was approached or the way that it was communicated?

We always knew that part of what we're doing is turning a very big ship in terms of the condition of American infrastructure and the condition of a lot of things that Americans count on government to do. But that's going to take a lot of time and that the best thing that could come of that is a higher baseline level of public trust in what government can do for them. Do you think you achieved that?

Well, I think we set things on a different trajectory, but we're also operating in a different information environment. We're now living in a time where some dude on the internet has as much authority as somebody holding themselves to the highest journalistic standards of fact checking and research. And that is something that I think can swamp a lot of our more traditional calculations about what makes for good policy and good politics.

You, up until this point, are the most high-profile millennial to hold national office. I guess Vice President-elect Vance will join that club in a matter of weeks. But as we talk about this, I'm wondering, you came of age with the internet. Do you think it's done more harm or good for government, for public policy at this point in time?

I think at best it has cut both ways. You know, one thing that I think it has made possible is it's empowered everybody to be a reporter. And there are things that we find out about, including things that have happened in our communities or on our streets that no one would have known about if it weren't possible to record and publicize that through the Internet.

On the other hand, what we found is that everybody is a reporter, but nobody's an editor. And the idea that you do, in fact, have a responsibility to separate fact from fiction, to make judgments about what deserves real scrutiny or real attention, that's something that has clearly weakened in our society as a result of some of these technologies. Also, for my entire lifetime, you could use a photograph...

usually to settle a question about whether something was true or false. That's less and less true. And adapting to things like that is really going to test our capacity as a society, as a species.

I want to talk about, for a moment, social justice and transportation. You at times talked about Robert Moses and got the attention of nerds who love the power broker. But, you know, to get to these broader examples of the way that infrastructure and transportation projects were often built in a way that furthered injustice instead of helping to fix it, you had talked early on about wanting to take that head on. And are there areas where you feel like you accomplished that goal, whether it was a neighborhood, where it was a particular road?

Yeah, I mean, we were able through so many of our projects to empower the very kinds of people and homes and families and neighborhoods that used to get rolled over by transportation projects in the past. And that's really twofold, both making neighborhoods better off with transit access to places that didn't have it in the past or roads that are built with their neighborhood in mind, but also the jobs we created. I mean, the number of people getting good paying jobs in the building trades who are actually in

Literally making these things happen and happen in the neighborhoods where they grew up in is extraordinary. And I believe it's unprecedented. So we've really been able to make a big difference. There's still a long way to go. You know, it took decades to get the way we are, everything good and everything that needs to change. And it's going to take a while to get to a new reality. But we're well underway in what I like to call this infrastructure decade.

When you made those comments, there was this parallel reaction of excitement from people who love thousand-page books and criticism in some of the right-wing press that this was yet another example of identity politics, social justice-type governing.

And I'm asking that because in the months since the election, there has been all of this back and forth about did Democrats kind of veer too far in that lane? Did that hurt them politically? I'm wondering what you make about that general conversation and if you have any big takeaways on the policies of the last five or six years and how people are interpreting them.

You know, I think it was a reminder of how some voices in the media can get people whipped up over anything when we're talking about measures that don't make anyone worse off and make a lot of people better off. I will never be able to relate to the idea that it's wrong to confront people.

segregation that neighborhoods still have to live with because of some physical design decision that was made in the 50s or 60s. When we see that, we should put it right. And that's what we set out to do. Do you think there's something to the idea that your party needs to talk about these things in a different way to bring more people along? I think

Any way you come at it, the most important thing is the actions, not the words. I think that there has been a lot of hyperventilating about vocabulary. I think that this is something that you see in different flavors from all sides of the aisle. My side of the aisle gets lost in jargon sometimes.

And there's some really troubling things that you see in terms of vocabulary of what comes from the other side of the aisle, too. But look, the bottom line is we need to do the thing and then figure out how to talk about what we're doing. And the thing that we're doing is fixing roads and bridges across the country. You're going to be a private citizen.

You, along with many other Democrats, really raised deep, deep concerns about what a second Trump administration would mean on the rule of law, on democracy, on many other fronts. How are you going to be approaching that, whatever you do next? How are you going to be responding? Do you have any thought about what you will charge yourself with doing when you're out of office?

What I know is that most Americans believe in some basic values and some very important norms that hold our country together.

Frankly, no matter how you vote, a strong majority of Americans believe in making sure that our country is a freedom loving place, that people have rights and that we solve big problems together. And that's something that I'm going to continue to care about and work on. I'll be doing it as a citizen rather than as a policymaker, at least for the foreseeable future. And I'm going to do everything I can to work on the things I care about.

and the things that are going to matter to our family in Michigan and to so many people who I've gotten to know along the way in this work. Secretary Pete Buttigieg, thanks so much. Thank you. Good speaking with you. This episode was produced by Brianna Scott, Avery Keatley, and Tyler Bartlam. It was edited by Adam Rainey. Our executive producer is Sammy Yedigan. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow.

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