Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg spoke to Paul Miller fellows on the heels of a rail strike being averted. Here are excerpts from their exclusive briefing, with the full transcript available here. [Video]
On Rail Safety and Strikes
Daniel Desrochers, Kansas City Star: The chairman of the STB [Surface Transportation Board] says America’s Class I railroads are facing a long-term self-imposed crisis after years of worsening service and deep employment cuts. Federal law leaves communities across the country helpless to deal with the issue of longer and longer trains, cutting off access to hospitals and first responders. People continue to die at unprotected railroad crossings that have been pegged for safety improvements and railroads could pay for life-saving improvements, but instead wait until state and federal governments fund them. Do you believe that the federal government should do more to regulate the industry to ensure that it is meeting its common carrier obligations and protecting the welfare of its employees and the public?
Buttigieg:
I share the overall viewpoint of the STB chair, and I think that one thing we’re observing right now is the evolution of the business model in Class I rail toward one that really strips out the human element relentlessly, as much as possible, is related not only to the labor issues that we’ve been experiencing, that came to a head this fall and winter, but also some of the performance issues that the system has been experiencing in terms of fluidity, which is, obviously, concern in terms of supply chain throughput.
I think we do need to be very attentive and very hands-on with all of the tools in our toolkit to drive better results and a better experience in cargo rail, and that’s true on everything from making sure that it’s safe, which is, of course, our primary responsibility, to making sure that freight rail can be compatible with high quality of life in communities that it passes through, a part of which we can address through investments we’re making on things like railroad crossing elimination – sometimes even in partnership with the freight rail companies – but may also require management or regulation of their activities. And I would add to that compatibility with passenger rail operations, one of their obligations is to prioritize passenger rail. STB is, I think, taking a more muscular stance and rightly so, and FRA [Federal Railroad Administration] has new authorities to gather data … We’re only going to work within the authorities we actually have, we can’t invent authorities just because we want certain things to happen. … I’m excited to see STB doing their own work in this regard, but we’re going to be vocal and continue to speak to what we think needs to happen in railroading for there to be better outcomes for everybody. And that, I think, can include good outcomes for shareholders, but what we can’t go on with is shareholders versus the world in terms of who’s benefiting from this business model.
Ximena Bustillo, NPR via Sonni Efron: The railroad strike has been averted, but why did the Biden administration decide not to provide sick leave to the railroad workers, because it was such a big sticking point and you mentioned trying to ameliorate the labor problems? What’s your view on that?
Buttigieg:
The administration doesn’t decide what to provide, this was a negotiation. When the negotiations broke down, labor unions asked the President to form a presidential emergency board, he did, the board came out with recommendations that were used as a framework. (07:55) The negotiated tentative agreement went beyond what the PEV had come up with and it reflected the priorities of what the different parties decided to negotiate. When that wasn’t ratified by the unions, and the choice came down to allowing a shutdown to happen or asking Congress to enact that tentative agreement reached by the parties, the President and our administration asked for Congress to make sure that that tentative agreement could be enacted. That’s what happened. Of course, we believe in paid leave for railroad workers and for all workers, we have repeatedly advanced legislative proposals that would make sure everybody from a railroad worker to a white-collar worker to a fast food worker would have a high standard of paid leave.
We continue to stand ready to work with anybody who worked with us on that, especially some of the members in the Senate who seem to have reversed themselves on the Republican side and said that now for paid leave, at least in this context. They have a wonderful opportunity to put their money where their mouth is, just go out on the floor, propose a bill, I think they’d get universal agreement from our side. So if they have changed their mind and drop their opposition to paid leave for all American workers, fantastic. I think they’d find an administration willing to work with them on that, otherwise it’s just politics.
On Pipeline Safety, Infrastructure and Inequality
Ben Siegel, ABC News: Do you have any update on the Keystone Pipeline situation in the leak that was reported on Wednesday and any more background on that to share?
Buttigieg:
[The regulator] of pipeline safety has put in a corrective action order that includes a number of steps that the pipeline operators have to comply with. (10:13) It’s everything from a shutdown of the affected segment for as long as it’s necessary for safety reasons, to requiring a root cause analysis, which, I should emphasize, needs to be done by a third party. … It’s not the first time that there has been a spill or a leak issue with this pipeline and so it’s one that we’re monitoring very closely and we’ll be investigating it and following up on.
Sonni Efron, National Press Foundation: We’ve seen all these attacks on the North Carolina power station, the hurricanes, the wildfires in California, incredible disruptions to the grid … but DOT has this decarbonization policy, which is great, but makes us more dependent on the grid. So what are your views about resilience when we’re moving to more and more electricity and we have a more and more vulnerable grid?
Buttigieg:
Every mode of moving energy is vulnerable in different ways and for different reasons. The most significant cyberattack that we’ve had on energy distribution in the U.S. in our tenure wasn’t on an electrical grid, it was on the Colonial Pipeline. Certainly, electrical grids are vulnerable too, whether we’re talking about cyberattack or physical attack, but that’s a pattern that’s true across any of our physical infrastructure. Whether we’re talking about transit systems or increasingly driving, which will be increasingly automated. And so I think the real lesson is that we have to make sure that our critical infrastructure assets are harder targets for disruption, whether we’re talking about cyber, physical or other vectors of attack. It’s challenging because most of our critical infrastructure, rightly, is in private and/or local hands. There are 3,000 utilities in this country that all need to secure whatever piece of the electrical picture belongs to them. Most water treatment facilities in this country are municipal and most of our supply chains and transportation systems are in private hands. We’ve got to make sure our own side of the house is in order when it comes to something that is in fact owned and operated by the federal government, which, in terms of transportation, the main example would be the air traffic control system. Specifically in terms of resilience and electricity, I think ultimately there is a greater opportunity for resilience when the fueling of cars, for example, doesn’t require moving large quantities of liquid fuel around the country. … You can have a rooftop solar panel on your garage, you can’t have a rooftop diesel refinery. So I think ultimately this could lead to greater resilience, but it’s definitely the case that we can’t run tomorrow’s vehicles on yesterday’s grid, and that’s why I think there’s a lot of wisdom in the way that the Infrastructure Act was built that contemplates these things at the same time, upgrades to the grid, right alongside upgrades to the highway system and everything in between.
Victoria Knight, Axios: If you don’t have access [to transportation] it can be harder to access healthcare, but also if you take public transit, it reduces traffic and also air pollution. So I’m wondering is that something you guys think about at the department? Are there health implications for policies?
Buttigieg:
There are clear connections between public health and transportation design and outcomes. … One reason you see a lot of racial disparities in respiratory illnesses, like asthma incidents, has to do with where people live, and the fact that, for example, Latino children are more likely to live proximate to highway interchanges and/or port operations that have more particulate matter in the air. So if we are electrifying America’s ports or investing in low and no emission buses or establishing better access to public transit – and we are definitely doing all three of those things – one outcome of that should be a higher standard of public health generally and a low level of disparity in public health outcomes. I would say some of the starkest differences are in Indian country, and that’s definitely connected to transportation, whether we’re talking about emergency medicine or whether we’re talking about access to routine care. … you hear heartbreaking stories when you visit a number of tribes about people losing their lives or having worse outcomes because a washed out road made it impossible for an ambulance to get to where they needed to get to or for a patient to get to a hospital.
Past, Present and Future
Ben Siegel, ABC News: You were a mayor so you had had some experience with transportation policy, but just big picture, what is it like coming into a job where you’re learning a lot of the subject matter or you’re dealing with things that you maybe haven’t dealt with before? What is that process like, just at the macro level of running a department that impacts so many Americans? And is it a constant process? Do you feel like you have a handle of how everything is connected in this country now? Or is it sort of come up follow the news cycle or the appropriation?
Buttigieg:
One thing that I think must be daunting for any new cabinet secretary, and you definitely experience here, is the sheer scope of our operations. And no matter what your background, and I felt that my transportation background had a lot of richness to it coming in as a mayor who dealt with a lot of these things at the scale of my city, is still only ever going to be a tiny slice of what goes on at a department like this. Not only is this the department of plane, trains and automobiles, but as came up before, we regulate pipeline safety, we license commercial space travel launches. We run a service academy for the U.S. Merchant Marine, I mean just things that most people may not even know are in the scope of this department. Not to mention the sheer complexity of any given thing that everybody does know is in our scope from what it takes to fund a bridge project to how we run the crash test dummy program. The most humbling part of it, especially if you’re a curious person who enjoys digging in on issues, is recognizing that, more often than not, substantive technical mastery is not how you’re going to earn your paycheck as a secretary. Sometimes you need to master a complex issue or at least learn it well in order to make good decisions or to do your job. I never thought I’d get as immersed as I did in the finer points of radio altimeter interactions with cell phone towers, for example. But if you recall the 5G issues that we’ve had that were looming large a year ago and are still with us, there was no way to play my role without getting immersed in the details of it. So what you wind up doing is learning to trust and empower teams of experts, many of whom are career employees who’ve been here decades as secretaries have come and gone. And to engage outside stakeholders, everywhere from Congress to the academy, and to know when the issue at hand is a technical one that needs to be left to them to handle.
Or when the issue is fundamentally not technical. You may need technical insights to see it, but what’s actually at stake is a question of values that is the kind of question that political appointees are supposed to address in the name of an administration that believes these calls should go one way and not another. And of course, where you really earn your paycheck, sometimes it is operationally, just stopping bad things from happening. But often it’s negotiating those moments when the things you care about come into conflict with each other, when your commitments around doing something quickly and something right. And doing right by the climate and doing right by workers and supporting America’s global economic competitiveness. Safety and a whole bunch of other things are jostling for priority, and those are the moments that really test you require a lot of you but are also, sometimes, the most rewarding. And in terms of this job, they remind you why we have people and not formulas making some of these decisions.
Sophia Cai, Axios: I would love to ask you about this issue of turnover … this effort to come up with some lists and pipelines for potential replacements at the most senior levels, at the level of the secretary, assistant secretary. I mean is this something that you are concerned about in the Department of Transportation and also looking horizontally? We’ve seen reporting of Secretary Yellen, Secretary Mayorkas potentially moving on, but how has that effort going? What kinds of conversations are you having with your peers as well as with your department?
Buttigieg:
After the midterms is a typical time to expect some churn, I’d say one thing that’s been striking to be part of this administration is how stable the top team has been. … I imagine now is a time when you’ll actually see some of that start to happen, if only because of the crushing demands of a lot of these jobs that my colleagues are doing. … I view this moment as an opportunity to support colleagues and I’m certainly glad to have this job, as demanding as it is, looking forward to continuing to do it. It’s funny, actually just earlier today I was looking – we all have these certificates, it’s the thing that executes our appointment signed by the President and the Secretary of State. I don’t know why I never really paid much attention to language, it’s beautifully written, I think it’s probably a formula that goes back to the founding, but the end of the paragraph says … Peter Buttigieg [serves] “during the pleasure of the President of the United States for the time being.” And I actually never noticed that the words, as if “at the pleasure of the President” were not clear enough that “for the time being” is added in there. I think we’re all aware of that contingent nature of our grasp on these roles, not just serving at the pleasure of the President, but because of the way the electoral cycle works. But I think it reflects really well on the President and on our chief of staff and on this White House that the team has been so stable. And at the same time, I think it’s perfectly natural that there will be some coming and going and I think that’s a challenge but also an opportunity.
