As of right now, according to Polymarket’s betting odds, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttagieg ranks third among possible 2028 Democrat candidates, trailing Gavin Newsom and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes. (Kamala Harris comes in 6th – what a slap in the face!)
The remarkable thing about all three candidates is that they have absolutely zero credentials to run on. Newsom has been an abysmal governor, overseeing the flight of tens of thousands of California residents and businesses to other lower-tax, more agreeable states like Florida and Texas and presiding over huge budget deficits thanks in part to unlimited handouts to illegal immigrants. AOC has sponsored and passed exactly zero bills during her eight years in the House; other than touring the country and absorbing the fairy dust of long-time progressives Bernie Sanders and more recently Zohran Mamdani, AOC is a virtual political nonentity.
But Pete Buttagieg is special. The former mayor of South Bend Indiana became Transportation Secretary early in the Biden administration and almost immediately proved he was not up to the task. If you recall, we had, thanks to the Covid epidemic, a serious supply chain problem. Goods were piling up on the docks, people could not get the products they wanted, and Buttagieg decided to take paternity leave. He and his partner had adopted a child, which was nice, but Mayor Pete took advantage of that event to go AWOL.
I’ll let Axios refresh your memory with its reporting from January 2023: “A historic string of air, rail and supply-chain meltdowns has plagued Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s first two years in office, placing him — for better or worse — at the center of crises affecting millions of people…A modest Cabinet role has become a political albatross for one of the Democratic Party’s brightest young stars.”
Yup, Pete did not emerge from those fraught months a hero. It got so bad, what with airline outages and a threatened rail strike, that Joe Biden’s inept mouthpiece Karine Jean-Pierre had to step in and reassure the public that the president still had confidence in Buttagieg.
No one else did.
What was he actually doing during those years? I have heard from people at the DOT that he was mostly a no-show, moving to Michigan where he thought his political career had more upside than in Indiana and spending most of his time there, rather than in his DC office. But now we find out that he actually was promoting and spending billions on DEI initiatives, instead of, I don’t know, maybe making air travel safer by updating the Air Traffic Control systems that we all have known for years were out of date. You know, the systems that Trump’s Transportation guy Sean Duffy, is actually modernizing.
The New York Post reported yesterday that Buttagieg handed out “hundreds of diversity, equity and inclusion grants totaling more than $80 billion over four years, at least half of DOT’s entire budget for a typical fiscal year.” At the same time, he reportedly had “little to no interest in improving our ATC issues.”
I believe that. The NYP story leaves the reader wondering, how could the Transportation head spend money on DEI? Here’s just one example from a Detroit Commerce report in 2022: “Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is spearheading a $1 billion pilot program named Reconnecting Communities to help connect cities and roads that were racially segregated and divided by road projects.” The program was meant “to compensate for the harm caused to low-income Black communities when the interstate highway system was created in the 1950s.”
Two years later Mayor Pete kicked off the “Thriving Communities Program” which was meant to help “local communities access the generational levels of investment made possible by President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law…[by providing] two years of no-cost, intensive technical assistance to under-resourced and disadvantaged communities…”
All these programs may have been worthwhile, but they surely seem more targeted to improving a gay white man’s chances of attracting future support in black communities than enhancing our transportation systems.
