Mene Ukueberuwa joins Brian Anderson to discuss the outgoing Transportation secretary’s tenure.
Audio Transcript
Brian Anderson: Welcome back to the 10 Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal. Joining me on the show today is an old friend, Mene Ukueberuwa. He’s an editorial board member at the Wall Street Journal. He’s a former associate editor at City Journal, and we’ve published a number of his pieces over the years. He writes about politics, economics, education, other issues, and his work has appeared not only in the Wall Street Journal and CJ but National Review, The New Republic, New Criterion, and other outlets.
Today, we’re going to discuss the career of Pete Buttigieg, the outgoing Biden administration transportation secretary. I will talk about infrastructure a little bit. Buttigieg is often touted as a rising star in the Democratic Party and a presidential contender next time around in 2028. So I think it’s going to be interesting to take an assessment of what his experience in the Biden administration has looked like and how that might affect his political prospects going forward. So Mene, great to see you or talk with you as always.
Mene Ukueberuwa: It’s great to see you Brian.
Brian Anderson: So Joe Biden, when he was elected, his mandate, or at least one of its mandates, was to get America moving again after the experience of COVID and the shutdowns and also to try to restore normalcy. That was often said at the time.
As a transportation secretary, Buttigieg was supposed to be the builder-in-chief, but after the administration really poured trillions into the Infrastructure Bill and the Inflation Reduction Act, there seems to have been very little building to show for it.
Just eight new EV charging stations, for example. New York’s Gateway Project is running behind schedule, and so on. So how do you spend that enormous amount of money on infrastructure programs and yet have such little effect?
Mene Ukueberuwa: Yeah, so I think the inability of the Biden administration and particularly the Transportation Department under Pete Buttigieg to actually execute on a lot of the projects that they were aiming to fund both through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and later through the famous Inflation Reduction Act, quote, unquote, is extremely representative of the difficulties of the current progressive approach toward investing in the country, investing in the economy, investing in its systems, and getting it moving again as they claimed to want to do.
I think that someone like Pete Buttigieg was hired for that job because he has the right mindsets and right credentials. He very famously, before entering government, was a consultant at McKinsey, though has real private sector experience and should understand the technicalities of business and investment. He also was the mayor of a small city, South Bend, Indiana, where he grew up and did a decent job, I think, according to the people who live there, in terms of upgrading a lot of their systems and was tapped to be able to execute that experience on a much larger scale in the Biden administration.
But I think very quickly, once those funds were appropriated by Congress, it became clear that there is a bigger problem in terms of improving American infrastructure than just getting the money in place, which is what Democrats tend to focus on. So the biggest example of this is the electric vehicle charging stations, which were granted $7.5 billion between these two major laws to be able to fund projects to expand the network.
This is a big priority of Democrats because they are encouraging Americans to buy a lot more electric vehicles. But one of the reasons why few people have been willing to buy is because it’s very difficult to find a place to charge them. They figure, “We get these charging stations built, that’s going to supercharge the EV market.” And yet, as you mentioned, after two years of the funding being in place, there were only eight stations built.
As of today, the number is about 17, but this is out of a goal of thousands and thousands that they intended to build and that they have the money to be able to build through 2030. And so the reason why they’ve fallen behind really is because they have a lot of regulations in place that make it very difficult for contractors to be able to actually execute on these projects and get the stations built. So one of the regulations is a program called Justice40.
This is an initiative in the Biden administration that requires 40% of major allocations, like the EV charging station spending to go to underserved areas, so to go to relatively poor zip codes with a lot of low-income people in them. The irony, of course, is that very few low-income people drive electric vehicles, and so it’s completely uneconomical for the developers of these stations to choose these types of locations to site their projects.
They know that they’re not going to be able to make money even with the government picking up 30 percent of the tab. Another reason why they haven’t been able to build more stations and get more viable proposals is because of the wage requirements on these projects. So the labor department requires that these projects be built with wages that are comparable to what unions pay in a particular region. So that inflates the amount of money that’s going to be going to employees who are staffed on these projects.
That means that there are certain contractors for whom it will be very difficult or inconvenient, again, even with government subsidies, to be able to afford to take on one of these projects. And so, after years, there were very few applications coming in. Buttigieg, as transportation secretary, has the ability to ask for waivers for some of these regulations, but like most progressives today, their desire to actually build is completely overshadowed by their desire to meet the interests of their constituencies like unions, like minority groups.
And so he was asked very famously by Margaret Brennan, who is a CBS reporter, why they’ve gotten so little built, and he wasn’t really able to explain it, but you could imagine that he was afraid of being asked by somebody, “Why were these EV charging stations built in only wealthy areas or why were these built with low-cost labor?” And so, it was actually more favorable to him to build very slowly and do very little rather than move ahead, do the things he needed to do to actually execute on the project, but do so in a way that would offend major progressive constituencies.
Brian Anderson: Speaking of these kind of overhanging regulations and political goals, numerous agencies within Buttigieg’s Transportation Department, including the Federal Highway Administration, made climate impact a main criterion for awarding grants. So talk about this a little bit and how it might have crowded out other areas that would’ve been more worthy of attention.
Mene Ukueberuwa: So the Infrastructure Bill, it’s important to remember, was passed on a bipartisan basis. You had 19 Republicans in the Senate voting in favor of it, along with all of the Democrats. And the reason why so many Republicans were willing to take a chance on the Infrastructure Bill is because they believe that their constituents want to see the federal government spending on building new highways, repairing bridges, doing all of these things that are going to make ordinary Americans commutes easier, are going to make things safer and more efficient. And so there was a pretty broad consensus that that’s what they wanted to get done.
But the Infrastructure Law, like most laws that Congress passes these days, leaves enormous discretion in the hands of the administrative agencies who are actually going to consider the grant proposals that are going to get these projects built. And so you saw the Federal Highway Administration, for example, issuing guidance saying that, “We don’t want any new highways to be constructed with these billions of dollars.We only want highways to be resurfaced. We want them to be maintained, but we don’t want actual new construction.” And the reason for that is because they believe that could have a negative environmental impact. That more cars on the road traveling at higher speeds was going to increase emissions. That expanding highways or building new rights-of-way had the potential to have a negative impact on animal habitats, on plant habitats, and things of that kind.
And so you saw the Federal Highway Administration, which again is under Pete Buttigieg’s authority, issue this kind of guidance. They later had to backtrack on it because the backlash was so great from a lot of the Republican lawmakers who said, “Building more highways was the only reason we supported this, and nothing in the law that we actually passed allowed you to constrain how this money was going to be issued in this way.”
But again, it just shows how, when these practical goals of getting things built are funded by Congress, you see progressive administrators like Mayor Pete and his staff at the Department of Transportation attaching other requirements because they have other goals in mind, like environmental protection that can end up overshadowing and frustrating their ability to actually execute on the core goal.
Brian Anderson: Buttigieg, I think it’s fair to say, also had an adversarial relationship with a lot of businesses, and a particularly striking example in this regard is how he handled the airlines, which were under his authority.
When the airlines ran into some significant delays a few holidays back, Buttigieg really launched into kind of a war mode against them, levying major fines, criticizing them publicly. What do you think about that approach here, and what does it say about Buttigieg and, more broadly, the Democrat’s view of government’s role with regard to the private sector?
Mene Ukueberuwa: Yeah, I think that the approach that was taken to regulating the airlines in the aftermath of COVID really showed how a lot of progressive administrators see their role not as creating a hospitable environment and helping business to be able to accomplish its goals on behalf of American customers, but they see their goal as actually taking on business, punishing them, rather than saying, “What is it actually in our authority to fix and how can we improve things?”
So to flesh out this particular episode, I think a lot of listeners will remember that there were a lot of flight delays in those years coming out of the shutdowns, and that was in part because the airlines were short-staffed and other logistical hiccups. And this really reached a climax when Southwest Airlines had a kind of meltdown that came from their scheduling system going offline initially caused by bad weather, but then they just had a cascade of cancellations because they didn’t have enough staff to be able to plug holes as they kept arising.
Pete Buttigieg, during his time as transportation secretary, initially started off with a fairly hands-off approach and trying to be in touch with business and see how he could be helpful. Again, he has private sector experience, and he seemed to want to play a constructive role, but there’s a lot of pressure among rising progressive cohort in the Democratic Party, sometimes referred to as the new left populists, to take a more aggressive approach and to say that these cancellations are something that businesses should be punished for.
There were a lot of people writing that he wasn’t taking a proactive enough approach, and he said publicly that he was reading and responding to this criticism and that he decided to ramp up his involvement after getting a lot of negative press. And so they did a very quick investigation of Southwest and ended up lobbying or levying the largest fine ever that the transportation has issued, holding them at fault for what had happened with these cancellations. And he went out and spoke very negatively about the role that Southwest had played. I think that this episode was cast into extremely bright contrast with how he handled a similar problem within his own agency that happened only a couple of months after.
You saw the Federal Aviation Administration end up having a problem with its security software, which grounded flights completely for an entire morning nationwide. This was the first time that you’d ever seen all flights grounded since 9/11. It’s a very rare thing to happen, and it was because of a software glitch, the same way that the Southwest episode was caused by a software glitch on their end. And yet you didn’t see Mayor Pete come out and say, “Heads need to roll because of this. We’re going to completely reform our agency. We’re going to refund customers in the same way that they forced Southwest to refund customers through their fine.”
Basically, the idea is that government is hostile to customers and is responsible for every problem that might occur, or rather that private businesses are hostile to consumers and are responsible for every problem that might occur, whereas government, there’s much less of a focus on doing what they can do to improve how their own systems work and play a constructive role in helping the flight business operate in a sound way. And so that’s representative again of, I think, a very rising cohort in the progressive movement that Buttigieg claims to be independent of, but can be very easily influenced by.
Brian Anderson: Now, in addition to these kind of problems that Buttigieg faced during his, there were some significant disasters, pretty grim episodes, including the 2023 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, which had released toxic materials into that community.
Buttigieg’s response to this and other kind of disasters seemed, at least this has been the criticism, kind of lax. He didn’t really rush to the scenes. His reaction seemed a kind of abstract and bureaucratic, detached even. At least, that was my impression. What was your take on his response and how he handled some of these awful incidents?
Mene Ukueberuwa: I agree with that. I do think that one of the things that the public really wants government to do is to react to major accidents when they take place, make sure that victims are taken care of, to conduct investigations, to figure out exactly what caused the problem, and make recommendations about how to proceed. And we did see that horrific crash in East Palestine, Ohio, in 2023.
And this is exactly the sort of thing that the National Transportation Safety Board, NTSB, exists to oversee. And they did conduct an investigation of that episode, make recommendations. They reached an agreement with Norfolk Southern, which was the railroad whose train derailed, about how costs would be covered. And Norfolk Southern was very cooperative. But I do think it’s striking that it wasn’t one of the episodes where Pete Buttigieg really was being very vocal and very public, in part because it might have been more difficult to cast in a starkly political light.
I think that there was a meltdown essentially on the train tracks that caused that accident to take place. And Norfolk Southern wasn’t particularly at fault. I don’t think that there was any negligence. There was nobody killed in the incident, thankfully. And it just didn’t seem like the kind of instance that could be easily turned into a big flashy story for political gain. And so that might explain the partly muted response on behalf of the regulatory agency.
Brian Anderson: Be worth concluding on how do you think Buttigieg’s political future will be affected by his significant experience in the Biden administration? It’s taken as nearly a given that he’s going to be a contender in 2028, as I said at the outset. His role in the administration definitely raised his profile, and you have to give him credit.
He’s a very smooth communicator, is articulate when he goes on TV when he speaks publicly. But when you, as we just recounted here to some degree, when you dig into his actual record, you’re not finding a huge amount of accomplishment. So what do you think that’s going to look like if he does indeed throw his hat in the ring going forward?
Mene Ukueberuwa: Well, I think it’s an interesting question because I think Pete Buttigieg is the type of candidate who a lot of thoughtful establishment Democrats think should be the standard-bearer in 2028. They want to distance themselves from a lot of the woke ideology that they believe sank their party’s prospects in 2024. And Pete Buttigieg is not particularly woke, at least not speaking publicly.
He’s gay, of course, but that’s not something that he describes as at the core of his political appeal. And he tends not to lean into some of these cultural issues. He also hasn’t been so stridently anti-Trump, saying that he’s a threat to democracy or that America’s on the verge of collapse. And I think having someone who’s a little bit more positive and not going to be so alienating to conservatives is also something a lot of Democrats are looking for. So, in theory, Pete Buttigieg should be the type of candidate who is in the mix.
I think he wants to present himself as, “All I’m focused on is getting things done for the American people. And the way that we’re going to do that is by investing in the country.” Being transportation secretary under President Biden should have been an ideal opportunity for him to demonstrate his ability to do that because he was in charge of executing on so many of these major spending projects. But I do think that his primary opponents and a lot of Republicans are going to be able to criticize him and say, “You say that you’re all about getting things done. You talk about all of these projects and the money that’s been put behind them, but you weren’t willing to actually take on your own constituencies and your own regulations that often are the things that get in the way of actually accomplishing the goals that you’re setting out to do.”
I think that he’ll be mocked for the number of EV chargers that they weren’t able to build during his time. And so many of the other unresolved problems that were a huge part of the reason why voters drifted from President Biden during the course of his term and ended up bringing President Trump back to office.
And so I fully expect him and several other Democrats who are cut from a similar mold, including Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan, and others, to try to run as the party of getting stuff done. But I think Pete Buttigieg’s tenure, more than anything, shows that there are major impediments for the Democratic Party as it actually exists in being able to actually make good on that and persuade voters that that’s what they’ll actually do if they’re given power.
Brian Anderson: Well, thank you very much, Mene. That’s a good overview. And one, I haven’t really seen anybody dig into that much. Is this something you’ve been covering with the Journal?
Mene Ukueberuwa: Yes. I think that it’s important to try to anticipate the way that the Democratic Party is going. Part of its shift has been constructive, I think, but they seem to be unaware of the impediments that have gotten in their way.
And so I’ve been covering these regulatory agencies. That’s one of the things that I do in my writing but wanted to also give an overview about how it represents some of the failures of their approach to politics as it’s played out over the past four years.
Brian Anderson: Well, that’s great. Well, thanks very much. Our guest has been Mene Ukueberuwa from the Wall Street Journal. He’s written a number of times for City Journal, as I had mentioned. We’ll link to his author page so you could look at some of those earlier pieces.
You can also find City Journal on Twitter @CityJournal and on Instagram @cityjournal_mi. And if you’ve enjoyed today’s podcast, please give us a nice rating on iTunes. Mene, always great to talk with you, and best of the season for you.
Mene Ukueberuwa: Thanks a lot, Brian.
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