Is Transportation Department Secretary Pete Buttigieg in trouble? Many signs point to yes, and it could be particularly telling how hard his partisans are working at changing the subject.
Critics will usually readily concede the former McKinsey consultant and former South Bend, Indiana, mayor is one of the brightest bulbs of President Joe Biden’s Cabinet. “He’s clearly one of the smarter people in the administration,” Baruch Feigenbaum, the director of transportation policy at the Reason Foundation, told the Washington Examiner.
And yet Buttigieg has found himself on the defensive over charges that he essentially went missing while the country began one of the worst supply chain bottlenecks in peacetime history as shipping containers turned to mountains and ships had to idle out at sea near two Southern California ports.
One issue is that Buttigieg, who with his husband, Chasten, recently adopted an infant son and daughter, essentially went missing from the job for two months. On Sept. 4, he tweeted an image of the two men holding the babies while sitting on what appeared to be a hospital bed, announcing that they were now not just a couple but a family.
In the middle of October, Politico reported, “PETE BUTTIGIEG has been MIA. While U.S. ports faced anchor-to-anchor traffic and Congress nearly melted down over the president’s infrastructure bill in recent weeks, the usually omnipresent Transportation Secretary was lying low.” And a Transportation Department mouthpiece conceded as much.
“For the first four weeks, he was mostly offline except for major agency decisions and matters that could not be delegated,” a department spokesperson said. While he had been “ramping up” some activities in mid-October, Buttigieg would “continue to take some time over the coming weeks to support his husband and take care of his new children,” the spokesperson said.
In a classic example of “Republicans pounce” framing, the Politico report then turned the issue to focus on the fact that political opponents had the temerity to point this out.
One of those critics was Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who, in a segment on Buttigieg’s absence in this crucial time, remarked, “Pete Buttigieg has been on leave from his job since August after adopting a child,” and included an
obvious joke about breastfeeding
.
Rather than address the issue of his absence at an important time, Buttigieg and his defenders have pounced on the pouncers. “Tucker Carlson’s crushing indifference to the realities of child-rearing is one of the more recent and extreme reminders of exactly why America needs paid paternity leave,” wrote Holly Thomas, an editor of Katie Couric Media for CNN. “Attacks on Pete Buttigieg for paternity leave are homophobic, misogynist, and bad for business,” read a headline on an NBC News Think op-ed. “I’m not going to apologize to Tucker Carlson or anyone else for taking care of my premature newborn twins,” Buttigieg said in an interview.
Joe Concha, a media and politics columnist for the Hill, refused to follow that line of thought and instead insisted, “Secretary Buttigieg should answer three simple questions: How many ports have you visited? How many port operators and trucking executives have you met with in person? Who served as acting director during your extended paternity leave? The answers to the first two questions are ‘None and none.’”
Concha wrote that his final question about who was in charge “has no good answer because it constitutes dereliction of duty to be absent in the middle of a crisis.”
Buttigieg’s handling of the supply chain bottleneck crisis also dredged up old criticisms that he got the appointment as secretary not because of his suitability for the job but as political payback for his clutch endorsement of Biden during last year’s Democratic presidential primaries.
For example, Tom Nichols, a professor at the Naval War College and author of the book The Death of Expertise, tweeted, “No one deserves a Cabinet post. You’re either qualified for the job, or you’re not. I like Mayor Pete just fine, but it’s not a pick that makes any sense.”
Monocle magazine, in the process of attempting to boost Buttigieg, admitted, “When Joe Biden nominated the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, to head the US Department of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg’s CV and the task ahead of him seemed almost comically mismatched. The department has a budget of tens of billions of dollars and a workforce of 55,000, the majority of whom are in the Federal Aviation Administration. Meanwhile, the executive of South Bend, the country’s 304th largest city, oversees a transport budget of about $10m, with a fleet of 47 buses and fewer than 100 full-time employees.”
To cut through as much political theater as possible, the Washington Examiner reached out to several transportation experts to ask how Buttigieg is doing in shaping and advancing an infrastructure bill and navigating the supply chain bottleneck. Those who responded did not give him high marks.
Reason’s Feigenbaum has “not been impressed with Buttigieg’s influence” in the Biden administration or Congress.
“During the campaign, he expressed an interest in mileage-based user fees and tolling,” Feigenbaum said. “While some modest reforms have been made in that area, this looks like a bill Biden created, not what Buttigieg would have wanted.”
He said he thinks Buttigieg has essentially ceded to Biden to sell the bill, which could be bad news for the legislation.
“The president has taken the lead as of late, and I’m not sure that Biden will be more effective at convincing Republicans to support the bill or progressives to approve it … given Biden’s falling poll numbers,” Feigenbaum said.
“Secretary Buttigieg sticks to the White House script,” said Ashley Nunes, the director of competition policy at the R Street Institute. “That’s both good and bad — good because it garners support from within the White House, support that can be used as a bargaining chip for Buttigieg’s future political ambitions, and bad because the infrastructure bill that’s likely to pass is a far cry from what the White House actually wanted.”
As for the supply chain problem, Feigenbaum said that “fixing the supply chain issues overnight is challenging” and almost outright impossible because “we still need to let the supply chain adjust to a post-COVID world.”
That said, Feigenbaum does think the Biden administration and the Transportation Department “could take some steps such as relaxing environmental and labor rules at U.S. ports, ordering more customs inspectors to speed up the unloading process, canceling tariffs [and] Buy American that mess up trade, relaxing the Jones Act to free up additional boats, and not opposing automation that could do some jobs currently handled by people.”
He said he isn’t sure if “the administration does not understand the problem or is too indebted to union and environmental groups to take some necessary steps.”
Nunes also doesn’t give Buttigieg particularly high marks on supply chain issues.
“It’s hard to say he has handled the supply chain issue because it is unclear what he has actually done beyond hosting ’roundtables,’” Nunes said. “His main claim was that supply chain issues were a byproduct of President Biden’s ‘success,’ a somewhat laughable claim. His handling of supply chain breakdowns were not helped by the secretary hiding (for reasons unknown) the fact that he had taken two months of paid family leave while Americans were bearing the brunt of supply chain breakdown effects.”
