Elaine Chao is the daughter of a shipping magnate. She was an administrator in the U.S. Maritime Administration in the mid 1980s. And when the calendar turned to the late part of the decade, she became chairwoman of the separate Federal Maritime Commission. Chao, who has had extensive government experience since, did not travel to her place as Donald Trump’s choice for Secretary of Transportation by land, but by sea.
However, as deputy secretary in the department during President George H.W. Bush’s administration, she served among Republican leadership that favored a robust ground infrastructure policy—an approach that seems to have returned a quarter-century later with the incoming Trump presidency. Bush pledged during his 1991 State of the Union address to send Congress “a blueprint for a new national highway system [and] a critical investment in our transportation infrastructure.” His team, led by department chief and Chao’s superior Sam Skinner, followed through with a request to boost investment in highways and bridges by 40 percent over a five-year period. Chao called the transportation blueprint “the first growth budget in seven years.”
By the end of the year, Congress and Bush had enacted the wonkily titled Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (Ice Tea), which prioritized key national roads to receive federal resources and tried to provide state and local governments so-called “flexibility” in their own transportation planning. Some right-leaning analysis criticized the plan as a classic Washington hog roast, incentivizing wasteful spending on pork-barrel projects. But the president was bullish on the future of infrastructure his legislation would shape.
“We pursued this law because it moves us closer to our three top domestic priorities: jobs, jobs, and jobs,” he said. “Our national transportation policy begins with a big dose of common sense. It acknowledges that you don’t get anywhere in a traffic jam, and a worker can’t do much for the economy or the family or for the community by sitting on a highway listening to the radio. A vital piece of equipment trapped on a truck trapped in traffic won’t do much good for the factory that needs it.” Bush added “you have to move to improve.”
The same could have been said then of Chao’s career. She left the Transportation Department in the latter half of 1991 to lead the Peace Corps at a time her ambition was reportedly to become U.S. Ambassador to China. One government source told the Journal of Commerce that Skinner, the Transportation Secretary, had “cut her out of the loop for the last two years,” regardless. “This is a positive development for her, very helpful for her future in the administration.
Maybe her exposure to the Bush-era GOP’s transportation policy was helpful to her future in a Trump administration, too. The same day Bush signed ISTEA, Newt Gingrich, who would later become House speaker, called infrastructure investment a “tradition” dating to the early federal government. “We have had a tradition that goes back to George Washington’s letters about getting the Corps of Engineers to fix the Great Falls, which didn’t work. But he had property above the Great Falls. I mean, there’s a long American tradition of infrastructure development as a way of increasing economic prosperity,” he said. “I think, frankly, the highway bill is undersold if you look at the job creation side of the construction jobs. We are in a situation where, to remain competitive as a continent-wide country, we have to continue to invest in our transportation structure.”
Trump wants such investment to be on the order of a trillion dollars. With a Republican House majority that has been galvanized the last several years by budgetary profligacy, the price tag is certain to be a point of contention—or maybe of four of them, if you count each of the commas in the cost. But Chao is married to the GOP majority leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell. If she’s asked to help craft and promote an historically expensive infrastructure policy, she’ll not only have someone to sell it to. She’ll have familiarity from being around a previous generation of Republican salesmen.
