Pete Buttigieg: Infrastructure accomplishments and challenges in the Biden administration

0:00:02.1 Celeste Watkins-Hayes: Well, welcome.

0:00:02.9 Pete Buttigieg: Thank you.

0:00:03.8 CW: To the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. We're so honored to have you here.

0:00:09.5 PB: Thanks. I'm honored to be here.

0:00:10.9 CW: Wonderful. So good afternoon everyone and welcome to everyone watching live stream for this event. I am Celeste Watkins-Hayes, the Joan and Sanford Weill Dean of the Ford School of Public Policy here at the University of Michigan. And today we are honored to welcome US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg. After your four years in the Biden administration, I understand this is your final trip as Secretary, so we thank you for choosing to share this special time with faculty and staff and students as we make sure everything is good with the mic. A note on today's format. So I'm just gonna give a quick introduction and then we're gonna jump right into conversation, 'cause there are a bunch of things I wanna ask you. And then the two of us, after we speak, we will turn it over to a Q&A that's moderated of audience questions, moderated by Molly Kleinman, who is the Managing Director of our Science, Technology and Public Policy Program and she's past chair of the Ann Arbor Transportation Commission. Thank you so much, Molly. And she will be joined by our Masters of Public Policy students, Vincent Pinte and Paulina Trujillo. So for questions in the room, please use the QR code on the orange cards around the room.

0:01:34.6 CW: And if you're watching online, the question link can be accessed on the event page or in the event description on YouTube or Facebook or LinkedIn. And then at the end of the discussion, we'll invite everybody into the Becky Blank Great hall for a reception. So Secretary Buttigieg is the 19th Secretary of Transportation. These past four years, he's led the department on five main policy goals, safety, jobs, equity, climate, and innovation. He's worked on development and the passage of President Biden's signature bipartisan infrastructure law, and then on its implementation. The Secretary has also worked on supply chain issues, highway safety, and distributing some $9.5 billion in funding for local transportation projects across the country. So we'll be talking about many of these topics and more this afternoon. Secretary Buttigieg previously served two terms as mayor of his hometown of South Bend, Indiana. He served for seven years as an officer in the US Navy Reserve, taking a leave of absence from the Mayor's office for a deployment to Afghanistan in 2014. As a fifth generation Hoosier, Secretary Buttigieg is a graduate of Harvard University in Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar and completed a degree in philosophy, politics and economics.

0:03:02.5 CW: He now lives with his husband, Chasten, and their two children, Gus and Penelope, and their dog here in Michigan, Traverse City to be exact.

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0:03:17.8 CW: So I also wanna mention and give a shout out to the Ford School's own Professor Robert Hampshire, who served as Principal, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Research and Technology and Chief Science Officer at the Department of Transportation with Secretary Buttigieg. We wanna say hello to Robert from his friends and colleagues here at the Ford School. So with that, let's give a warm welcome to Secretary Buttigieg, shall we?

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0:03:50.4 CW: So I wanna take you through a four-part conversation, if you will. I wanna talk about the landscape in the policy environment. I wanna talk about policy issues specifically. I wanna talk about the toolkit of how the work gets done, and then I wanna talk about the job. So I wanna start first with the policy landscape and the environment in which you've been operating. And you are still busy working until the very end of the Biden administration. And one of the things that I wanna ask you about first, is your policy communication skills, because I think that has been so much a part of your story and is so critical in the conversations we're gonna have in policy issues. You've been engaged with speaking to the public during your tenure. You've done numerous interviews, exit interviews in the media, speaking in front of all kinds of different audiences. Why has messaging been so important to you and what have you learned by leaning into that as a strategy of policy influence?

0:05:02.6 PB: Well, I think, first of all, thanks very much for having me. It's a real honor and I've really enjoyed getting to meet many of the students and faculty on the way in here. And I've really been looking forward to this discussion. To answer your question, I think a big part of how you earn your paycheck as a Cabinet Secretary is communication. I've got a little post it note on my desk that reminds me the three things that I think I'm supposed to be doing all day, which is to prioritize, to communicate and to motivate. And the prioritization, that's the sort of decision making part of the job. The motivation is a bit what I think of as kind of part of being the mayor of the DOT workforce, so to speak, and keeping a team of 55,000 people focused on the task at hand and energized for the work ahead. But so much of what you do in this job is to communicate. And I think it's especially important because so much of the work we do affects everyday Life. But only some of that effect is obvious. Some of it's very obvious. If I'm on a flight and the flight's delayed and the captain makes a point of telling everybody the reason it's delayed is because of air traffic control, which is our employees, put a hold on the flight, I feel like I want to sink a little bit into my seat because all the eyes turn toward me.

0:06:24.5 PB: And it's very obvious that there's a relationship between the work of our department and what's going on in the day to day. Other things we do, many of the most important things we do, are not things people think about every day. If we have and enforce a regulation to make sure that hazardous materials are kept safe while they are on a truck moving through your neighborhood, the less you need to think about that, the less you need to notice that any work had to go into making sure that you were safe, the better. Because you are then free to worry about whatever you should be thinking about that day instead of worrying about whether you're safe. I could say the same about labor standards, aviation safety, or any other range of activities that we do. The other thing, of course, is in any public process, in order to get anything done in a democracy, you have to communicate to the public, to the press, to Congress, and to your own boss. A lot of what I do is communicate, to the President what our priorities are and how we're advancing that agenda, especially when we are presented with difficult choices between different things that we care about.

0:07:40.5 PB: So what I try to do is make it make sense first to myself. Because if it doesn't make sense to me, I can't communicate it to anybody else. And a big part of my learning style, but even my management style, is to repeat back what has been said to me out loud in a way that invites any expert in the room to stop me if I've garbled something or I'm saying something that isn't true. And then to go out and tell the world so that I can make the case for what we're doing well. The last thing I'll say is that communication is also a two-way process. So it's not just me telecasting what we think we're doing and why we're right. It's a process where we find out what it's actually like to live in a neighborhood dealing with a lot of truck traffic, or to be a taxpayer who may or may not agree with our prioritization on how to fix roads and bridges and assess whether the people we think we're helping, agree that what we're doing is helpful. Because if they don't, it's very important to take that back and adjust course.

0:08:43.1 CW: So you are on a bit of an exit interview tour, if you will, in the sense that you've been talking to a lot of stakeholders and the press about what you see as some of the most significant accomplishments of the Department of Transportation in your time as Secretary. What is the main message you wanna offer in terms of setting the stage for what you have been and what the agency has been able to accomplish in the last four years?

0:09:12.3 PB: Well, the bottom line is that I believe we are leaving every form of US transportation better than we found it. And that doesn't mean our work is done. It doesn't mean any single piece of our transportation system is perfect or the way it someday ought to be. But it's much better than when we found it. And that didn't just happen on its own. Take the infrastructure package, which is funding, as of latest count, 72,000 projects around the United States, from the famous, locally famous up in Traverse City project to do the parkway and replace a very important road along the bay there, to a project like taking I-375 in Detroit and changing it from a gash that cuts the communities in two, the way it's dug in, to a surface level boulevard, and other projects of every type and every size. All of that's happening now, and I think it would be easy to imagine it was always going to happen. But it was only three and a half years ago that commentators were writing the political obituary of what is now the infrastructure package over and over again. It was considered impossible to advance something that ambitious, especially to do it on a bipartisan basis.

0:10:35.1 PB: But we got it done. And I think people need to hear that story, not just because I believe and continue to believe that it's important that there be credit given to all of the people who worked on that, but also as a reminder that we have to hold on to what was best about that process moving forward to get things done. The other thing that's very important to me is, as we reflect back on what's been done for the last four years, is the safety record of the department. There's always more to be done. But we arrived facing a crisis of safety, including a rapidly rising rate of roadway deaths in our country that frankly did not get enough attention. And we've now had 10 consecutive quarters of that number going down. It's got a long way to go, but again, that's not something that just happened. That's something that happened because of a lot of steps, a lot of cooperation, a lot of tough choices. And similarly with our aviation safety record, which I think many are tempted to take for granted, the fact that three and a half billion people got on board an airplane, a commercial airliner, just in the time our administration's been here. And of that three and a half billion, the number who have been involved in a fatal crash is zero. It didn't just happen. And we got to really assess what it took to make that possible and what it will take to keep that going.

0:12:01.5 CW: What were some of the biggest challenges that you faced? I mean, you know, we all are very aware of what's happening in the political environment. We watch and read the news. But I'm wondering about what I call the 10:00 PM challenges. The things that after fighting it out all day, you're still struggling with, you're still processing, you're still irritated about, you're still frustrated by. And those things that then maybe wake you up in the middle of the night or that they're the first things you're thinking about in the morning where you say to yourself, I didn't anticipate it would be like this. Talk to us about that.

0:12:42.7 PB: Well, the biggest 10:00 PM challenge that we experience is usually the re-litigation of bedtime. Because we've got toddlers, three and a half and 10:00 is about the time when, if I happen to be at home and not traveling, there's this little face kind of peers around the stairwell into the living room, usually our daughter, very aware of how cute she is, trying to strike up a conversation and test our determination to get her back to bed. But professionally, the biggest 10:00 PM challenge or 3:00 AM challenge as it sometimes is when my phone rings in the middle of the night, is that, of course, in a massive, complex transportation system, any given minute anything could go wrong. So the last thing I do before I go to bed is I take my phone and I turn the ringer on and I set it on the dresser so that I have enough time to wake up instead of just turning it off when and if it rings. And it could be something like the collapse of the bridge in Baltimore, which required immediate action, or any number of other things. In terms of things we didn't necessarily expect coming into this job.

0:14:02.1 PB: The biggest thing I would point to is the information environment. And one set of examples is, of what we're up against, emerged in the wake of Hurricane Helene, where we were batting back false reports of all varieties. From false claims that the government was not going to pay people disaster aid, which led to real people making real choices not to apply for aid they would have gotten, because they might have believed that false report. To reports that led to threats against personnel in the field working to help those disaster victims, to even mischaracterizations of what the FAA was doing to keep the skies safe in the disaster area. That information challenge has reached a level just in the last four years that we've been here that is, I think, unprecedented in the modern media age.

0:15:00.7 PB: And it is going to be a challenge not just for people trying to get elected or get their way in policy, although that's enough that we should all be worried about it. Because if your policy arguments are over things that are actually true, that's already enough to have ferocious arguments about. But at least you're arguing over things that are true. When anybody, some dude on the internet is received with as much credibility as somebody who has to hold themselves to the highest standards of journalistic ethics, fact checking and professionalism. That is a huge threat to the entire possibility of making policy in a democracy, but also has very real implications on the ground in the moment when you were trying to respond to something like a fire, a flood, or a hurricane.

0:15:45.5 CW: So how do we respond to that? How do we respond to that, both as citizens in our information literacy, but also as a policy school where our stock and trade is evidence and evidence-based policymaking. Where we teach our students how to use data to inform decisions. How do we think about when that is no longer the kind of coin of the realm, or it's not in so many different environments? How do we respond to that, both as citizens, but also as we think about the work that we do as policy educators?

0:16:20.4 PB: Well, that might be the challenge of our time. I mean, the first thing, of course, is to maintain that fidelity to the truth, and to data and to facts. And another thing I would welcome is challenging the policy world to be as transparent as possible with that data. Because when you put accurate information out into the world with things like open data policies, then it's more likely that people in their disagreements are pointing to a shared reality, a data set that everybody can access, and arguing over the implications of something that is in fact accurate instead of whether something's true or not, that you can have a better foundation for a healthy policy conversation. But I also think that part of the task of an institution like this is to really explore this question of how people get information. It's always been complicated and attenuated how we get good information, how we determine what's true and what's false. But at a moment like this, where media institutions, government institutions, and frankly, academic institutions too, are less trusted, what can we do to make sure that there are credible voices, not people who tell us everything that we have to believe what they have to say is gospel, but people who can be trusted to help us navigate what to pay the most attention to.

0:17:43.0 PB: That itself needs to be its own area of inquiry. As in many things, I believe part of our salvation comes from the local. Because one thing that I experienced as mayor, and one thing I experience now in my travels, is that it is harder to be misinformed about something that's happening in your own backyard. It's still possible. But there's just less by way of what they call alternative facts on an issue of whether there's a hole in the road in your neighborhood, because it's either there or it isn't. You know, as a local elected official, you're gonna be held accountable for that. And finding those mechanisms, those offline mechanisms that we use in our day to day lives to build a realistic picture of the world around us and finding a way to scale that out to our state and regional and national and even global dialogues and controversies is I think going to be one of the most important projects of our generation.

0:18:41.0 CW: Let me ask you about the state and local before we dive into some policy issues. It won't surprise you that here at the Ford School we have students who are interested in international policy and federal policy, but we have a number of students who are interested in state and local policy as well. And I wonder if you can talk about that level of policymaking. It's where you got your start. What are some of the tools that you learned from those experiences that did translate and what are those things that struggled to translate and talk to us about how that area of policymaking at those two levels are so important for us to be thinking about as well?

0:19:23.7 PB: Well, I think in my biased but also correct opinion, that there is no better preparation for anything in public service than being involved at the local level. And I would say that whether you're thinking of it as a policymaker or just as a citizen, partly because you can really get your arms around that immediate local reality that folks are dealing with. And questions over... A question of fact might be something you could settle by literally going and looking at the hole in the road or the neighborhood or whatever it is in ways that's tougher at the state and national level. The other thing I would say is the humanity of it. And one thing I would say, as I've found myself at higher and higher tables, is that anybody, no matter how famous or powerful they are, any level where you might think some inscrutable next level process goes on that in some elaborate way settles questions with total rationality and maturity, turns out to just be people doing stuff to the best of their ability. It is an exquisitely human enterprise, which means, among other things, that if somebody's in a bad mood or somebody doesn't like somebody else, or any other number of reasons that are not exactly rational, they still matter.

0:20:52.4 PB: So what you learn in local government is where things aren't so much predicted or dictated by party or ideological affiliation, for example, I can't tell you how many times there was some council member who was frustrating my biggest goal at that moment, who I was this close to just wanting to let them have it and burn a bridge, and three months later they'd be the swing vote that made it possible for me to get my budget through and making them feel heard, listening to them, even admitting sometimes when they were right and I was wrong, and being able to handle that, made it possible for us to work together in the push and pull of government. That happens in any political institution. And I don't just mean Big P political. It happens in how a university is run, it happens in how a company is run.

0:21:43.9 PB: But it's on display in a different way, I think, in how communities and school boards and counties do their business. I think you can learn a lot from that. And the other thing I would say is that there is more offline experience at the local level, kind of by definition. And so if we're trying to find ways to return to the human. I've talked about humanity in its idiosyncratic sense, that the humanity of these processes means they're not always reasonable. But there's also humanity in the best sense, which is that sometimes just a level of regard and respect for a fellow human being becomes more important than some power play or some ideological battle. And you can cultivate. You get a lot of practice in cultivating that, in dealing with community processes that are up close and personal in ways that at its best you can import to national or other levels. And I think that's really important at a time like this.

0:22:40.3 CW: Yeah, let's talk about some specific policy issues. I wanna pick up the thread of what you described as turning the ringer of your phone on at 10 o'clock when so many of us are turning those ringers off. And I wanna talk about crisis management, whether... And we're talking about crises, whether directly or indirectly related to the DOT portfolio. It's such a big part of the job. A bridge collapses, there's a freight train accident. We're now watching the devastating fires in Los Angeles. What are you, and what might the next Secretary of Transportation need to consider as we address these devastating incidents, some of which are directly and some are more indirectly related to your portfolio. Given that transportation and infrastructure are always key issues in the restructuring efforts. When you watch LA, for example, what are you thinking about?

0:23:36.0 PB: One thing I'm thinking about is there's gonna be more where this came from. So the first thing I think any of us can feel, especially as we see the images and stories out of LA, is just heartbreak for the people who are losing their homes, those who have lost their lives, people who have lost their whole neighborhoods. We have one friend who's moved into a neighborhood precisely because their whole extended family was within a block or two. And now their whole extended family doesn't have a place to stay. And the next thing you think about is we were warned that this kind of thing would happen more often and in a way that I first really became alive to when I was mayor, experiencing my second once in a thousand year flood. And I think a lot of local leaders could point to an experience like this. We have been warned that this sort of thing would happen and it's happening more and more. And we don't have to just sit back about that. First of all, obviously there's a lot to be done around preventing the worst climate outcomes from happening. But there's also a body of work to be done that acknowledges that it's on us right now.

0:24:44.7 PB: And for the first time we have a federal program specifically for resilience investments, knowing that there are gonna be more of these threats for communities. So for example, in Hawaii, there's a road that's getting swamped more and more by what they call king tides, 'cause the sea level is rising. Instead of paying every five years to have it fixed when it keeps getting washed out, we're elevating it to higher ground. In South Carolina, it means investing in a route that's going to be used for evacuations, hurricane evacuations. There are examples of this all around the country. We have to invest in that. It's a reality that's upon us. The other thing I would say about crisis management in, I'd say for any cabinet officials, certainly for our role, is that you need to think about at least three levels of involvement. The direct authorities you have, the indirect areas you might be able to help, and then your information role. So the direct authorities, those are the clearest things. So, for example, if a federal highway is damaged by a hurricane, we will get a request from the governor to release funding to make sure that it can be quickly repaired, and we've got it to where within hours of that request coming in, we can get it signed off.

0:25:56.6 PB: That in some ways, I don't wanna say it's the easiest, but it's the clearest part of the job, because there's an almost literal textbook answer to what you're supposed to do. Then comes the indirect part. This is where a body like the White House can be very important. Pulling everybody together so that if I'm sitting across from the Secretary of Energy and she's got an issue that doesn't sound like a transportation problem, but it involves access to rights of way to restore energy networks. And it turns out we have relationships in state departments of transportation that we can use to engage with utilities. And suddenly there's something we can make happening, not because anybody reports to us or because it's exactly in the book that that's what we should be doing, but just because we know who to call. That's a big area of how we can make a difference. And there was a lot of that kind of problem solving and troubleshooting that had to go on in a case like the Baltimore bridge collapse. 56 different agencies were involved in responding to that, clearing the harbor of the wreckage and helping to get the port back up and running and then getting the bridge back up.

0:27:01.3 PB: Many of the things we were doing were not in the protocol, but they needed to happen. And we figured out a way to really, with a lot of leadership from the White House, set the table to get that done. And then the third is the information challenge, which I've already mentioned but just to unpack a little bit, sometimes everything could seem to be going squared away by the book all set on the textbook response. But we're in an information world where real things are happening that need attention, that you can do something about, that are not contemplated by our legal authorities.

0:27:35.7 PB: This was one of the biggest of the lessons of East Palestine, Ohio, where a train derailment and the subsequent fire led to a toxic cloud terrorizing a community. And that community was really harmed twice in a row, first by the actual incident and then by a barrage of a combination of information and misinformation that had people fearing that the values of their homes were destroyed, had people uncertain whether they could believe medical authorities telling them when and where it was safe to breathe the air or drink the water or be on the soil. And what we found was, while our textbook response was there, for example, the Department of Transportation had people on the ground in a matter of hours. We were not equipped to deal with that second wave, which really hurt people in that community the most. About a week after the incident, that was when the online information swirl started to become extreme.

0:28:32.2 CW: And it's almost a second crisis.

0:28:34.2 PB: It was very much, especially for the people who were impacted by it on the ground. And again, there's no legal statutory authority that said what to do. But it was very clear that part of what someone like me had to do was to literally be there. And in addition to laying out the policies that we thought needed to change about railroad safety, create a framework for better information to be available to people. And those were lessons that we applied in the case of hurricanes Helene and Milton, when that misinformation afterlife started to kick in while people were still dealing with the physical consequences of the storm.

0:29:10.1 CW: Talk about, as you mentioned, climate. If you could talk about that intersection and that conversation between climate sustainability and infrastructure and transportation, the way that you're describing it suggests that there can be a win-win there and that you can advance excellent policy and developmental policy on transportation and infrastructure and do it in a way that is attentive to sustainability. But not everybody sees it that way. How do you grapple with that tension where the drive for development and advancement and commerce and economic development sometimes is put in opposition to climate and sustainability concerns. How do you navigate that?

0:29:56.9 PB: Well, I think we have to be honest that there often are trade offs, and we've got to decide whether to do something in a way that is unconstrained but has terrible environmental consequences, or to try to do everything just right from an environmental perspective, but overlook real basic economic realities. Striking that balance is a classic tension in policy. But it is also the case that there are some real win wins to be had right now. And this is something I take very personally when it comes to the future of the auto industry. And I think all of us should here in the industrial Midwest. I'm the child of a community that was still recovering from the loss of an auto company that went under 20 years before I was even born. And 30 years after that, we were still dealing with it when I became mayor of South Bend. So I saw firsthand what happens when a community loses its manufacturing powerhouse and part of why the Studebaker Car Company stopped making cars in 1963 was that they couldn't innovate, they couldn't quite keep up with the times. And I see now both an enormous risk and an enormous opportunity as we see things happening in the auto industry, first with electrification and then a little bit, but not that far down the road with automation where we can either be on top of that and win or miss it and fall behind.

0:31:24.2 PB: We see that in a ferocious competition with China, where China is investing very heavily in electric vehicle technology and industry. And I don't believe they're doing it because the Chinese Communist Party is more committed to environmental protection than the American people. I think they're doing it because they understand the economic security implications of trying to win that battle. So what are we gonna do? Our policy has been to make sure that that is a made in America EV revolution, to make sure that it's more affordable for Americans to purchase so that we kick start that market and to make sure that there are more places to charge these cars as you go. Getting that right, I think brings enormous economic opportunity. I've seen it for myself. St. Joseph county in Northern Indiana, there is a facility going in that represents 400% larger investment than the biggest manufacturing investment that happened in my lifetime before. And it's EV facility for GM. Just the process of building it, is putting about 500 union electrical workers to work, just to put the thing up, let alone when it's up and running. So we see the win wins that we could have. But we got to be intentional about making sure that we actually prosper and thrive in doing that. Because again, our competitors aren't doing that by just sitting back and letting the market do its thing on its own. Our competitors are doing that by investing. What are we gonna do?

0:32:55.4 CW: Right, let's talk about supply chain. So we saw the vulnerability of the US supply chain during the height of the COVID 19 pandemic. And the department has announced that long term container delays have been cut in half during your tenure. What else has been done on the front of the supply chain? And do you feel like we are better prepared for things like pandemics? How did you think about this supply chain question?

0:33:24.1 PB: So we're better prepared, but there's more work to do. The first thing we got to do is the physical condition of our supply chains, the condition of our ports, the condition of our roads and highways. If a bridge is in bad enough shape that it has to have its load Limited. That means that a truck can't go across that bridge and it has to go some other route, which almost by definition is going to be less efficient, more costly, and more polluting. So part of how we've been able to contribute to the reduction in inflation as it came off of its peak of about 9% and back into the neighborhood of 2 or 3% is to deal with some of those blockages or irregularities in our supply chains. But of course, when we were presented in the summer of 2021 with a bunch of critical challenges that raised the question of whether people were gonna get their Christmas presents, you couldn't wait the amount of time it takes to fix a bridge or a highway to act. So that was where the short term problem solving came in. Again, that difference between what the book says is your job and what you can just kind of put together, on a handshake with no particular authority and no budget, we created a structure for players in the supply chains.

0:34:32.4 PB: The companies think like a Target or a Home Depot, the port owners, the shippers, railroads, a whole bunch of different parties to come together and start sharing information that they were in the habit of keeping from each other for what they thought were important business reasons. But which it really turned out they could share without any disadvantage to their business if there was a neutral third party like us helping to referee all of that. Through that, we created a program called FLOW, which now does have authority and it does have a budget, but we created it on a handshake. And it was one of many things we did over that summer and fall of 2021. So by the end of that year, that same year, when we saw those breathless headlines saying Christmas is gonna be canceled this year, we actually saw the most goods move through ports in the US in our history, that same year. So we know that this kind of problem solving can work. We had pop up container yards dealing with the fact that the containers were filling up in the ports and it was a blockage. So we worked with different players to create other inland container yards to store them, all while it was flowing through the system.

0:35:33.7 PB: There are ways to deal with these things. And if there's one silver lining on this horrible set of supply chain problems we faced, especially in the lurching back into activity of our economy post Covid, it was that people think about supply chains now, not just people around here who do this stuff, 'cause we're transportation nerds and we just care about this stuff, but just people every day understand that supply chains matter in a way I don't think they necessarily thought about as much five years ago. And I hope we harness that as a reason to prioritize this work, whether it's the nimble problem solving in the moment or the big picture policy work that has to happen in order to have stronger supply chains for the future. We still have some big problems and I'll just name a couple.

0:36:16.0 PB: One, the threats to our supply chains that come from extreme weather and climate change, like a part of I-70 shutting down. And if you're going through the mountains of Colorado, you don't have anywhere else, you don't have a lot of good alternatives to I-70. And if a fire burns all of the vegetation on a hillside and then it's immediately flooded, followed by a flood, that will be followed by a mudslide, which is what shut down I-70 and truck traffic for several days. So we know that that's a threat to our supply chains. We know that there is still a backlog in terms of the highways, bridges, ports and other facilities that need to get done. And we also know that we have to have an economic strategy that while of course we will always trade with the rest of the world, allows us to be less vulnerable to having a single supply chain, sometimes a single country or even a single company producing really essential goods that we need and can't do without.

0:37:18.0 CW: So you were thinking a lot about movement of goods and I wanna ask you about movement of people and particularly as it affects so much of our day to day lives. Each year more than 40,000 road deaths occur in the United States. And you've worked on road safety and announced a 10th straight quarter reduction in road deaths. So I wonder if you can talk about what was behind that change and what's needed to continue to bring road deaths down. And then I wonder if you can talk about aviation, another area that affects our everyday lives as we traverse airports. And you've definitely had moments where all eyes were on the aviation world with cancellations and delays, et cetera. How have you thought about and what are the challenges ahead of that kind of day to day experience of travel individuals?

0:38:09.2 PB: Let me start explaining how we view road deaths by talking about aviation. So think about this. A year ago, almost exactly a year ago, a door plug blew out of an Alaska Airlines flight. And the aftermath of that prompted America to really rethink a lot of the basics of how we regulate aviation safety because someone could have gotten hurt. And it led to the FAA taking a number of steps in its oversight of Boeing to change the quality practices of Boeing to make sure nothing like that could happen again. And that's one of many reasons why, as I mentioned earlier, the aviation safety record of the last few years has been that you were literally, not to be flip about it, but you and I are literally more likely to randomly come to harm during this interview than to be involved in a fatal airline crash. That's the safety standard, okay? Meanwhile, 40,000 road deaths means that since we sat down for this conversation, several people died on America's roadways. But it also means that every 1%, 1%, we take off of the roadway fatalities in this country, by the simple napkin math, right, that's 400 people.

0:39:30.5 PB: That's several fully loaded aircraft worth of people who didn't die for every 1% that we improved our track record as a country in the last couple of years, and we've done a lot better than 1%. Now, what we have to do is we have to mentally, as a country, get on the road to zero. And zero sounds silly to a lot of people, but it's the only acceptable rate of roadway deaths, just as we've already decided as a country, it's the only acceptable rate of fatal aviation crashes. So what does it take to do it? First of all, acknowledge it's actually happened. Obviously not nationally, but every year we recognize cities, including meaningfully sized cities, of tens of thousands of people who have hit zero for at least one year. We wanna find out what they're doing right and how we can help make more of them. We're investing in better design, we're investing in better technology. And that is part of what's helping to drive that downward trend so that we can get closer to zero. So that's always gonna be the most important thing our department does. But when we talk about protecting people, it's not just...

0:40:33.3 PB: It's not just that. It's also protecting people economically. That's where the consumer protection agenda comes in. What we found is that we have an aviation sector that is increasingly concentrated, contrary to the predictions that were made 40 or 50 years ago when we entered this current deregulated area, when people thought and said and wrote that we'd have about 100 airlines by now, and instead we're down to basically a big four and then a few other competitive airlines. And the fewer competitors you have, the more it matters to have a good watchdog in government. What I found was that we had not used our tools as a watchdog nearly enough, and we set out to change that. One of the aha moments that'll be of interest to folks who study the details of policy is this question, anytime you're enforcing a regulation of how tough are you in your penalties to change behavior? And we had a meeting early on where the team said, great news, we have fined this airline. They held out, I think it was something like $200 million of refunds they owed people. But we spent the last year negotiating a settlement with them, and we're gonna fine them $2 million.

0:41:44.3 PB: I thought to myself, okay, but $2 million is 1% of $200 million, which means at current interest rates, if all you have to pay for holding back people's refund money for a year is 1%, that's actually a net gain to you. So what happens if we add a zero? And the team, who are brilliant people, they'd never been empowered to do that. I said, well, we might get sued. I said, okay, let's see what happens. And to date, even when we add $135 million action, we found that airlines understand that they're responsible for that level of penalty and that we would have the upper hand in a legal confrontation. So we've been willing to do that in order to change behavior. The other area that's been really important for us in consumer protection, and this is coming from the economic back toward the physical, is disability policy. So the experience of wheelchair users in our aviation system has been shocking.

0:42:55.9 PB: A lot of people just don't fly wheelchair users, period. Which means not only that they miss out, of course, on all of the opportunity and benefit and potential that comes with having access to civil aviation, but also everybody else misses out at whatever meeting or wedding or event they would have gone to if they could fly. And so we've introduced both through enforcement, what the penalty levels are, which we've stepped up, and through rulemaking regulation that has elevated the importance of this, saying there is a right to safe and dignified travel for wheelchair users. We think it's really changing what it will be like to navigate the system for wheelchair users. And that can be viewed as a specialty concern because, again, whole communities are better off when more people are able to access the aviation system. Plus, anyone who is not today part of the disability community may well age into it and personally benefit from that policy.

0:43:48.8 CW: So it's been clear that you've been really busy, and what I wonder about is the durability of your work and how you think about that. There will be a new administration, how do you think about the transition? What do you plan to say? Or do you plan to say anything to try to make a case for the durability of some of the work that you've done and some of the work that the agency has done?

0:44:20.1 PB: Yes, I do.

0:44:21.5 CW: What's your pitch?

0:44:23.4 PB: Because first of all, judging by how the last couple of years went when we were in charge, but a lot of people who tried to stop us from getting the infrastructure bill done were still in a big hurry to celebrate the announcement of the projects we were funding. I think it's very important, if only for the benefit of future processes, where these things come up for debate again, to remind everybody who's actually there to help us get these things done and who wasn't. So I think that's important. I think it's important to talk about how the benefits of these policies are not just one administration's project or one President's priorities or one Secretary's ideas, but something that make us concretely better off.

0:45:11.7 PB: And that's true, whether it's just getting our roads and bridges and airports into better shape or aviation passenger protections or any of a number of other things we've done. I would like to believe that our policies ought to be among the less partisan areas of domestic policy. I know not everybody sees it that way. Some of what we did that I didn't think ought to be that controversial, turned out to be very controversial, but we stuck to it because it was the right thing to do. So I will only have this role for another six days or so, but I will be out there talking about why this mattered. I don't know exactly what hat I'll be wearing when I do it, but I think it's important, and I think it's important to talk about as a national interest, not a partisan priority.

0:45:50.5 CW: Do you think it's equally important to talk about not just the policies and the things that got done, but who did them? The "bureaucrats", the government workers, the people who have built careers at DOT or who have spent a portion of their careers serving the government. Do you think it's becoming increasingly important to tell that story as well so that it can't be abstracted into a concept that can be criticized and poked apart?

0:46:24.4 PB: Yeah, I think it's hugely important. Many of you may have seen Michael Lewis' book The Fifth Risk. If not, I would recommend it to you as a really very readable as well as very well researched account of exactly this. And he's involved in a project that has built on that, as is the Partnership for Public Service, which is an organization I would encourage folks here to become familiar with too, to celebrate just these people. Every year we do an event called the Secretary's Awards. And it's the biggest moment we have as a department to recognize the teams that have done different work around our agency. Even people from around the country might come into Washington to be recognized. And I get to present these awards, sometimes these really large physical awards and sometimes a certificate to people who've done incredible things. And it's a reminder of the range of life saving activity that goes on that these public servants, "bureaucrats" do every day with very little recognition and very little hope of a compensation that approaches what they would make in the private sector.

0:47:33.0 PB: We're talking about some people who are responsible for multi billion dollar programs who make less money than most of the people who will work on the programs that they've created in the private sector. But they do it because they know the difference that it makes. And there is a unique role. I think a lot of people involved in a place like the Ford School wouldn't be here if you weren't alive to the uniquely rewarding nature of doing that kind of work. But we also really depend on these career civil servants to be motivated and respected because they are doing the vast majority of the work. In our agency of 55,000 people, 100 of us are political appointees who will leave on January 20th and be replaced. The rest are career civil servants who are there as presidents and secretaries come and go. And their work is extraordinary.

0:48:28.5 CW: So let's transition to the last piece of my questions, which is the toolkit and how the work gets done in the job. And then we're going to turn it over to our questions from the audience. So a lens of equity has been a big part of the work that you've been doing, whether through jobs, thinking about livable communities. You've also talked about... It's been interesting to listen to you talk about the historical impact of transportation and infrastructure projects, highways that tore through neighborhoods, things that had negative impacts in certain areas. As you think about the work ahead, and the work that you did, how did you weave those conversations into the work that you did? How did you engage an equity lens in the work of transportation and infrastructure? And how did you get the buy-in?

0:49:21.6 PB: Well, the buy-in seems to be a work in progress if we're talking about the public conversation. But what I came to realize was that every decision we make has a lot of implications for equity, whether we admit it or not. What's really frightening is the idea of people making huge decisions about equity while pretending that that they're not. Because everything we do with transportation can either connect or can divide. One simple illustration of this is the fact that in our American dialect of the English language, we have the expression wrong side of the tracks. What does that mean? It means, among other things, that a piece of infrastructure such as a railroad track can be a dividing line. And that if you're on one side versus the other, you're worse off because you're on that side. And that's something that we've seen not just in a certain decade and not just in a certain region. This didn't just happen in the South. Everywhere I go, I was in Pittsburgh on Friday, there it's the Hill District. If you're in Minneapolis, St. Paul, Rondo is the neighborhood that experiences this the most dramatically, in Philadelphia Chinatown. And as I mentioned earlier, one of the examples in Detroit is what used to be thriving black neighborhoods of Paradise Valley and Black Bottom that were eviscerated by the construction of 375.

0:50:46.6 PB: And so the next question is, how do we make sure we understand this is a live concern. This is not some distant historical concern. Because if you live in that area today, you are affected by that policy choice. And if you drive on 375, which most of us have, you are affected by that choice. Now, I'm not saying that to make you feel guilty for driving on 375. It's there. It's how you're gonna go. By the way, you might be both. Right? But of course, the most important question is what do we do next? What do we do now? Especially if federal dollars were involved in causing things to be the way they are, what do we do with our federal dollars now to make sure we do better next time? That's exactly what we're doing. Whether it's 375, where we're gonna take it to a boulevard, whether it's the Kensington Expressway in New York in Buffalo or in Philadelphia Chinatown, we're actually stitching it back together and creating one of the things you almost never get to create, which is brand new land in the middle of a city 'cause you can build on top of it, right? Or have a green space, which is often what we're doing.

0:51:48.4 PB: So there's opportunity to make people. You all, it's a policy school, you all hear about Pareto optimality, the fact that you reach a point where you cannot make somebody better off without making somebody else worse off. There's a lot of those choices that's what economics is. But there's also a lot of opportunities where you can, in fact, make no one worse off and make a whole lot of people substantially better off. And many of those are at stake in these conversations about equity. Likewise, on the business side, where there is so much economic opportunity, but it has not always been available to everybody. And at a moment now where a union equipment operator can be making six figures, we have huge ladders in the middle class. How can we make sure that that's available to people? Especially if you happen to be in the neighborhood where a project is being done and you see it happening around you and you're asking yourself, can I work on this? What are we doing to make sure it's possible? We've taken a number of steps to do just that, to identify the barriers and to try to tear them down.

0:52:45.6 PB: I'll point again to Pittsburgh because something I saw on Friday is at the construction site of a billion dollar terminal project where there had been a lot of feedback that many workers, including workers of color and women, would have wanted to work on that project but weren't able to get that job because they couldn't figure out childcare. They put in a childcare site on the job. There's a childcare center at the work site, which means that we both unlocked more talent at a time we really need talent, people to be available to do the work so we can get the projects done. And we're including people who had been excluded otherwise. We see this happening all over the country. And while I know that the word equity may fall out of fashion in the executive branch in Washington in seven days, the value of that work isn't gonna change. People can call it whatever they want to. I usually call it fairness, but it's the right thing to do.

0:53:44.8 CW: Also in your toolbox, your ability to work across the aisle. And I wonder if you can talk about the role of bipartisanship and shaping the policy work that you've been able to do. But I also wonder if you can talk about conversations across differences and how looping back you've used that in your strategy of communicating with the public. You're known to go on Fox News quite often and other media outlets that are not commonly associated with, are known to be bastions of the Democratic Party that you're a part of. So I wonder if you can talk about why is that important to you? What have you learned from it? What do you see is the value of it? And why do you think it's so hard for us to talk across differences as a society right now?

0:54:46.5 PB: Well, in many ways, that set of questions is the question that I think we're all contending with. And the simple answer to why it matters is 'cause we're in a democracy, however imperfect our democracy is. If you are in a democratic society, then people have to take each other seriously. And so my rule number one for all of this in terms of my own practice, is take other people seriously. Whether it's a media voice, a voter, or a citizen or a lawmaker, take them seriously. The other thing I think is really important is a presumption of good faith. I'll follow this up in a minute. In places where presumption of good faith might not be appropriate, but I think you need to maintain a presumption of good faith, at least at the outset, to assume that anybody who's challenging you is challenging you in good faith. In other words, they're challenging you because this thing that you're sure you're doing for the right reasons and is gonna be helpful to them, they think isn't for a reason that is as convincing to them as your reasons are to you. By the way, this is one more reason why I think local government is maybe the healthiest level of government.

0:55:56.0 PB: Because you can usually feel how sincere those clashes of good faith differences over what to do are, sometimes all too sincere. And it becomes really tough to navigate those things, especially for local elected officials. But you know that there's something real about it. And if you see that, it helps reinforce the former thing of taking each other seriously. Because if you're in that kind of clash, then only one of a small number of things is true. Either you're right and you need to find a way to convince the other person, or you're wrong and you need to be open to what the other person has to say, or it's more complicated than that. And then you need to negotiate with the other person about how what they care about and what you care about can come into some kind of balance. And that sounds very idealistic and kind of maybe theoretical in terms of our civics, but that really is how these things play out, directly or indirectly a lot of the time. The other thing I would say is, I think even in places where I'm under no illusion about the good faith that I'm encountering, I still think a presumption of good faith is helpful.

0:57:06.0 PB: And I'll give you a couple of examples of that. One, I go on certain television networks where I don't have a Huge level of confidence in the editorial good faith of the folks who are having me on. But if I enter that interaction in a spirit of good faith, it speaks to the fact that even if I'm not sure that the network is having me on in good faith, the person watching it is tuning in in good faith. And I'm not actually there to talk to the network. I'm there to talk to the viewer. Right. That's why I'm there. And so I think it's really important to hold in mind so that you're not dismissive of the viewer, that in order to reach them, you're presuming that. The other thing I would say in an environment where there is even less of a confidence, of a presumption of good faith, which is, for example, certain congressional testimonies I found myself in, where certain members I don't think are exactly there for a sincere dialogue about policy, that there's still something about going through the motions of speaking as if we were in a sincere good faith dialogue about policy. That's the only appropriate way to handle that situation. And that hopefully people watching at home can clock and use to gauge who they should take seriously.

0:58:24.5 CW: Part of the job you are going to miss the most?

0:58:31.5 PB: I'll have a smarter answer for this in about a week or two. What I know for sure, is the people. I get to go to work every day with some of the most sincere, committed, smart people you'll ever meet. And it's fun. I have had fun being briefed on the funding patterns for the allocation of emergency relief dollars in preparation for congressional testimony. And even I am not so nerdy that I would have thought I would have enjoyed that. But what was fun about it, other than that I was learning, was that I was in a room with experts practicing their craft, talking about what we'd learned over the years about how to do this incredibly arcane, technical thing the government has to do so that if your home gets destroyed in North Carolina, we're there to help get a road back out to you. And that part is really inspiring. People put so much into public service, and I think they get a lot out of it, not always financially, but get a lot out of it. And that chemistry that happens with a team, both the team that have had a hand in building, but also, as I mentioned, the vast majority of people who are my colleagues at the US DOT are people who were there when I got here and they'll be there when I leave. But they're there because they care about this stuff, and it's really inspiring and reassuring to see. So that, I think, is what, I know is what I'll miss the most.

1:00:04.3 CW: And you know where I'm headed. Part of the job that you liked least, or I'll phrase it this way, the part of the job that you won't miss quite as much.

1:00:18.4 PB: Huh. Well, it's the negativity, right? There's just a lot of negativity. And sometimes it's wrapped in dishonesty, sometimes it's not. But it's what most... Sadly, it's what most people see when they see Washington. It's what most people think of when they think of politics. It's why so many people check out, do not check out right now. I get the temptation, especially right now, to check out. I feel it, I share it. I'm on the news and I don't even watch the news that much right now because we're all so exhausted. And when you do, you regret it. The other day, I was like, you know, I'm gonna... I was at a ceremony for President Carter. I clicked on the news. I was like, let me see if they're covering this 'cause it was so inspiring today. And it's a debate over whether we're gonna buy Greenland. And I just... Where's ESPN, the Lions are doing well. It'll feel better to just watch that. And so I get it. But in a democratic society, we can't do that. We can take a little break every now and then. I think we all need a little break sometimes from the news, but we can't check out because then the negativity dominates and we can't let that happen.

1:01:39.2 CW: I'm gonna turn it over to audience questions, but before I do, I just wanna thank you so much because so much of what you talked about resonates with the work that we are doing at the Ford School. Your deep commitment to evidence-based policy, your commitment to policy leadership, and your commitment to policy communication, even with people with whom you might not agree. And those are values that are so important to us at the Ford School. And you've given us so much to think about, both in terms of the policy developments that you've been able to oversee, but the way in which you carried out the work, it's been really instructive to hear. So we're gonna continue the conversation and I'm gonna turn it over to audience questions.

1:02:28.9 Vincent Pinte: All right, Sounds good. Good afternoon, Secretary Buttigieg. Thank you for talking with us. I wanted to start us off with responding to some of your comments about the FAA regulations for folks with disabilities. I was really touched to hear them. And I'll say, I went to a wedding this past November and thankfully because of those regulations I was able to go a lot easier. So thank you. But I wanted to ask there still are challenges that many in our community face. I still can't take my wheelchair in any of the major four airliners and still in many cities across the US Rideshare companies do not offer wheelchair accessible options. So I just was curious, what can DOT do and what can advocates do to help enact those changes so that we could participate in our society?

1:03:13.3 PB: Thanks for the question. And first of all, the role and voice of advocates has been absolutely central to this work happening because of course many or most of the people involved in this policy don't have the personal experience of dealing with it. And only those who do can really make that clear. And so hopefully you have seen and felt that much of the rulemaking we've done is shaped the way it is because of the dialogue we've had with advocates and people who are affected by how airlines treat wheelchair users and the wheelchairs themselves. Things I just never would have understood, like the importance of being able... If there is a case of damage, in addition to the airline being accountable for it, the idea that you, the passenger, get to choose the vendor instead of the airline can have a huge impact on how long it takes to get a chair restored, which of course affects not just your trip, but all the way until it does.

1:04:13.3 PB: So we've clearly been able to make real strides in terms of that rule, which I was proud to finalize just a few weeks ago, another rule which has to do with the physical accessibility of airplanes, making the bathrooms more accessible not just on the wide bodies, but on single aisle aircraft. But as your question anticipates, the real holy grail here is to be able to take your own chair onto an aircraft. These are not interchangeable. People's chairs are often very expensive made to suit their needs. And you can do it at a concert. You can increasingly do it on a train or a bus. You can't do it on a plane. I am actually pretty confident that the goodwill is there in the policy world. I think the goodwill can be there on the airline's part if the policy world requires it. But what most needs to happen is the technical process, of course, of making sure that everything is safe. Just to give you another illustration of how high the safety standard is on an airplane.

1:05:13.4 PB: Recently, I noticed there's a certain... I fly so much that I actually have gotten to, like, I kind of know on an A321 versus A377 what the shape of the little thingy that holds the tray table in place is. And that's important because sometimes the little doohickey, this is a technical FAA term, has a little kind of a thumb on it that you can use to hang your jacket on, on other aircraft it's on the side. If you're in an exit row, it's not there. That little piece of plastic to hang your jacket on is not present in an exit row, because the FAA believes that if you did hang a jacket there and there was an emergency, that would affect the pace of the evacuation. That's the level of detail that we're at in terms of needing to make sure everything is technically the way it needs to be. So you can imagine the complexity of making sure that it is safe to have wheelchairs on board. But we've already gone several steps into this process, and I have not seen any concern raised that I think is insurmountable. Which means I believe we will see this. Not overnight, but we will see this. But the push, the pressure is gonna have to continue, and it'll be a great day when we're able to mark that that has become possible in air travel. So keep pushing is the best advice I can give to anybody who cares about this.

1:06:34.8 VP: Thank you.

1:06:37.6 PB: Thanks.

1:06:37.7 Paulina Trujillo: Okay, so for the next question. Hello, Secretary. My name is Paulina Trujillo. All my peers are very excited to hear from you today. So thank you so much for being here. So the question that was raised, how do you ensure that today's infrastructure investments not only address urgent needs, but also anticipate the challenges of the next 50 years as you touched on climate resilience and also technological shifts and changing demographics and so on?

1:06:58.3 PB: Yeah, yeah. One of the challenges of the policies I'm involved with is that we have to live with whatever we came up with for 50 years or 100 years. It's part of what's at stake in those equity conversations we were talking about. It is daunting because, of course, we don't totally know, we can't. We have really good process. Some of you will be part of it for forecasting and assessing what the needs are gonna be. But in South Bend, Indiana, one thing that we're funding right now is a planning process to deal with this on ramp. Back when I was mayor, I called it the on ramp to nowhere, 'cause it's this highway style interchange that accommodates an amount of traffic that could probably be handled by a stop sign or at least a stoplight. And in the process, that interchange chews up some of the best land in the city. Now, the reason it's there is it was designed at a time when tens of thousands of factory workers all left downtown South Bend at the same time. And it was completed tragically a few years after those factories shut down. So you're never gonna totally know, which means one thing you got to do is try to be as flexible as you can in the policies you come up with.

1:08:04.4 PB: One reason you're seeing in transit, a move toward bus rapid transit, is that it is more nimble and flexible than a heavy rail network to adapt it. If living patterns change or economic patterns change. Think about how much has changed just because of COVID and the restoration of post Covid patterns. We also have to have humility that this is not about predicting which technologies will matter most, because we don't always know. For example, the most consequential transportation technology of the last decade turned out to be the smartphone. It's not even part of a vehicle, and yet it's changed everything from how you board a plane to how you get to your destination.

1:08:46.0 PB: So we don't totally know what some of those developments will be, but we know what some of them will be. Electrification automation being the clearest ones that are in front of us. So what we have to do is we have to develop policies that will allow us to harness those changes, that will be flexible enough to adapt to things we didn't see coming and to try to take into account as much as we can upfront. And by the way, your colleague Dr. Hampshire, who I'm thankful that you all shared with us because he's a great colleague leading a lot of our research efforts at the US DOT is involved in that process and we're funding, including with UTC right here at U of Michigan, helping to assess some of these things. We have to have some humility about being able to really gauge what's about to happen. But that's all the more reason to be flexible and forward leading in our processes of building things.

1:09:36.2 VP: My next question is sort of, it's about the urban rural divide and how do you think that federal transportation policy can help bridge the divide between rural and urban communities and support addressing inequity and poverty in both areas?

1:09:54.2 PB: Well, certainly it's part of what's at stake when we talk about equity. Recently, earlier in my tenure, I had a senator from a conservative rural and predominantly white state say to me, well, you know, our state is very rural and mostly white, so equity, your equity agenda doesn't do us any good. I said, wait a minute. Equity is about fairness. And a big part of fairness is being fair to rural communities that have so much at stake and have been left out of a lot of transportation policy. And it shows, among other things, it shows in worse rates of traffic fatalities in rural communities. We also see worse rates of traffic fatalities in communities of color and low income communities and tribal communities. So all of that is of a piece. It's why we have invested... One of the many things I love about President Biden's infrastructure package is a dedicated program just for rural surface transportation. But also in the broader programs that are eligible, have eligible projects coming from cities, we have eligible projects coming from rural areas too. We gotta make sure everybody benefits. And of course we can very literally connect rural and urban areas. We gotta do it with sensitivity toward how the needs are so different though.

1:11:05.5 PB: And there's rural, like I think I know rural 'cause I live in a more rural part of Grand Traverse County. And then there's rural like a community in Alaska that you cannot even get to to by road, period. So there are different levels of remoteness, there are different needs, and we have to have a policy structure that's not one size fits all that can meet these communities where they are. When we get it right, we know we'll be getting it right when living in a community that is more rural or more remote is not itself measurably disadvantaging people in access to opportunity, whether it means a chance to come to a city and thrive there, or the chance to stay right where they come from and thrive there. And by the way, again, technology could play a huge role here. Just to take one example, while we were all, I think, rightly concerned about some of the unintended consequences that might come with the more widespread uses of drones, one thing that could be a huge benefit is in areas where it's just not feasible to be build a road. Having drone deliveries of necessary goods could really be a game changer.

1:12:17.5 PT: I'm sure it comes at no surprise. There's a lot of questions about trains and high speed rails. So we try to pick one to convince you...

1:12:23.2 PB: So I know I'm among my people, everybody's got trains on their minds.

1:12:27.1 PT: So I wanted to ask, what do you think it would take for Americans to dream big and really make long term investments in high speed rail or better ensure state public transportation?

1:12:35.7 PB: I'll tell you exactly what I think it'll take. It takes seeing it here. I was talking to a student who spent some time in Korea on a Fulbright. Are you still... Right. You're talking about how you came back, right? And you came back like so many do, thinking, why can't we have nice things? Right? The G7 meeting in Japan a couple of years ago, there was a transportation meeting. We took the train down from Tokyo through to go to a community called Ise Shima. I mean, riding on a Shinkansen train is an impressive experience. Riding in the front, which is one of those little things I'll miss about being Secretary, is being invited to things up front. That I can only describe as a spiritual experience. You just watch it. And by the way, that technology they launched it, they've made improvements to it, but they launched it in the '60s. And then you come home and you're... And I love US train travel, but I have literally been on an intercity train in the US that was 10 hours late. And you just think, why can't we have nice things? In fact, in Japan they were apologetic because it was 30 seconds late. I never would have noticed.

1:13:45.3 CW: Wow.

1:13:49.0 PB: So what I really wanna have happen is that you don't have to go to Korea to see that. So that's reflected in our strategy. One of the biggest investments we made was in a project called Brightline West, which runs from Las Vegas or will run from Las Vegas to Southern California. And among many things that helped set this project up for success, one is that it's a public private partnership, so I got federal money in it, but there's private money coming into it too. The other thing is a big part of the right of way problem was solved because they could shoot it down the middle of I-15. And so the right of way was basically already there for a big part of the route. But one of the many reasons I'm excited for this and if they hit their marks, they could be serving passengers as early as 2028. It's because then instead of coming back from Korea and saying why can't we have this? All you gotta do is come back from Vegas and say, why can't we have this? And I think once, just once, somewhere on US soil there is actual butt in seat revenue service on a high speed train.

1:14:52.1 PB: There's gonna be no going back. 'cause then it won't be this like, oh, this is like a European thing. We never do that. We can do this here. Not only that, we should do this here. I can't think of a better environment to benefit from high speed rail actually in terms of the physical layout than the Midwest. Any place where you have lots of places that are an uncomfortably long drive or a ridiculously short flight away from each other are candidate. Think about how many those are. Imagine if Detroit and Toledo and Chicago and Cincinnati and Louisville are all connected by all of these two to three hour hops downtown to downtown. We could do it. So I think seeing is believing. And while it would not be honest of me to say that our package funded a full high speed rail network, we couldn't get that far. I think that when we do it somewhere, which we're doing and people see it, then the appetite will be overwhelming.

1:15:52.6 VP: I wanted to ask sort of a different type of question, but one thing that you mention a lot is your amazing husband and your amazing family. And I'm really interested in sort of as Secretary of Transportation, how did you navigate working with people who may not, is not as supportive of your family or challenges the most personal parts of you?

1:16:17.2 PB: You know, so much of my sense of purpose now comes from our family, my husband and our two kids, three and a half years old. We're raising them in Traverse City City and their lives will be shaped, their livelihoods and maybe even their lives will depend on making good policy choices right now. And so it's a huge part of what propels me, even if it's also very healthy that they don't know or care that much about. They're not too impressed by what I do. They're starting to be actually, 'cause I tell them what I do and they kind of get it now. For some reason it's bedtime when they always say, "Tell me about your work". One time I asked my daughter, I said, "Does me talking about my work help you go to sleep?" She said, "Yeah". But I think they get that I help make bridges stronger and help the airplanes. And they seem to be somewhat impressed by that. But it is strange, of course, to be in the situation, sometimes I've literally been in the situation of breaking bread with a member of Congress who, to be polite, asked me about my kids and that same day, that same member voting against the existence of my family.

1:17:37.2 PB: You have to compartmentalize a lot to be in politics at any level. And up to a point that's okay because the best chance you have of, I think cutting across some of that stuff is for people to see each other's humanity. What I said earlier about taking each other seriously and I would hope that that person would at least have thought twice. I don't know, maybe I should ask them. Would have thought twice about voting against the existence of my family after hearing my answer to the question of how are your kids doing. The whole reason any of this matters is the everyday. I think even for those of us who live and breathe policy and think it's interesting in its own right, it's only actually worth it because of how it cashes out in the everyday. And that's true in a comparatively obvious way for transportation, but it's true for tax policy. It's true for foreign affairs. It's true for anything that we do. It matters because your life is gonna be different, better or worse tomorrow morning, if we got it right or if we got it wrong. And nothing reminds me of that more than my kids and in a different way, my spouse, who is somebody who, as I think so many of us have experienced in life.

1:19:06.1 PB: We have somebody who loves you and also always tells you the truth and can give you very thoughtful critiques of how you've done that day. It can really help you do a better job and help you remember what's important. Because when you go into any organization or any position or responsibility, part of what very naturally happens is you start caring about what everybody around you cares about. That's called culture, right? And it can happen at a firm or a city or a political party or whatever it is you're part of, office or whatever you're part of, but that... And that's fine, except you can't get completely sucked into that. So there need to be voices in your life that come from outside of that and remind you about other things to care about or remind you about what you cared about before you went into that environment and before you joined that firm or office or political party or whatever it is, and somebody who loved you before you were doing this and will love you afterwards, you hope, is the best way to stay in touch with all of that. Plus, and again, I'm talking to a room full of people who will experience this.

1:20:15.2 PB: So many of you, by virtue of your interest in public policy, are destined for meaningful work, which is wonderful. It's one of the great blessings in life, is meaningful work. It's one of the reasons why people gladly do jobs that have as much responsibility as a global CEO making tens of millions of dollars a year, and they do it for about as much money as a dentist. But there's an occupational hazard here, which is that if your work is very meaningful, your work could become your source of meaning. And that's different and that's riskier. Because in many cases, especially for those of you who will run for political office, there will be moments where you need to confront the question of what is worth more to you than the chance to continue doing the job you've been doing. And in order to navigate that with your right sense of grounding, you're gonna be in touch with whatever it is that can bring you purpose that isn't your job. And again, nothing can better do that than spending quantity time with somebody who loves you.

1:21:36.9 PT: So you shared a lot today about how being Secretary has been an incredible learning experience for you. So I was curious, what is a policy issue about which your thinking changed as a result of your time as Secretary of Transportation?

1:21:46.9 PB: Ah, interesting. Well, there are a lot of policy areas I didn't think about much at all. I mean, even as somebody who loved transportation, worked on it, was proud of the work that we did, when I was mayor, you know, there were a lot of questions around space junk or the administration of the Merchant Marine Academy or pipeline safety regulation. That just had never been on my plate before. And so I had to think about them, really, for the first time in a rigorous fashion. But other things, you think you have an answer and then you see how complicated it gets. And one example is how hard it is, how long it takes, and how much it costs to build or do anything in this country. By the way, another set of problems. I hope a lot of the brain power in this room is getting allocated towards dealing with, 'cause I think it will continue to be one of the central problems of infrastructure in our time. When I was mayor, I came in out of the business world and I had a pretty clear sense of how to tear down the barriers toward getting stuff done.

1:22:51.2 PB: There were just enough barriers to stop me from doing something stupid. Usually an intransigent council that I would then have to negotiate with, and I grudgingly admit would make things better than if I just had my way with no constraints. But it was relatively simple, by comparison, it was a simpler equation. It turns out that the sources of this kind of complexity in infrastructure are so multiple and overlapping that there's huge disagreement about what they even are. There are some things we know. There are things that happen in the permitting process that need to be accelerated. We work to accelerate them. There are things that happen in procurement processes that we can make simpler without jettisoning the good government value of a lot of checks and balances in procurement. But a lot of it is squishier than that. It's what happens in a political environment where there are lots of different players with their hands on the same problem or question. By the way, another thing you have a magnificent backyard laboratory for is how so many results have been achieved here in a community with so many municipalities right up against each other. And what still needs to happen to get them more into alignment, to do more, and what would happen if they weren't in alignment on the things they agree on.

1:24:05.6 PB: Those kinds of things cash out in complicated ways that affect your ability to get stuff done. So I think my thinking on that has become more nuanced, but my sense of urgency about it has only grown after confronting this challenge that the cost of building a bridge has increased more than most costs in the last five, 10 years. And one way I put it to our team to try to motivate them in our work on this is that if you have a trillion dollar, we got a $1.2 trillion piece of legislation. If we miss 1% of efficiency, we're 1% less efficient than we ought to be, that's $10 billion of value that get erased. That's bigger than the transportation budget of most US States, gone. And by the same token, if you can be 1% more efficient, that's how much you just unlocked. And a $10 billion initiative would be a big deal even in Washington. So that's kind of a body of unfinished business where we've made some gains, some real ones. We've tripled the pace of getting grant agreements done. We found new ways to move money more quickly. We've got dirt flying on thousands and thousands of projects. But I've had to become more open minded about just how hard that is and what it'll take to really make progress there.

1:25:25.4 CW: Vincent and Paulina, I'm gonna ask you to offer your last question, each of you, on behalf of the audience here.

1:25:33.9 VP: Awesome. Well, thank you. So my last question is more of an ask, but inspire us. What do you say to folks in the room?

1:25:43.6 PB: No pressure.

1:25:45.2 CW: Okay, before you answer that, and then Paulina, what is your question?

1:25:48.9 PT: I think overall, just being in a policy space like you were saying, the political clinicians can be like a lot. You know, we're exposed to this all the time. Like you said, you have to take a break from the news, but you still need to be in it. What is your advice to students who maybe feel pessimistic but obviously are very driven by this public service element?

1:26:05.0 CW: Okay. So how do you deal with the pessimism. And then your last... Say it one more time, Vincent, you had a great closer.

1:26:10.8 VP: Yes. Inspire us...

1:26:12.9 CW: Inspire us.

1:26:13.5 VP: For the folks in the room who are cynical. Give us hope on issues of where we're concerned about civil rights, climate change. Give us hope for the next couple of years.

1:26:24.4 CW: Awesome. There it is.

1:26:29.4 PB: Well, first of all, I'm not discouraged. I'm sad sometimes about things that I see happening around me in Washington or on the news. I did not come here to tell you everything's gonna be fine. I'm not here to tell you that, everything's not gonna be fine. We know everything's never been fine. And if you think through our lifetimes or through history, the things that are most compelling, most inspiring, most choice worthy are the difference that has been made in the most difficult circumstances or the confrontation of the most ugly problem. Right? I doubt any of you was inspired to be interested in public service because you read about some relatively easy problem where everybody agreed on what to do and then they did it and everything was fine. Right? We choose to do these things because we know that, first of all, it matters who gets involved and it matters what the outcome is. And that's hard. It's always been hard. I don't know if this is inspiring. Maybe it's a little bit comforting, is that to the extent we do figure these things out in our lifetime, the most difficult and painful things we're involved with will later on be romanticized by future generations looking for inspiration.

1:28:02.6 PB: I grew up envying my parents a little bit for living in the '60s, which from the comparatively calm and sometimes even politically boring waters of the late '90s and early 2000s seemed just cooler. And my parents would say things to me like that was a terrible period. It was terrifying. People were getting assassinated and my friends were being sent to war. And, like, it all looks cool now because you listen to the arts that flourished in response to the horror that our generation was being subjected to. But the way we navigated that, often the hard way, inspires us precisely because of how tough it was on the way in. And I think that's what makes all of this kind of work worth doing, which is why I'm not discouraged and I'm not checking out and I'm not giving up. How can we give up? We don't even have the right to give up. Think about the stuff other people didn't give up in the face of. And then think about how things change. And yeah, sometimes things change for the worse and sometimes things don't change in time, sometimes things change faster than you ever thought they would.

1:29:18.2 PB: As recently as when I was sitting in the seat of a student at an institution not that different from the Ford School, watching politicians come and give speeches, wondering if I'd ever be among them, I knew that I probably wouldn't because I was categorically disqualified from holding office where I came from because I was gay. And then I wasn't. I was gay. I wasn't disqualified. Things changed. But that didn't, like, just happen 'cause I waited around long enough. It happened because other people put their careers on the line and their futures on the line and made a change in less than one political lifetime so that I get to be here as a Cabinet official offering the world according to Pete to a room full of students weighing what our complicated future is gonna be. So how dare I give up, right? And all of us have our own reasons for being in this. And all of us have our own reasons for feeling the temptations of being discouraged. But if you're not out there doing this work, somebody else will be. As you can imagine, that has a particularly specific implication for those of us who are literally seeing the people who will be doing the jobs that we've been doing. But that's true, whether the job, so to speak, is a job job or the job of an activist, the job of an advocate, the job of a researcher, somebody's gonna be doing this. And you and your kids and your kids kids will be living with the implications of the choices they made. Wouldn't you rather it be you?

1:31:15.1 CW: Secretary Pete Buttigieg, we wanna thank you on behalf of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. Thank you for being here. Thank you for this conversation. Thank you to Molly and to Vincent and to Paulina, and thank you to every member of the audience. Please join me in thanking the Secretary.

[applause]