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Buttigieg in the spotlight

By Associated Press

Posted January 16, 2023

(Steve Burns, WFIU/WTIU)

The nation’s transportation secretary usually holds one of the most public-facing roles in any presidential administration. A core aspect of the Cabinet job is to travel the country, doling out millions of public dollars and attending ribbon-cutting ceremonies for new bridges and overpasses and ports.

Even by those standards, Pete Buttigieg has spent an inordinate amount of time in the national spotlight delivering the largesse of the big infrastructure and domestic spending bills. But at the same time, the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate and onetime mayor of South Bend, Indiana, also has been the public face of a string of transportation-related crises, all amid steady speculation about his future political prospects.

During the 40-year-old Buttigieg’s tenure, there have been widespread global supply chain issues and logjams at major ports, multiple instances of mass flight cancellations by airlines and a narrowly avoided nationwide strike by railroad workers that was only averted by an eleventh-hour intervention from Congress.

The latest transportation mishap was the most high-profile yet.

On Wednesday morning, a malfunction in an obscure and apparently obsolete internal system called the Notice to Air Missions, or NOTAM, forced the temporary grounding of all air traffic in the United States. The move touched off a cascading snarl that resulted in the cancellation of more than 1,300 flights and the delay of 9,000 more. It was the biggest shutdown of U.S. aviation since the attacks of Sept 11, 2001.

Faced with a historic system failure, Buttigieg appeared to lean into his role as the face of the beleaguered American transportation network.

Appearing Wednesday at a Transportation Research Board conference, Buttigieg jumped right into the airline debacle before anyone could ask.

He called it “another challenging day for U.S. aviation” and said his department was “now pivoting to understanding the cause of the issue.”

“We’re gonna own it,” Buttigieg later told reporters.

Earlier that day, during an interview with CNN, Buttigieg offered a positive spin, saying that “part of what you saw this morning was an act of caution.”

But he also acknowledged that the mishap had exposed a desperate need to modernize crucial and antiquated systems.

“We need to design a system that does not have these kinds of vulnerabilities,” he said.

Buttigieg’s challenges earn a special kind of sympathy from those who have sat in the same seat.

Ray LaHood, a former Republican congressman from Illinois who served as transportation secretary for four years under President Barack Obama, said he met with Buttigieg for 90 minutes shortly after Buttigieg was nominated by President Joe Biden.

“I told him, ‘When you walk in the door and turn the lights on, there’s going to be a crisis. And every day there’ll be one or more,’ ” LaHood said. “When something goes wrong, you become the face of it.”

In his two years on the job, Buttigieg has repeatedly criticized U.S. airlines for chronic cancellations and shoddy customer service — making Wednesday’s debacle particularly awkward. It also highlighted the fact that the Federal Aviation Administration has been without a Senate-confirmed leader for nearly a year.

Stephen Dickson, a former Delta Airlines executive and appointee of President Donald Trump, resigned last March, midway through his five-year term. Biden’s nominee, Denver International Airport CEO Phillip Washington, has seemingly stalled in the Senate, despite Democratic control of the chamber, over questions about Washington’s qualifications and his involvement in a corruption investigation in California.

Similarly, another major part of Buttigieg’s department, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, has been without a Senate-confirmed leader since last fall, when Steven Cliff resigned just three months after his confirmation to run the California Air Resources Board.

Robert Mann, an independent aviation industry consultant and former executive at American and Pan Am, said the vulnerabilities highlighted by the transportation issues far predate Buttigieg’s tenure and run deep into the institutional fabric of the his department and many other large government agencies.