Pete Buttigieg has been a particularly consequential secretary of the Department of Transportation. During his tenure, the agency passed a slew of new consumer protections and generally took a more active posture in regulating and penalizing the industries under its umbrella.
As Buttigieg prepares to return to life as a private citizen, he sat down with USA TODAY in New York to reflect on his time at the department and talk about what he hopes travelers will see out of the next administration. He also said he’s mentally preparing himself to be a regular member of the traveling public again – he just applied for Global Entry – and took a moment to remind everyone why fish culverts, which the DOT funds in places where fishing is a major industry and recreational activity, are so important.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg reflects on his time at the department before the new administration change.
Question: You’ve passed and implemented a lot of consumer protections during your tenure as DOT secretary. Which of those provisions make you the proudest?
Buttigieg: Well, I’m really proud of the automatic refund rule and now law for two reasons. One is the simple fact that people get their money. But what’s great about this provision is there’s an indirect effect, too, which is by changing the default to make refunds automatic, it actually changes the economics of the flight such that an airline has to think twice about something like realistic scheduling.
I also think that the dashboard work was a powerful lesson in how good information and transparency can lead to very concrete results because, within days of us putting the airlines on notice about the dashboard, they actually changed their written policies, which are now enforceable and backed by our department.
Q: What should travelers know about how the consumer protections your department implemented may change under a new administration? Are you worried about them being rolled back?
B: Every good policy that we believe in, I’m worried about policy change in the future but I would say a couple of things that should be reassuring.
One: when it comes to things like the refund rule, that’s not just a rule, that’s a law now. It’s backed by the FAA reauthorization, which means automatic refund provisions are something that would take an act of Congress to undo, and they were done on a bipartisan basis.
The second thing I would say is this work has such bipartisan support among the traveling public that there would be real consequences to undercutting it.
Q: One of the biggest struggles that we’ve seen during your tenure has been with FAA staffing. What’s the trajectory there?
B: To put it succinctly, FAA staffing had been on a trajectory of decline, then it stabilized under the Biden administration, and now it’s actually going up. It’s not that we got it done overnight, it’s that we changed the trajectory from a problem that was getting worse to a problem that’s getting better.
I’m not here to pretend that problems in some air traffic control sectors are not real. They are. They’re something I’ve had my hair on fire about sometimes, and that’s why we acted and changed the structure.
Anytime there’s a legitimate critique or an issue that’s under our control, of course, we want to deal with it, and we want it, but they can’t be used as an excuse to minimize the extent to which airlines need to take responsibility for what they do.
Q: Under the Biden administration, we saw JetBlue and Spirit’s merger not go through, Alaska and Hawaiian’s did. What do you see as the future of airline mergers?
B: If you have regulatory authorities, then that means you also have responsibilities, and there were tools the DOT hadn’t picked up that I thought we should, and that’s why we got involved in JetBlue-Spirit. We saw an industry that’s consolidated again and again and again, and you know – whether we’re talking about railroads, whether talking about airlines, whether talking about ocean shippers or, for that matter, whether we’re talking about the agriculture industry – nothing good comes of losing competition.
And so we got involved, but based on a lot of market analysis and legal analysis, so we’re not dogmatic about it – which is why in the end there was a different answer on Alaska-Hawaiian, but that one too, we were not going to let that go forward without strong passenger protections.
At the time of deregulation it was confidently predicted that there would be something like 100 airlines competing in the U.S. market, and it just isn’t what happened. I think the fewer players you have, the more hands-on policymakers need to be to keep them honest.
Q: Speaking of airline mileage programs, how’s it going with the investigation into those consumer protections?
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg reflects on his time at the department before the new administration change.
B: So the deadline has come and they’ve all submitted something. Now our team is working to gauge whether what they submitted is adequate to the request.
The bottom line is that the airlines owe not just the DOT but the public some transparency about these programs that, in many cases, have become more profitable for them than the part of their business related to actually flying airplanes.
These are part of our savings for so many passengers. It’s how Chasten and I are hoping to take a vacation after this job wraps up.
If you have cash in the bank, that’s protected as a deposit by the FDIC, but if you have miles in an account, there is a company that could change them pretty much arbitrarily.
The biggest question is, have they been doing that? Anecdotally, most of us have noticed that it takes more miles, and it seems to be harder to book a ticket than it was 10 or 20 years ago, but we don’t make policy based on anecdotes, which is exactly why we’re requesting the data.
Q: What happens to this work once the Trump administration is inaugurated?
B: That’s where the public needs to ask the incoming administration, “hey, what did you do with this?”
I would not presume or expect that a different administration will handle these processes, decisions or data the same way I would have, but these processes are underway. This data is coming in. The public wants to know: what are you going to do about it?
Q: What do you see as your biggest legacy?
B: Three things in particular:
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The infrastructure package. We’re past the 1,500 mark in terms of just the number of airports alone that we’re making improvements to, that’s just the airports. We’re sitting next to one biggest public works projects in modern American history in the Hudson tunnels, which did not have funding at the start of the Biden administration. But also there are these 6 figure projects that are fixing an intersection somewhere that’s going to save lives.
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That brings me to the second and least publicized of the important things that we’ve done, which is reversing the rise in roadway deaths in this country. We’re at nine consecutive quarters of that number going down. We are rightly up in arms when something happens on an airplane and someone could have gotten hurt, and yet we let a full airplane’s worth of people die every day in car crashes on our roads. We have a long way to go, but we have consistently improved as a country on that.
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And then third is the use of our tools, enforcement, and transparency to make things better for airline passengers, railroad workers, and a lot of other people who count on this department for protection.
Q: What’s next for you and Chasten?
B: I love this job, but it is very 24/7, so I’m ready to catch my breath. I’m ready to spend more time with our kids.
I have not made any big life decisions, and I won’t until I’ve had a little more time.
Q: Where’s on your travel bucket list?
B: So many. Around the U.S., I can’t get enough of New Mexico.
Two places I hadn’t been to or hadn’t been too much were Alaska and Hawaii, which I think are fascinating.
There’s any number of places around world I’d be happy to explore or see more of.
Q: You must be looking forward to doing some traveling without a whole entourage.
B: Yeah. Although I will also have to get used to it.
I will have to get reacquainted with TSA checkpoints. I just had to sit and do my Global Entry interview.
Q: You would think that that would just come as a perk. Like, once you’ve been DOT secretary, you just sort of get Global Entry for life.
I think my credit card covers the fee, so that’s nice, but you still have to fill out the little form like everybody else online and go get your picture taken and do your fingerprints, which is only fair.
Q: As a regular passenger, what kind of policies or changes that you weren’t able to implement do you hope to see to improve your own travels?
B: Well, I’d love to see the follow-through on the family seating work that we’ve set into motion. We’re still working on it, by the way.
Especially as a parent of toddlers, I really care about that both policy-wise and personally.
As a private citizen, I’ll also have a lot at stake in the transparency and fairness of these miles and points programs.
The truth is these things are important and interesting to work on. But the only thing that really matters is can it continue to be the case that every time I step onto an airplane, I know that I’m participating in the safest way to travel?
The rest is pretty secondary compared to safety.
Q: You’ve been doing a lot of these interviews as your tenure comes to a close. What’s one thing you haven’t gotten to talk enough about?
B: There should be more written about the fish culverts.
Q: About what?
B: Fish culverts.
Q: Oh, the fish culverts.
B: Yeah, we’re doing culverts. It’s a big deal, especially for anadromous fish.
(Editor’s note: a fish culvert is a tunnel-like structure that helps fish bypass an obstacle like a road or railroad.)
Whether you’re in Michigan and you’re just really into trout, or whether you’re in the Pacific Northwest or Alaska and your livelihood or even culture is related to fish, it’s actually a really important program.
Maybe not considered the sexiest to many, but we have so many things like that.
I understand why they don’t rate as much attention as the multi-billion dollar projects, but I think that stuff is really important as part of the bread and butter.
On a somewhat more sober note: the broader resilience agenda, in a world where a 1,000 year flood happens every other year, we’re not just putting a road back the exact same place and way every time it gets washed out, we’re actually going to move it. We’ve put billions of dollars into that, but that’s going to be more part of the story for the next many years, and I think there’s deserves a little more attention than it gets.
Zach Wichter is a travel reporter for USA TODAY based in New York. You can reach him at zwichter@usatoday.com.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Pete Buttigieg says safety record is his proudest DOT legacy
