‘an Artist Is Not Necessarily Appreciated In Their Lifetime’: Pete Buttigieg On Policy And Politics

In the heat of the 2020 Democratic primary, Joe Biden attacked Pete Buttigieg in a now-deleted, scathing digital ad called “Pete’s Record” — mocking him for doing little more than installing “decorative lights under bridges” as mayor of “small town” South Bend.

Nearly five years and several political lifetimes later, that ad is water under one of the 12,300 bridges under construction or repair as part of Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure law. And it was Buttigieg, who Biden has since compared to his late son Beau, who oversaw the legislation’s implementation as Transportation secretary. Yet Biden has also recently expressed some frustration about the law, telling USA Today, “We would’ve been a hell of a lot better off had we been able to go much harder at getting some of these projects in the ground quicker.”

In an exit interview with POLITICO Magazine, conducted partly on the campus of Notre Dame in December and later over the phone this month, Buttigieg defended implementation of the infrastructure law, even as he acknowledged it didn’t deliver huge rewards in the 2024 election.

“I think what the president was getting at is an impatience we all feel about the recognition and credit that this work deserves,” he said. “But just the nature of the beast with this infrastructure work is that it takes longer than a political cycle to get it done.”

Buttigieg also spoke about the difficulty of governing when the truth seems up for grabs, Elon Musk’s role in the incoming Trump administration and chopping wood in his adopted hometown of Traverse City, where he’ll mull a future that could include either a Michigan gubernatorial bid in 2026 or a 2028 presidential campaign.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You visited South Bend in December and took a ride on the South Shore Line to Chicago. When I visited you in your office in 2018, you were working on the double tracking of that train. Convince me that your 2017 bid for Democratic National Committee chair, your 2020 presidential campaign and your appointment as Transportation secretary wasn’t a long scheme to get this project done. [The project spanned parts of Barack Obama’s, Donald Trump’s and Joe Biden’s administrations.]

It’s a roundabout way, but I got it done. The longest way around is the shortest way home.

Even though I had nothing directly to do with this Amazon thing [New Carlisle, Indiana landed an $11 billion Amazon Web Services investment last year], the Amazon thing is the fruit of the industrial strategy of the administration that I'm in. The administration is doing things that actually help places like where I grew up.

While people have been trying to appeal to the industrial Midwest with all kinds of divisiveness and bullshit, we’ve been working to create actual economic opportunity. And we're doing it with the infrastructure bill, obviously.

And then, you hear Joe [Gambill of the Local IBEW] say 38 projects they’re working on have to do with the infrastructure bill. I’m pretty sure that the Amazon thing has a little to do with the CHIPS and Science Act, and I’m certain that the factory has more than a little to do with the IRA [Inflation Reduction Act] making things happen in South Bend that would have been beyond the wildest dreams of first term Mayor Pete.

Ezra Klein of The New York Times called you the “Democratic Party’s acknowledged best-of-class communicator.” Your job, in part, was to communicate the benefits of the bipartisan infrastructure law. And yet polling shows most Americans credit Trump almost as much as Biden for this law. Why?

I think I said this to Ezra on the show: The nature of good policy and being politically rewarded for good policy is it doesn’t tend to happen — in the same way that an artist is not necessarily appreciated in their lifetime, a policy is rarely appreciated in the same political cycle where it happens, especially a good one. Think about the political life of the ACA, to go from being an albatross to being our winning issue in eight years. And even then you have to do all the finessing for folks who don’t think of the ACA and Obamacare as the same thing. There’s a lot of that here with this stuff.

Part of it’s that we were competing with a lot of other things for attention. Part of it is good news is no news: That unambiguously and uncontroversially good things command less attention. So I can go out there and wave the flag. I think it will matter over time. I think it did matter.

Speaking with USA Today in one of his only exit interviews, Biden expressed his frustration at how long it took to get shovels in the ground for infrastructure projects.

I think what the president was getting at is an impatience we all feel about the recognition and credit that this work deserves, when the nature of the beast is that these are very long-term projects. Precisely because they're unambiguously good news, they don’t get as much attention as the controversy. To be clear, of the 66,000 projects that we’ve announced, about 16,000 of them are complete from a federal perspective. [Since the initial interview, per DOT, 72,000 projects are underway and 22,000 are complete.]

Consider what’s probably the biggest transportation project that he’s responsible for, the tunnels [between New York and New Jersey]. That’s a project that will span perhaps three, four or five presidents before it’s fully complete. So I think he’s hinting at the impatience that all of us who have helped to work on it have.

That said, we’ve also been able to contend with a lot of the structural issues that slow projects down. We’ve tripled the pace of getting grant agreements funded in this department compared to the previous administration. We’ve cut the time to work through the environmental permits. By some measures, we’ve cut it in half on the complex projects requiring a full environmental impact statement. So we’ve gained a lot of ground. But just the nature of the beast with this infrastructure work is that it takes longer than a political cycle to get it done.

You hosted a podcast in 2020 called “The Deciding Decade,” saying it was full of choices that will determine our entire future. Trump will take us through 2028. How are we faring?

In terms of societal, political and civic trust, I’m worried. Very, very worried.

On some other fronts, I think there is a durability to what we spent the first half of this decade doing, much of which will bear fruit in the second half of this decade. And it may be maddening politically for somebody like me to contemplate that people who actively opposed it might wind up scooping up the credit for it. But the most important thing isn’t the credit, it’s that it happened. Because I also think that the benefits — not the political benefits, but the actual benefits of the job creation and the innovation and the infrastructure — will make not only our economy but our society stronger.

Have you talked to your successor at the Transportation Department, Sean Duffy?

Yes.

What was that like?

We had a very nice conversation. I let him know that he’s going to be picking up the best job in the federal government, and he’s going to be working with some of the best civil servants I’ve ever met — that I want the agency to succeed.

Is he qualified for the job?

There’s one qualification for a job like this that matters above the rest, and it’s the confidence of the president of the United States. He’s certainly somebody who, I think, has a very healthy amount of support coming into this.

In your public remarks and interviews post-election, you keep using the phrase that salvation will come at the local and state level. What do you mean by that?

Well, for one thing, we have leaders at the local level who are much more offline, so to speak, in their leadership. They’re dealing with reality, not conspiracy, and that’s the nature of kind of backyard work, which means that they can set a kind of tone and do sometimes a better job of discerning what’s important and making sense of what’s happening than what’s possible in Washington and in the provinces of the media that revolve around Washington.

I also think so much of what we have worked into motion at the federal level is now passing through local hands. And I don’t just mean because of the transition, although I’m obviously mindful that there are many more state and local governments led by Democrats than what we have at the federal level.

No matter who’s going to be in charge, all these award announcement grants that we launched in the last two or three years on the strength of the infrastructure package consist of funding projects that are conceived and led by state or local or tribal or regional authorities. Now so much depends on how they pick it up, run with it. Thinking back to something like climate, really in the first Trump term, I saw how cities came together knowing that they collectively represented the bulk of the world’s GDP and didn’t want to wait for their national capital on things like climate. I think you’ll see that dynamic again, where things that matter — whether the White House gets it or not — will continue to be addressed by leaders who are local.

You held office at a time of increasing conspiracy theories, whether it was around the train derailment in East Palestine, the fall of the Francis Scott Key Bridge or recovery efforts in western North Carolina following Hurricane Helene. What do you make of the difficulty of governing in a time that feels increasingly post-trust or post-truth?

I think, not just politically, but societally, it may be the biggest problem of our time, and we're going to be contending with it for our entire lifetimes. We have all of these digital connections and yet, to a historic degree, are more disconnected than ever. We’ve never had more information coming at us and yet, never in my lifetime have we been less informed about what’s going on.

I think it’s a massive challenge, and it’s a challenge, obviously, for governing, but it goes even beyond that.

The one thing we have to grab hold of is that things are, in fact, true or false, and even with the collapse of the editorial function in a lot of the ways that we get our information, truth remains truth and falsehood remains falsehood, and we’ll have to find new ways to pick through all of that. I’ve done what I can with the tools that I’ve had to contribute to that, but that’s clearly not—even from a national standpoint, but a species standpoint—probably the biggest thing we’ve got to deal with in our lifetimes. At the end of the day, we can’t make good decisions, whether it’s in public life or in our personal lives, without good access to true information.

You’ve dealt with Elon Musk, for whom at least two of his industries DOT regulated, several times, most recently when he shared misinformation on X about Hurricane Helene recovery efforts. What do you make of his growing power and proximity to President-elect Donald Trump?

An agency like ours has to treat everybody fairly, and we have to deal with companies and entities based on things like safety and what the law says, not who is pals with him. That's something that just has to, has to continue, because it's the mission of the agency.

More broadly, I think, it remains to be seen whether he will have a formal, public responsibility or something a little more diffuse. But it’s not unusual for wealthy and well-connected people to also be very powerful. I think the question is, how our public institutions can continue serving people fairly.

You have often been presented by your political critics as kind of the CEO of the American transportation system given the post-Covid disruptions in travel — even though much of our transportation system is privately owned and operated. What’s that been like? And do you think that you've left the transportation system better off today than when you came in in 2021?

I’m absolutely certain that we are leaving every part of America’s transportation systems better than we found it and it’s not just in terms of getting through Covid.

When I say “how we found it,” there’s two facets to that: There’s the long term decay, and then there’s the acute set of emergencies that were waiting for us when we got here and we came in. We were greeted with the most profound and widespread set of transportation problems since 9/11.

I think it’s too easy to overlook just how enormous that set of challenges was. So we’re talking about supply chain problems or airline problems. Those are problems we confronted, not problems we created, but I’m proud of what we did when we confronted them, because airline passengers have more rights than when we got here. Our ports moved more goods than was possible when we got here. The trajectory of all kinds of long-term trends, from the condition of our highways and bridges to the number of air traffic controllers, has gone from getting worse when we got here to getting better when we leave. There’s always unfinished business, but I’m absolutely convinced that we are leaving America’s transportation system in much better condition than we found it.

You’ve spent a lot of time in Traverse City, Michigan, living the life of a congressman, commuting back and forth between Michigan and D.C. Do you think more cabinet officials and cabinet agencies should be based outside of D.C. during their tenure?

Not necessarily. I did what made sense for us and our family. It was doable, but not exactly sustainable. And I think every one of my cabinet colleagues has met this puzzle in a different way.

We were reflecting on how many of us — it wasn’t until year two that we were actually in the same room as each other, and frankly, the things that opened up and improved when we were able to get in a room with each other was pretty remarkable. The good challenge for anybody in these roles is you have to lead a team, and you have to be part of a team, and for both of those things, you need to be around your team, and that team is based in Washington. At the same time, if you're in Washington too long, there's absolutely a risk that you can begin to care more about the things that this town cares about than some of the things that matter to your neighbors. That’s one of the reasons why I think it’ll be healthy to be spending more time in Michigan.

Do you have anything on your to-do list when you get back?

I got what I asked for for Christmas, which is a splitting maul and a new axe. So I’ll be chopping a lot of wood and being outside a little more. I want to spend more time engaged with ideas and with students. I’m looking at ways to make that possible. The biggest thing, obviously, the family pays a pretty big price when you’re involved in politics and public life. Looking forward to making up for some lost time.

After overseeing the FAA, do you think you’ll cross that item you’ve had on your bucket list of getting your own pilot’s license?

I hope so. It’s still on my bucket list, and I think it’s a beautiful place to fly. I haven't signed up for anything, but I have caught myself browsing the course catalog of Northwestern Michigan College [a local community college], including their flight programs.

Will you adopt Michigan State or the University of Michigan as a college football team now that you’re in Michigan? Or are you going to stay with your beloved Notre Dame?

I love my new home, but I can’t ever forget where I came from. And by the way, I’m very excited about the Irish right now.

What do you make of head coach Marcus Freeman’s extension?

It’s crazy to think he’s younger than I am. And it’s a job where not unlike some jobs in public life, he gets withering criticism for anything that doesn’t go perfectly. But look at what he’s done with this program. It’s just incredible. I went back for that first playoff game and hadn’t been to Notre Dame stadium in a while. The energy was just amazing.

You went to the Notre Dame-Indiana game? Where did you sit?

Nosebleeds. My toes were cold, but what a great game.

What’s one thing that you haven't been asked about in these exit interviews that you wished you were asked about, and you can't use fish culverts this time.

I’m always struck by how the most important things that have happened are in the safety department that didn’t get that much coverage. We’re up to 10 quarters now of declining roadway deaths.

Our top three things that I was especially focused on through the years, two out of the three got a fair amount of attention. It was building good things, building generational wealth and putting people back to work, and then reversing the rise in roadway deaths. And that third one continues to be one that doesn’t get a lot of attention.

What will you tell your twins when they’re older about the last four years?

I’ll be able to tell them that all of the travel and all of the long days and all the days that I was away were for better infrastructure that they're going to get to use. And what will be fun is in the years to come, more and more of those multi-year projects are seen through to completion. Hopefully in our travels, I can point out something, and say, “I worked on that, and that’s one of the reasons why I was working so hard back when you were really little and we were getting to know each other.”