Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Stay Tuned In Brief. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. My guest this week is Pete Buttigieg. He first joined me on Stay Tuned in 2019 when he was on the cusp of announcing his candidacy for President. He told me then-

Pete Buttigieg:

Well, maybe the simplest way to introduce myself is that I’m a Midwestern millennial mayor.

Preet Bharara:

He is now the Secretary of Transportation, and most recently appeared as a guest on, Stay Tuned  in July 2021 to discuss President Biden’s infrastructure legislation. I’m pleased to now catch up with him at the sidelines of Vox Media’s Code Conference in California as he nears two years in his cabinet post. Mr. Secretary, thanks for joining us.

Pete Buttigieg:

Good to be with you again.

Preet Bharara:

So can we talk about infrastructure in the few minutes we have?

Pete Buttigieg:

I love talking about infrastructure.

Preet Bharara:

I know you do. It’s Infrastructure Week once again.

Pete Buttigieg:

Yeah. Except it actually is every week.

Preet Bharara:

So, the first thing I want to ask you is about how well known this legislation is. I saw a poll that suggests that many Americans, I think one poll that said most Americans may not be aware that the infrastructure bill passed. Does this mean you’re not doing enough podcasts?

Pete Buttigieg:

So I think what it means is that Americans are not always following the ins and outs of the legislative process or the blow-by-blow there. It is true, I think certainly by Washington standards, at least, fewer people than you would think know that the infrastructure law passed.

But the important thing is for people to know that we’re doing a lot of infrastructure. In other words, it’s less about the legislative vehicle that got it done and more about people recognizing, and sensing, and seeing that the funding, and the decisions being made by this administration, and the work that Congress did to give us these tools is actually being put to work for them.

Preet Bharara:

But are these things that were in the pipeline already, or are these tangible consequences of that particular legislation?

Pete Buttigieg:

These are things that would not be happening unless, or at least many of them wouldn’t be happening without the grants that we’re providing. And the grants wouldn’t be happening without the legislation. So you can draw a direct connection between the President deciding this is a priority and the members of Congress who voted for it, and me being able to make an announcement with the people of these communities that, “Yes, we’re going to get a new berth for this port,” and “Yes, we’re going to fix your streets and make them safer.” “Yes, we’re going to be able to build a rail link here in this logistics hub and improve our supply chains.”

Preet Bharara:

Do you show up with a ceremonial shovel?

Pete Buttigieg:

We started doing big checks, actually, just because I didn’t-

Preet Bharara:

Like Publisher’s Clearinghouse?

Pete Buttigieg:

Yeah, because I don’t want, especially on my side of the aisle, I think sometimes we’re a little too subtle- and we need to make sure that there’s no mistaking how and why this happened. This is your government working for you. And so, we’re literally, we’re doing the shovels for the groundbreakings, I’m doing the checks for the award announcement so that people understand in more concrete terms what this all adds up to.

Preet Bharara:

So the money, what was it, like a million bucks? What was in the bill?

Pete Buttigieg:

So of the 1.2 trillion-

Preet Bharara:

Oh, one trillion with a T-R.

Pete Buttigieg:

…about half of that is transportation-related.

Preet Bharara:

And of that, do you have an understanding as to how much of it is for new stuff and how much of it is to fix decaying stuff?

Pete Buttigieg:

So part of that actually depends on what people come to us with. A lot of these are grant programs where a community’s actually going to decide, “Hey, this is the thing we most need.” And it might be to replace a bridge, we were just in Tucson, 22nd Street bridge there, it’s in rough shape. It hasn’t fallen down or anything like that, but because of its condition, they have to load limit the bridge.

What that means is, a heavy vehicle, a school bus, truck, ambulance, not allowed, which of course has implications on everything from supply chains to emergency response. So we’re going to help them replace it with a new one that won’t have that problem.

Other places, it is something completely new. It really depends. Some of the airport work, same thing. Sometimes it’s building a whole new terminal. Sometimes it’s repairing something that’s been there for a long time. And what we’re finding is the needs are different in each community. And so the programs are designed that way. We don’t sit in Washington thinking up, “Oh, your town ought to have a bridge here.”

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, so I think this is something that people may not understand because they haven’t read the bill. And actually many members of Congress may also not have read the bill. That’s our little secret. The bill doesn’t set forth in line item which airports are going to get money, which streets are going to get repaired.

Pete Buttigieg:

Right.

Preet Bharara:

How broadly is that designated? And then, when a local community, a state or a municipality, wants to do something with infrastructure and transportation, how does that come into reality?

Pete Buttigieg:

So the basic philosophy of these programs is that the ideas don’t all have to come from Washington, but more the funding should. And when we send out that funding, it’s going to line with priorities that we care about. So I’m not going to sit there and say to a community, to Tulsa, “You ought to have a bridge here or you ought to move your highway there.” They’re going to decide that. But what we will do is we’ll put out word in, for example, in RAISE, that’s one of our flagship programs that we just announced about $2 billion in funding. We’re going to be looking for communities that have thought about safety, that have thought about climate and how their project is going to help with climate and pollution, that have thought about equity and if there’s been a justice issue with who gets access to transportation, that this is going to make it better. And projects are going to do well when they reflect some of those considerations. So we shape the general policy priorities. They come up with the actual ideas and we fund as many of the good ones as we can.

Preet Bharara:

So let’s say I’m a mayor of, I don’t know, South Bend.

Pete Buttigieg:

Sure.

Preet Bharara:

I assume they have a new mayor.

Pete Buttigieg:

They do.

Preet Bharara:

They do.

Pete Buttigieg:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Okay, good.

Pete Buttigieg:

In fact, they just got a grant recently.

Preet Bharara:

Oh, is that appropriate?

Pete Buttigieg:

It was-

Preet Bharara:

Would you like to repeat yourself on that?

Pete Buttigieg:

Yeah. That was all based on staff recommendations.

Preet Bharara:

So you’re a mayor in some town, South Bend or elsewhere, and you think, “Well this bill just got passed and there’s a lot of money and we need some help.” Do they send an email? Do they go on a portal?

Pete Buttigieg:

Well so-

Preet Bharara:

Literally what do they do?

Pete Buttigieg:

Yeah. So the mechanics of it, it’s actually something we’re looking at. ‘Cause we’re trying to make it a little less complicated because I remember being a mayor of South Bend, it’s not like I had a federal affairs team on staff to navigate this stuff. And it’s expensive to apply for federal money. Which means some of the communities that need it most, small communities, rural communities, low income communities, tribal communities, are some of the those that would be at a disadvantage trying to get the funding. So what happens in these competitive programs, we put out a Notice of Funding Opportunity, a NOFO in federal speak.

Preet Bharara:

And you put that on a website?

Pete Buttigieg:

Yeah. Goes out on a website and basically says, “Here’s the purpose of the grant. Here’s how to apply. Here’s what you need to do in order to be competitive.” And so to make it a little more specific, we have a resilience program. We’ll put that out soon that we’ll say, “All right, here’s a bunch of funding available to help your communities be more resilient.” Maybe it’s evacuation routes for hurricanes. Maybe it’s how to move a roadway that keeps getting flooded because of climate change to higher ground so it doesn’t get flooded anymore. Instead of just fixing it the way it was. “Here are the things you need to do to qualify.” A lot of it’s about compliance, making sure that federal taxpayer dollars are being spent appropriately and transparently. But some of it’s about policy, the things that we believe that Congress in the law set out for these dollars to be used for.

Preet Bharara:

So how bureaucratic and lengthy is that?

Pete Buttigieg:

Well, that’s what I’m working on. So some of these Notice’s of Funding Opportunities, the NOFO, so to speak, were more than a hundred pages.

Preet Bharara:

NOFO’s also a bad nickname. I would change it from NOFO to something else.

Pete Buttigieg:

All right, we’ll see what people come up with.

Preet Bharara:

Okay.

Pete Buttigieg:

So one thing we did was we had three different programs. We rolled them up into one NOFO. In other words, one simple way to apply for all three of them. So a community didn’t have to navigate three different, it’s like the Common Application for college, right?

Preet Bharara:

Yes.

Pete Buttigieg:

So instead of having to fill in your-

Preet Bharara:

Going through that little bit.

Pete Buttigieg:

Zip Code. All right. So instead of having, before that, that would mean that if someone wants to apply to seven colleges, they got to fill in their address seven different times on seven different sheets of paper.

Preet Bharara:

So the mayor has to do a personal statement?

Pete Buttigieg:

That would be interesting actually, that’d be one way to give them a little more flavor.

Preet Bharara:

Put all the honors in there.

Pete Buttigieg:

But my point is we’re trying to make it less pages, less steps, less complications so that the less resourced communities can compete and win.

Preet Bharara:

Is it sometimes the case, or is it always the case that these possibilities for communities mean that they need a bridge built or a road rehabilitated that the federal money will fund all of it? Or is there sometimes sort of a matching understanding?

Pete Buttigieg:

Yeah. So it depends. A lot of it is based on a match, but sometimes the match is prohibitive. It could be 80%, 80 to 20, 20% local dollars. And that might not sound like a lot, but maybe for low income community, certainly a community like I served as mayor. That could be the difference between whether you apply or whether you don’t bother. So one of the things we’ve done in, for example, part of the Bridge program for what are called off system bridges, typically more smaller areas and more rural areas that we’ve actually made it possible to do a hundred percent match. That being said, in a lot of the programs, it’s important to have that local match for the city, the transit agency, whoever’s applying to demonstrate that they can bring some resources to the table. We’ll do the rest.

Preet Bharara:

So once somebody succeeds in getting a grant, and let’s say it’s for the whole thing, no matching and the money gets sent in a bank account somewhere, presumably?

Pete Buttigieg:

It’s usually a reimbursement system. But yeah, it depends, right?

Preet Bharara:

Like it’s not cryptocurrency, it’s money.

Pete Buttigieg:

Yeah. No, it’s good.

Preet Bharara:

And then once that happens and you, you’re signed off as the department, are you then unconnected to the project? Or do you have some ability to, among other things, reign in cost and quality control?

Pete Buttigieg:

No, there’s a lot of quality control that goes on here. There’s a lot of steps. Part of it’s the NEPA of the famous National Environmental Protection Act process. Basically anything that you do with federal dollars has to go through a number of procedural steps to make sure communities were included in decisions about what to do that. That is a key step. There’s a lot of just auditing checks and balance. We’re talking about federal taxpayer money. It’s very important to make sure it’s very accountable. But let me also say this, you and I have mostly been describing the competitive grants where we say, “There’s $2 billion out there. Come to us whether your great ideas.” And then we pick the ideas that we think are strongest and most compliant for every dollar that we do that way, there’s many more that go out by formula. In others, we send it to the state DOT.

And as long as they’re within the left and right boundaries of the law, they can use it on anything they see fit. And so we’re also working a lot with the states on things like how these investments can help or hurt with something like safety. How they can do a good job of including workers and businesses that are owned by, for example, a lot of women-owned businesses, Black- and Latino-owned businesses that have been cut out of contracting in past generations, that they get a fair chance to compete and win. And other things that are really a little bit indirect kind of a bank shot because we’re not actually picking and choosing and spending. We’re working with the people who do.

So in a way, you could think of our role as the middle. At the beginning of an idea, somebody else in a community is having an idea, “We need this,” whatever, “We need this new bus line,” but they don’t have the funding. They come to us or our federal dollars going through the state. And that’s where the federal role comes in and we help shape that. And then at the end, it’s up to them to deliver. We don’t actually do the digging or the construction. It’s certainly not the operation. We just make sure that it’s meeting the requirements for how to use federal dollars and that it’s successful. And then we got to do, I think a better job as a federal government of making sure people know that this is how their tax dollars are.

Preet Bharara:

You got to let them know. More podcasts for you. Can you give a sense of, with respect to the $1.2 trillion, half of which is for transportation. How much is out the door? And what the sort of disbursement will be over time?

Pete Buttigieg:

Yes. So we’re just over 90 billion in terms of dollars that have been made available all.

Preet Bharara:

Oh really?

Pete Buttigieg:

Yeah. Now that can mean a lot of different things. So I want to be clear. Sometimes that means that we’ve shipped the dollars to the states and the formula grants. Sometimes it means that they’ve been awarded. That doesn’t necessarily mean that, I’m learning a lot of convoluted steps to some of the movement of money. But to simplify a little bit, about 90 billion is out there now.

Preet Bharara:

Do you see the pace picking up or it’ll be…?

Pete Buttigieg:

Yes. Yeah. So earlier I thought there’d be two stages to this job really. The first year, which was selling and hopefully succeeding on getting that infrastructure law bill done. And then everything after which is running these programs. I’m finding actually there have been three stages. The first, everything up until the president signed that law in November was getting the bill passed and helping with that. Then this last year has really been creating all of the programs, all of the plumbing so to speak, for these programs, these dollars, all of this to come together. 46 new programs were created within the Department of Transportation alone in addition to growing the ones we already had. And that’s everything from the Resilience Program I mentioned a little bit earlier to a program that’s dedicated on railroad crossing elimination and all kinds of things. So we’re standing these things up that never existed before. In this, the first of the five fiscal years covered by the bill where that $660 billion dollars has to move.

I’m really looking forward to the next stage. The four years ahead because then what we’re doing is, the programs exist, we’re fine tuning, and we’re improving, and we’re checking how they’re going. We’re making them better. We’re seeing the projects that work best. The ones that came up short, in many ways, the hardest part, and in many ways the decisive part because the implementation, the execution, the results, that’s what this is all about. But that’s the stage that we’re launching into now. But the fun part of it is getting out in these communities, seeing the, first of all, the pride of the local leaders who put together these visions and are now getting them funded. And then most of all talking to the people whose lives are going to change because of the improvements. Whether their commute’s getting shorter, their neighborhoods getting safer, their air’s getting cleaner. All because we’re taking this action.

Preet Bharara:

Which leads me to ask the question because I don’t know the answer to this. Doing a lot of traveling, going to communities as you’ve been describing. Do you have a plane? Is there like “Transportation Secretary One?”

Pete Buttigieg:

So most of the time I’m an airliner. Definitely yesterday. Tomorrow.

Preet Bharara:

A commercial airliner?

Pete Buttigieg:

Yes. But once in a while. Yeah there is-

Preet Bharara:

So when you fly in an airplane and there’s crappy service, do they know that you’re Pete Buttigieg?

Pete Buttigieg:

I’m guessing it just kind of depends. But, I mean, I’ve definitely had my share of-

Preet Bharara:

Do you ever say, “Do you know who I am?” Do you do that?

Pete Buttigieg:

No. I got canceled-

Preet Bharara:

You should.

Pete Buttigieg:

No, in fact we’re careful. If I’m traveling on the government dime and I happen to get upgraded because my frequent flyer or whatever, I try to get back out of there. ‘Cause I don’t think it’s a good look to be sitting in first class when you’re on government travel.

Preet Bharara:

Do you think it’s a better look to be sitting by the laboratory in the back as a cabinet secretary?

Pete Buttigieg:

I mean sometimes that’s where they put me and that’s-

Preet Bharara:

They do. I was a government servant for a long time, and I would be on planes with friends in first class, them going, “What are you doing in the middle seat in the back?” That’s the government job.

Pete Buttigieg:

I try to go for a window or an aisle seat, but sometimes it’s the middle seat. It is what it is. Look, I mean, I’ve probably been canceled three times in the last two or three months, so we’ve all experienced some of the frustrations of air travel. And we’re seeing improvement too, but there’s a long way to go and we’re going to stay on that.

Preet Bharara:

Last question because this is Stay Tuned In Brief. Is there a favorite project that you have seen funded or that has been mentioned to you that’s part of this?

Pete Buttigieg:

I wouldn’t dare pick a favorite. But let me just tell you the one I saw today. I’m seeing one just about every day.

Preet Bharara:

You were telling me about it before we started.

Pete Buttigieg:

So my new word of the day is, “Centroid.” “Centroid” sounds like a Star Trek thing.

Preet Bharara:

It’s a robotic insect.

Pete Buttigieg:

Yeah. No, it’s a term for this thing at the port of LA. Basically, picture a… It’s the shape of a racetrack, an elliptical shape made out of railroad. And very creatively, they started using the inner space of it which hadn’t been used very much to put extra chassis and containers during this period we faced last year when so many containers were building up, container ships that were coming in in an irregular wave from China post-COVID, or during that stage of COVID.

And in order for a truck to get into or out of that zone, they have to cross this elliptical track. And there’s one place to cross it, which isn’t very optimal because either the truck has to wait or the trains have to wait. Or there’s a tunnel, which doesn’t really work well either. So we’re building them a bridge over this track into the so-called centroid that is going to mean more chassis availability, containers moving more quickly. It’s going to save something like 2,500 truck hours per day when it’s complete and we’re giving them 20 million bucks to help get it done.

So that’s just one example of something that most people will never see that, or feel it, or know it. But you could be sitting at our house in Michigan and a product will get to you sooner or cost a little bit less to ship because that improvement was made in the Port of Los Angeles. Everything is connected, and that’s what we’re trying to support and deal with with all these funds.

Preet Bharara:

So we are out of time because it’s In Brief. Thank you for your service. Safe travels, and congratulations on becoming a dad.

Pete Buttigieg:

Thanks very much.

Preet Bharara:

Thank you. Secretary Pete Buttigieg. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at Preet Bharara with the hashtag “askpreet,” or you can call and leave me a message at (669) 247-7338. That’s (669) 24 PREET, or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com.

Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The senior producer is Adam Waller. The editorial producers are Sam Ozer-Staton and Noa Azulai. The audio producer is Matt Wiener. And the CAFE team is Matthew Billy, David Kurlander, Jake Kaplan, Namrata Shah, and Claudia Hernandez. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. Stay tuned.