In one of his last official appearances as U.S. Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg spoke Monday with students at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor about the Biden administration’s long-term investments on transportation, but also encouraged them to remain politically engaged as President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office next week.
Buttigieg, speaking during a 90-minute question-and-answer session at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, said as the Biden administration comes to an end, it is leaving every form of U.S. transportation better than they found it.
“That doesn’t mean our work is done,” Buttigieg told moderator Celeste Watkins-Hayes, the Joan and Sanford Weill Dean of Public Policy.
“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,” he said.
Buttigieg pointed to the $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, signed by President Biden in November 2021, as the foundation of that statement, noting the 72,000 projects it funded across the United States, including in both rural and urban areas of Michigan.
“From the 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 every size. All of that’s happening now, and I think it would be easy to imagine it was always going to happen,” he said.
Buttigieg, a former presidential candidate who used to be the mayor of South Bend, Ind., moved to Traverse City in July 2022 with his husband, Chasten Buttigieg, who grew up there. Together, they have two young children. With his time as Transportation secretary ending, Buttigieg has been touted as a possible candidate for Michigan governor in 2026, telling the Detroit News on Monday that he wasn’t ruling out that possibility.
When asked by a student at Monday’s forum to give them hope “on issues of where we’re concerned about civil rights, climate change…give us hope for the next couple years,” Buttigieg acknowledged the lack of optimism about the future that younger generations may be feeling, but urged them not to give in to cynicism.
“I did not come here to tell you everything’s going to be fine. I’m not here to tell you that. Everything’s not going to be fine, but you know, everything’s never been fine,” he said.
Buttigieg recalled stories he heard from his parents about the turbulence of the 1960s, with political unrest centered on the Vietnam War and the fight for civil rights.
“It all looks cool now because you listen to the arts that flourished in response,” said Buttigieg. “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.”
Buttigieg said among the biggest challenges he faced as Transportation secretary, and that we as a nation face, is what he called “the information environment.”
“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 hurricane,” he said. “That might be the challenge of our time.”
Buttigieg said among the ways to combat the rising tide of misinformation is to rely less on global information platforms, and focus more on local sources of information.
“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,” he said.
Buttigieg recommended that people rely more on “offline mechanisms … to build a realistic picture of the world around us,” and then work on scaling that up to the state, regional and national level, calling it “one of the most important projects of our generation.”
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