NEW YORK FOREIGN PRESS CENTER, 799 UNITED NATIONS PLAZA, 10TH FLOOR
MODERATOR: All right. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the New York Foreign Press Center. We are glad you are here. My name is Melissa Waheibi. I’m the acting director, and I’ll be the moderator for today’s briefing. I am honored to introduce U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, who will highlight U.S. investments in infrastructure, transportation, and international partnerships. So we’ll begin with opening remarks from the Secretary, and then we’ll follow from a time of Q&A, which I will moderate.
Sir, thank you for being here.
SECRETARY BUTTIGIEG: Thank you, Melissa. Thanks to the Foreign Press Center for hosting us, and thanks to all of you. I want to begin with this: There are a few weeks left in the Biden-Harris administration, and that makes this a good moment to reflect on what has happened over the last few years; and so much has happened so quickly that I think it’s important to remember what it was like when we got here.
When President Biden took office, we were deep in the pandemic, facing disruptions to our transportation systems more profound than anything we have experienced in peace time in the United States. Our global supply chains were snarled, the aviation industry had been brought to a standstill, so much so that economists feared it might not recover at all. And at the same time, America was grappling with the consequences of a slower motion crisis that had been brought on by longstanding underinvestment and disinvestment in our national infrastructure, which underpins our entire economy.
The circumstances that greeted us in 2021 demonstrated the interconnectivity of the global economy and of our transportation systems. The challenges we faced demanded bold and decisive action, which President Biden delivered. For one, thanks to the historic bipartisan infrastructure law, America’s transportation systems are finally receiving much needed and long-awaited investments.
Over $570 billion in funding has been announced and more 66,000 infrastructure projects are receiving support from this generationally significant package. That means we’re fixing roads, bridges, public transportation, ports, and the airports that I know many of you know intimately. We are funding the Gateway tunnel project not far from where we are gathered, which is among the biggest public works projects in modern American history and which includes adding new train tunnels under the Hudson River that are critically important given the condition of the current tunnel, which was built at the dawn of the 20th century and was badly damaged by Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
And today because of this President and this administration, our regional, national, and global supply chains are more resilient. We have created an innovative program to bring together a network of public and private partners to share information, work together, add visibility to our supply chains, and better anticipate cargo movement and shipments. We’ve taken measures with our G7 partners to monitor and strengthen international supply chains. And today we’re better equipped to withstand other disruptions – as we have seen, even since COVID, from extreme weather impacts, to Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, to events like the Baltimore bridge collapse in March of this year.
In the aviation sector, U.S. passengers are flying in record numbers. In fact, we’ve recently recorded more than 3 million passengers flying in a single day, the Sunday after Thanksgiving. That’s the most ever recorded. We’ve delivered the most expansive range of consumer protections in the modern aviation era, and we’ve expanded global connectivity through new Open Skies partnerships with Angola, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Fiji, Moldova, Mongolia, and Mozambique, such that the U.S. now has 135 Open Skies partners in total.
We’ve worked alongside the member nations of ICAO, the International Civil Aviation Organization, to ensure safety in the skies and promote sustainability in the future, as we work to increase the production of sustainable aviation fuel and work towards a shared goal of net-zero emissions by 2050. And last week, we provided to ICAO our 2024 Update of the U.S. Aviation Climate Action Plan, charting this very important dimension of the future of aviation.
Finally, I want to underscore that the U.S. Department of Transportation is proud to stand with the people of Ukraine as part of the United States commitment to our friends abroad and to universal democratic values. The Biden-Harris administration has been clear in our support of Ukraine’s independence since Russia staged its brutal and unjustified full-scale invasion in 2022. In Kyiv just over a year ago, I had the opportunity to take the train from Poland, meet with President Zelenskyy, with Prime Minister Shmyhal, and with my transportation counterpart and other Ukrainian leaders to reinforce our partnership and to discuss ways to advance Ukraine’s economic recovery and self-sufficiency. And we have been clear about continued technical assistance to improve the efficiency of transported goods across borders, to strengthen rail and maritime infrastructure, and to prepare for the resumption of civil aviation when they secure a just peace.
So with that, again, I’m pleased to be able to join you this morning, and I will return it to Melissa to guide our questions and answers.
MODERATOR: Great. Thank you, sir. So this is the time for the Q&A. For those in the room, please raise your hand, I will call on you – and wait for the microphone, as this is being transcribed. For those on Zoom, same. I will call on you. You can enable your microphone, state your name and organization, ask your question. We’ll begin here in the room.
QUESTION: Paolo Mastrolilli with the Italian daily La Repubblica. Thank you very much for doing this. You were mentioning before the initiative of the G7 partners in terms of supply chains after COVID. What would be the impact of the tariffs that the President-elect is talking about, not only in commerce but on the supply chain effectiveness?
SECRETARY BUTTIGIEG: Well, certainly there would be an impact. I can’t speculate on what the incoming administration will do. What I can say is that not only COVID, but the response to COVID demonstrated the benefits of strengthening our supply chains, and demonstrated the importance of even the most complex international supply chains to our ability to sustain economic growth.
We as an administration have been equally focused on developing robust domestic industry, and on making sure that we have healthy international relationships in the trade and the supply chains that underpin that. I think that we have demonstrated that a commitment to domestic manufacturing and a commitment to our international relationships are things that can travel together, because we have seen both grow at levels that have been certainly without precedent in my lifetime under President Biden’s leadership. What will happen under the next president, obviously I have to leave to them.
MODERATOR: Thank you. We’ll go to Zoom. Dmitry, I saw your video enabled at one point. If you could re-enable that, your audio, and state your name, organization, ask your question.
QUESTION: Oh, yeah. Thank you very much for taking my question. Dmitry Anopchenko here. I am in the same boat as our speaker today. No one is able to pronounce my family name. (Laughter.) You know what I mean?
Mr. Buttigieg, thanks very much. Just a question. A lot of people in Biden team – we still got a month and half under Biden administration. And I heard from a lot of your colleagues that they will try to accomplish what they started toward Ukraine. They will try to support, they will try to provide the money, they will try to accomplish some project they started during the – being in their administration. So what’s your position? Do you have something in your mind you may finish, you may accomplish, helping Ukraine? Thank you.
SECRETARY BUTTIGIEG: Well, thank you, to a fellow member of the unpronounceable name club. And let me say first that we are going to continue with each of the 38 days that we have left to make good on this administration’s commitment to our friendship with Ukraine. For the U.S. Department of Transportation, that includes planned sessions exchanged technical information and expertise, to be hosted in Moldova, related to cross-border transportation and logistics matters. And we continue to deeply value the relationships that our department formed with our Ukrainian partners, both before and since the full-scale invasion.
I would also offer two other reflections: one, that the relationship between the United States and Ukraine is a relationship between peoples, and not only a relationship between states; and that the entire country, as did so much of the democratic world, looked up and took notice as the Ukrainian people, even though they had not asked to be in this position, wound up defending universal and democratic values while defending their own independence.
I would likewise note that there continues to be a remarkably strong degree of bipartisan belief in the cause of supporting our Ukrainian friends. The last time I had the occasion to mark the relationship at the embassy in Washington, we had many visible Republican as well as Democratic leaders in attendance. And so it is my hope – knowing that, of course, the foreign policy of the Executive Branch will be set by the President and the White House – it will also, though, be influenced by the American people, and by voices in Congress, and other voices; that there will continue to be a very strong commitment and a very strong relationship, which I hope leads to an unrelenting focus on supporting the people of Ukraine for as long as it takes.
MODERATOR: And we’ll go in the front.
QUESTION: Thank you for doing this. My name is Emmanuel Cyria. I’m from Swedish Business Media. I have a question about the bipartisan infrastructure law. Half of – about half of the funds have been announced, and there’s a lot – I think it’s like $600 billion left of it. How do you future-proof it so that the incoming president can’t stop it through executive action, or any other ways?
SECRETARY BUTTIGIEG: We have worked to move as much funding as we responsibly can. And we were doing that before the election, and of course are doing it with a great deal of energy and urgency since the election, too. Because of the way the funding is structured, even funding that is considered part of Fiscal Year 2025, for example, in some cases it was appropriate and allowed to announce that earlier, because it was advance appropriated. So whenever we saw an opportunity to begin the process early, we took it – because of the urgency of getting these things done. It’s not just driven by a political calendar, it’s the awareness that each year that a project waits to be funded, it grows more expensive and the cost of not having it grow.
I would also say that for the projects that have been announced but are not yet complete, we have completed and will continue working to complete grant agreements that contractually commit the federal government to deliver on its promises with the funding. And there are many structures that would allow construction to proceed, sometimes even before some of those processes are complete.
The last thing I’ll say is that I think that – I would like to think that improving our infrastructure is one of the least partisan remaining dimensions of U.S. domestic policy. I would add that, if anything, the benefits of much of what we have done as an administration have skewed toward conservative areas and red states – obviously, not as a result of any political favoritism, but because the funding went where the need was. And in whatever capacity I’m in in the future, I’ll do my part to remind everyone that these projects were chosen because they’re good projects, not because of ideological considerations.
MODERATOR: Great, thanks. We’ll go to the second row.
QUESTION: Thank you. Sally Patterson from Feature Story News. Thank you so much for doing this. You mentioned record numbers of passengers on flights in particular, and how that has seen a real bounce back after COVID-19. That is, of course, something to grapple with when it comes to the environment and environmental sustainability. What sorts of measures are in place at the moment, and are you concerned when the next administration takes over that some of those measures might be really thrown out the window?
SECRETARY BUTTIGIEG: One thing that we’ve found is really a keystone in many of our international relationships is the development of sustainable aviation fuels. We’ve had a particularly fruitful partnership with the UK on this. It’s been a frequent topic in the G7, ICAO, and ITF and just about every other multilateral forum that we participate in. That is an opportunity not only for sustainability but for economic growth, certainly in the United States, and I think it’s something that deserves to be pursued.
We have a lot of work to do, though, to meet our marks in terms of expanding the availability of that. This is another example of something that, while climate action may not be greeted with as much enthusiasm by a future administration, the constituency for the economic opportunities and the jobs that it’s creating, including in the industrial Midwest, should, I hope, provide a compelling reason not to allow politics to pollute what is a very important effort.
Of course, we also need to make sure that there are alternatives, and – to each form of transportation. And in the U.S. we see a lot of markets, a lot of regions, where you have very short flights or uncomfortably long drives. These are excellent candidates for rail, and I think the delivery of high-speed rail on U.S. soil, which we expect to begin with the Nevada project that we broke ground on earlier this year, will pave the way for increased appetite in the U.S. for that kind of development, both to improve the reliability and frequency on the rail network we already have and to expand routes. Creating those kinds of alternatives I think helps with the challenge of how to keep emissions under control, and we’re clearly going to see even more demand in the future.
MODERATOR: Great, thanks. We’ll come to the front.
QUESTION: Hi. Bastion Bouchard from Les Echos in France. I wanted to ask – you just talked about trains and Amtrak and on its regard with ridership. Are you confident that with funding the project that you funded there’s going to be continuing growth in rail passengers in the U.S., and why – what do you think it’s future-proofing from the next administration (inaudible)?
SECRETARY BUTTIGIEG: So the way I’d speak to audiences about rail is that we should expect in the U.S. the same standard as citizens of any other developed country are accustomed to, but we don’t really have that. And so long as that’s true, we’ve got a lot of investments to make. This is not about geographic preference; it’s not about ideology, although certain things that we’re committed to in our administration, like climate action, are also at stake here.
Candidly, much of the investment we’re making is necessary simply to sustain the level of rail service we’ve already got, and that’s part of what many of the Northeast Corridor projects underway are doing. Something like the Portal North Bridge to replace a hundred-year-old swing bridge with something that has no moving parts is necessary just in order to maintain the kind of service that people who’ve – been accustomed to. Other things really do represent a novel improvement, including frequent – these added frequencies will be possible in New York and Washington with the completion of some of those projects.
I do not believe that we are close to a true high-speed rail network, but I believe we will come a big step change closer to it the first time that Americans experience true high-speed rail on U.S. soil, which should be the result of the Nevada to southern California project. My goal is that the same conversations Americans have with their friends and family when returning from abroad and experiencing the TGV or the Shinkansen and saying “why can’t we have that here” becomes an experience people just when they get back from Las Vegas and say “why can’t we have that here” in the Midwest or Texas or wherever they live. And I believe we’ve made material steps toward that, but to continue the progress will clearly require more funding.
MODERATOR: Okay, we’re going to go to – in the third row. Let’s get around the world a little bit.
QUESTION: Thank you so much for this opportunity. My name is Moeko from Tokyo Broadcasting System, a Japanese television network. I had a great opportunity to cover you back in 2020, your campaign trail, and we went to Indiana. And this is kind of change of pace. As a younger generation of Democrat, how are you taking in the presidential election results this year? As you step away from this role, how do you see yourself involved in politics in the future?
SECRETARY BUTTIGIEG: Let me – well, first let me take care to respect U.S. campaign rules that prevent me from speaking too much about partisan politics while I’m in a federal capacity. But having said that, as a policy matter I believe that the work that we have done, especially around things like infrastructure and job creation, will continue to bear fruit in the years to come. But the reality of the work that we do is that so many of the things we launched in the first half of this decade will bear their greatest fruit in the second half of this decade. It’s certainly the nature of large, complex infrastructure projects, but other things, too, like the cap on out-of-pocket expenses for Medicare will kick in soon, which means there may not have been time to reap political credit for them, but they were still the right thing to do.
I was back in northern Indiana, where I grew up and served, a couple of weeks ago, and the level of economic growth happening there is astonishing, specifically in areas where they told us when I was growing up we were done – auto manufacturing. Now there’s a $3 billion plant going up – by the way, a joint venture with Korean partners – that GM is putting up that represents by a multiple a greater investment in the auto industry than anything probably since the Kennedy administration in the town where I grew up. That’s happening because of the Biden-Harris administration and our work.
But one thing I’ve seen often is the political trajectory of a good policy takes a long time. I first ran for office in 2010. Any of us running for office with a D next to our name were demolished politically because of how Americans felt about the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare. Today, that legislation is so popular that even Republican members of Congress and others who attempted to destroy it claim to have been protecting it all along. To me, that shows how in eight years, which is both a short time and a long time depending how you think about it, the political rewards attached to a good policy change.
As for me, I know – I can speak with more clarity on what I care about than what I’ll be doing professionally after January 20th. I can tell you that for the next 38 days we have a lot of work to do to continue moving funding toward projects that are deserving – you can expect billions of dollars more in announcements before we leave – and to complete policies that we’ve been working on.
But what I care about is questions like the recovery and renaissance of places in America, in the industrial Midwest where I grew up. I care about the use of technology to make people better off, and I care about structural questions that will determine whether our democracy grows more representative or less in my lifetime. And I will find ways to work on that, whether it’s in office or otherwise, after spending a good amount of time with my spouse and my kids and our dog and a long list of chores that has been prepared for me by my husband.
MODERATOR: Great. We’ll come on the end here.
QUESTION: Hi. Shilong from Xinhua, a Chinese correspondent (inaudible). I’ve got question – so what lessons have you learned as Secretary of Transportation in terms of – that could inform the future of transportation policy? And secondly, what do you see about your legacy as the Secretary of Transportation? Do you have concerns that incoming administration would flip-flop what you have done?
SECRETARY BUTTIGIEG: Well, to answer the first question, an experience like this is every day an education, and much of what we’ve learned has had to do with the complexity of major infrastructure projects but also the remarkable political alliances that can be formed around getting it done.
No one believed when we arrived that President Biden could actually achieve what he set out to do in terms of a bipartisan agreement on a major infrastructure package. We were told he couldn’t do anything on a bipartisan basis in the polarized Washington of 2021, and yet many Republicans crossed the aisle to work with President Biden, work with Democrats, work with me on getting this legislation through. And now places red, blue, and purple are benefiting from the 66,000 projects that it’s funding, and we’re still going.
Another thing I learned is the importance of information both to empower consumers – for example, we empowered consumers with better information about how to hold their airlines accountable for the way they are treated as passengers – or the importance of information for people who are suffering from crises, whether it was the derailment in East Palestine, Ohio or the impacts of Hurricane Helene, where many people were harmed twice, first by the original incident and then by false information that was being presented to them that harmed them. And so I think any agency needs to think in new ways about its responsibilities in the information space.
As far as a legacy, when I think about the things that we are proudest of – a historic infrastructure package in greater proportions than anything we’ve done in 70 years; protections for aviation passengers and railroad workers and many others benefiting from our policy; and the most important thing that gets very little attention, which is the reversal in the rise of roadway deaths in this country that has now been taking place for nine consecutive quarters. Each of those is an area where I would like to believe that, no matter your ideology, you can see the benefits of that. And I think that helps to explain why transportation is one of the less ideological places in the U.S. domestic policy landscape, and that’s something I want to continue working on to help build alliances around getting good things done.
QUESTION: Thanks very much for speaking to us today. My name is Manik Mehta. I’m a syndicated journalist. My question relates to the Baltimore bridge. How much progress has been made, and what is your – what is the federal government’s cost-sharing in reconstruction of that bridge? Secondly, could you envisage the safety of ships plying through the Red Sea in view of the changes that have occurred in Syria recently?
SECRETARY BUTTIGIEG: So with regard to Baltimore, the speed of the work to clear the channel and get the port back open was astonishing, and it was – I remember, maybe on the second day of the crisis, sitting in the Oval Office with President Biden next to Admiral Gautier from the Coast Guard, as both of us were deferring to the Army Corps of Engineers on what was possible. And the President, as if in a movie, picked up the phone and said, “Get me General Spellmon” – from the Army Corps of Engineers – and him joining by phone a discussion about what was possible, and hearing the general say that they could clear the channel in a matter of weeks, and wondering, given the dimensions of the wreckage that I had seen, how that could be done. It was done with more than 50 different agencies – state, local, and federal – cooperating.
But the next project, of course, is restoring the bridge. It will happen. The original bridge took five years to build. I believe we can beat that, but it’s going to take continued work to tear down every obstacle that could get in the way. Some of those obstacles are administrative, but the biggest is funding. The President is committed to the principle that 100 percent of the funding should be federal, with a very important nuance I should mention, which is that taxpayers should not be responsible for anything that can be recovered from private actors. There’s already been an insurance payment. There may be other judgments to hold private actors accountable. But in terms of taxpayer funding, the President’s made a commitment that would be 100 percent. That is not the first time that we’ve done that in response to a disaster, but it would require legislation from Congress.
The other thing we need Congress to do is to replenish our Emergency Relief Fund. There are billions of dollars in unmet needs and less than $200 million remaining in that account for our department to work with. So far, we have not had to turn anybody away because we provide the funding as the expenses accrue, both for a disaster like this and for a disaster that may have happened three years or five years ago that they’re still recovering from. But we’re not that far away from reaching the bottom of the tank, and we need Congress to help.
As for the Red Sea, I will speak more with hope than with expertise, but certainly there would be an enormous benefit, especially when you consider the constraints on shipping capacity that have been created that make spot rates in particular much more sensitive to any disruption because of the added capacity that’s needed as a consequence of shifts taking longer routes to avoid the Red Sea, in a way that growing the fleet simply can’t keep up with. So anything that contributes to stability in the region is certainly going to help with shipping prices and even as part of the ongoing project of achieving disinflation in the United States.
MODERATOR: All right, we have time for, like, one, maybe two questions depending —
SECRETARY BUTTIGIEG: I’ll try to be concise, then.
MODERATOR: Yeah – no, sir, you’re doing great. We’ll come in the middle here.
QUESTION: Hi. My name is Maral Noshad Sharifi. I cover the U.S. news for Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant. For the past few years I’ve been traveling across the country talking to voters also about your infrastructure bill, but it seemed like a lot of people weren’t really aware of your plans and how it would change their lives. Looking back, do you think you could have, the administration could have done a better job at selling the success of this? Because you’ve been talking about how many big changes you’ve made and how it will change people’s lives, but then you lost the election. So how do you see that?
SECRETARY BUTTIGIEG: One of the challenges we faced is that when something is unambiguously and uncontroversially good, it gets way less coverage. And so we did everything we could to draw attention to good things happening, including me visiting, the President visiting. But some of the projects that got most coverage were the ones where a Republican representative who was against the funding tried to take credit for the project, probably because there was a little more controversy to put some tension on the string and we got more attention on the project.
But it remains the case that often good news is no news, and so we have to continue connecting the dots between good outcomes – whether it’s a new bridge, a repaired airport, or the extraordinary job creation happening in places like where I grew up. And I think we’re dealing both with that fact, that good news is no news, and with the longer-term nature of infrastructure work. I think in the long term, the big deal of President Biden will rank alongside the New Deal of President Roosevelt in its impact and its benefit to the American people. But the long term doesn’t always help you in an election.
MODERATOR: Okay, we have – we’ll go to Boris and —
QUESTION: Hi. I’m Boris Hermann from Suddeutsche Zeitung in Germany. Mr. Buttigieg, I guess I just wonder how you feel at the end of this very remarkable year – let’s put it this way. There was a presidential candidate dropping out of the race. There was a other presidential candidate with a very enthusiastic summer who then lost in some swing states. There’s a convicted felon coming back to the White House. So how is America doing at the moment?
SECRETARY BUTTIGIEG: Well, it’s complicated. I think that’s the best answer I can get. It’s a complicated time for our country. We have, not just in this year but in the last four or five years, been through so much. I think that if you had asked me five or six years ago, for example, how long it would take our country to recover psychologically and societally from a pandemic killing a million Americans and shutting down our society for some period of time, my response would not have been less than five years to get back to normal, and I don’t think we are, psychologically.
But I could also say that the proportions of what we’ve been able to achieve are head-spinning, when I think about what it means that we have renewed industrial strategy in the United States in a way not seen in my lifetime and done everything we’ve done on infrastructure and many other accomplishments. I think that trying to size them up from here, from this moment, is like being close enough to the Empire State Building to touch it, an experience I was thinking about because my father brought me to do exactly that when I was a child the first time I went to New York City. And when you’re close enough to touch it, you can’t actually really see it very well. You can’t even make up – make out its shape. And I think we’re that way, both in terms of the challenges we faced and the accomplishments that have happened in these last four years.
The moment we’re in is, I think, socially and politically precarious for our country, but in certain ways not unprecedented. If you just think about the upheaval that we’ve gone through – obviously nothing quite like this moment, but we have a way of finding a path forward which, in my view, will largely come from local leadership and from outside of Washington in the next couple of years, and I think ultimately can get to a good place.
MODERATOR: Thank you so much. Secretary Buttigieg, thank you so much for being here. Thank you all for coming.
SECRETARY BUTTIGIEG: Thanks for the chance to join today.
MODERATOR: This transcript will be on our website later today. Thank you.