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CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, it is, of course, all about infrastructure and an essential part of daily life, whether in public health utility systems, or indeed how we get around. In the United States, billions of dollars are going towards improving transit in President Biden’s American Rescue Plan. The industry was hit hard during the pandemic. And Pete Buttigieg is Biden’s new transportation secretary. And he tells our Walter Isaacson it is an equity issue that’s tied to health and, of course, the climate.
WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you, Christiane. And, Secretary Buttigieg, welcome to the show.
BUTTIGIEG: Thanks for having me. Good to be with you.
ISAACSON: The American Rescue Plan that we have just passed to fight COVID, it’s got $30 billion for public transportation, for transit. First of all, why is that part of a COVID relief bill? And, secondly, what is it going to do?
BUTTIGIEG: Well, two simple reasons why it is part of a COVID relief bill. First of all, COVID is the reason why these public transit agencies and other transportation entities got absolutely crushed when it came to revenue. Many of them had to cut routes. Many of them were looking at laying off more workers if we didn’t do something. The second reason this has a lot to do with COVID relief is the simple fact that we can’t expect all Americans to be able to get vaccinated if they literally can’t get to where the shots are available. The truth is, public transportation is part of public health. You can’t separate the two. And this infusion of support from the American Rescue Plan is going to allow us to bring a lot of these agencies back from the brink, not just local public transit, by the way, but also Amtrak, which was going to have to cut even more of the routes they had cut. Now they’re restoring routes already. We saw news about airlines telling their employees they could tear up those furlough notices. This is a real sigh of relief across the transportation sector.
ISAACSON: OK, but in places like South Bend or here in New Orleans, what are we going to expect, especially with public transit now? What’s your vision there?
BUTTIGIEG: Well, as we said, with the Rescue Plan, we’re able to get back on our feet. For the long run, I’m really energized about what’s possible with a comprehensive infrastructure vision. It’s been talked about here in Washington for a long time. But, right now, I think we have a once-in-a- lifetime combination of public impatience, bipartisan interest, a supportive president, and the right kind of economic conditions to do something big. In communities like New Orleans or South Bend, that could mean ensuring that we have more of the routes that are going to serve those who maybe have been bypassed in the past. It also means making sure that transit is part of the climate solutions. We have programs already that make it possible for agencies, for example, to buy buses that run on electric power and are not emitting. But that’s just the beginning of what we could do. And, again, all of these things are connected. A lot of people who live closer to bus routes and highways that they have a lot of vehicles with high emissions are more likely to be communities of color, and are more likely to suffer from health issues related to particulate matter going into the air. Now is the time for an infrastructure vision, whether we’re talking about public transit, whether we’re talking about aviation, driving, or any other way of getting people and goods around the country. Now is the time to embrace the goals of climate responsibility, equity, and economic strength for the future.
ISAACSON: So, how do you build climate responsibility into an infrastructure bill that you’re thinking of?
BUTTIGIEG: Well, think about what’s happening with electric vehicles. The technology is getting better and better in the cars. But we have got to go a long way in order to make sure there’s the charging infrastructure, so that people would not be anxious about whether they would run out of charge on a medium-sized trip. That’s why the president committed to installing half-a-million electric vehicle charging stations across the country. It’s the kind of thing that we need to do as a matter of policy in order for the private sector to be able to do the rest with these fantastic electric cars that are being often designed, made, built right here in America. This also goes hand in hand with other kinds of related policy, so, housing, for example. Obviously, a different U.S. department handles that. But transit-oriented development, making sure the way that our cities and communities continue to grow, is compatible with giving Americans more options for how to get around, that’s something that should be closely connected to a better vision for access to public transportation. Look, cars are a big part of the community I grew up in, which was largely created as an auto manufacturing town, and will always be an important part of American life. But we need to have alternatives to cars as well, from bicycles to trains. And it’s about making sure all of these things fit together in a way that makes sense for Americans and makes sense for our climate.
ISAACSON: The last time America had a really great infrastructure bill was during the Eisenhower years, when we did the interstate highway system. But it was so focused. I know you have been reading about Robert Moses and things. It was so focused on the automobile. What mistakes were made there that you think we now have to remedy?
BUTTIGIEG: Well, I think those policies really revolved around the car has, as you say. We need to make sure the policies revolve around human beings, who will sometimes be in a car, sometimes be on foot or on a bicycle or in a wheelchair, or sometimes want to be able to get on a train. All of these things have to be supported in an integrated way. And I think you’re right that this is a moment the likes of which we haven’t seen since President Eisenhower implemented the interstate highway plan. I’d say this is maybe the fourth moment for a transformational investment and decision around infrastructure. The most recent one was the interstate highway system under Eisenhower. You could go back about a century before that to the Lincoln era, and what it meant to truly get this country connected by rail with Transcontinental Railroad. And you could go back a couple of generations before that to look at how the construction of the Erie Canal wasn’t just about moving goods on water. It was one of the things that actually made the United States one country. We got to have that same level of ambition right now, because I believe a moment like this, with the conditions we have, and the appetite that we have, and the need that we have, comes along roughly once every 50 to 100 years. And shame on us if we don’t do something about it, because I can tell you, our international competitors, notably China, very much are making those investments. And we risk being left behind.
ISAACSON: Man, I love your sense of history on these great waves. And each of the waves you have talked about had some signature to it, whether it be the great rail connections or the interstate highways. Do you think your infrastructure bill on the Biden administration is going to have some big signature, defining characteristic or will it more properly just be a collection of many different things?
BUTTIGIEG: This one will need to be a little more spread out. And I’ll tell you one of the main reasons why. We’ve got about a trillion-dollar backlog just in maintaining what we’ve already got. Now, it’s not as glamorous as building something new. But the truth is, we’ve just got to fix the roads and improve the bridges that we have. And there are some places where we may even need to reduce what we have a little bit. Areas where there’s just more asphalt than we need. And some mayors, I definitely know how these feels, has to pave, plow and maintain it when it’s actually no longer meeting its original purpose. So, we’ve got to add and subtract. And the sum total of all this will be a transportation network that works across every mode and it works across every kind of community, rural and urban. And that means paying attention to the history. Sometimes the dark history of the past where highways went through, often black neighborhoods, sometimes destroying them, and where other communities and neighborhoods were left out entirely.
ISAACSON: Yes. When you talk about that, highways being built in the past that destroyed thriving black neighborhoods, I mean, I can look just about seven blocks from here and Claiborne Avenue used to be a thriving black business district until an expressway was built on top of it. Do you think there should be money to take some of these things down?
BUTTIGIEG: I do. I think that we ought to have funding that is specifically committed to reversing some of the arms in the past. But it’s not just a backward-looking project. If we make these investments in the right way, we’re also creating thriving communities for the future. That’s a policy choice we could be making right now. And if we do it right, it will pay dividends. Look, there is a lot of hard-nosed economic analysis telling us that the cost of racial inequity to this country brings the entire country down. Holds the entire country back. So, these are investments that are going to be to the benefit of U.S. economic strengths writ large as well as representing a measure of justice and equity to communities that have been harmed.
ISAACSON: Give me a good example of an equity driven public or transportation decision you might make.
BUTTIGIEG: Well, a good example is along the lines of what you’ve described. So, if you have a community where a highway was sent right through a neighborhood, often a neighborhood where there were minoritized residents who were politically considered, literally, the path of least resistance. Sometimes that highway still needs to happen, but it ought to be underground. And when you do that, when you actually move it underground, you can create new land. That scarcest thing that you usually can’t get any more of, only less, through what’s on top of it and make decisions about how that land can be used for the benefit of the community. The mayor of Mount Vernon, New York, let me know that in that community, at certain times of day, residents find it easier to get down to Manhattan than to get across town to get to a grocery store because of the way that that community has been sliced up through infrastructure investments in the past. Are there ways that we could do something to fix that? These are the kinds of investments that I’m excited about. And one more thing which will be a policy and economic challenge. We’ve got to make sure the business opportunities that are going to be created with infrastructure spending, in terms of who owns businesses, especially small businesses that get these contracts, and whose working on the projects reflect America. There’s a lot of conversation around buy America. There also needs to be a lot of conversation around things like local hire. It won’t be easy because we’ve got to build up a business base to do this. But shame on us if we allow a lot of resources to be spent once again and have them not go to businesses that reflect the communities where these investments are happening.
ISAACSON: In addition to looking at the new transportation infrastructure bill through an equity lens, you say you want to look at it through a climate lens. Give me some examples in which people may not understand how you can do things that will have significant impact on climate change, including — would that include things like next generation air traffic control or moving away from cars to transit?
BUTTIGIEG: Yes. There’s a huge opportunity here. It starts with this. If you look across the U.S. economy, the sector that contributes the most greenhouse gases is transportation. Now, that also means transportation stands to be the biggest part of the solution. We already talked about electric cars. That’s one big part of it. We’ve got to help make sure that they’re adopted. Also, having alternatives to cars. That’s why we need to have good transit options. And this is not just a big city or blue state thing. Smaller communities can benefit enormously from having quality transportation options like good buses or bus rapid transit. Even just making communities more bike friendly creates a greener and healthier way for a lot of people to get to work and get where they need to be. So, there are a lot of these things that we know how to do right now before you even get into the more futuristic possibilities. What high-speed rail would really mean to our climate future in this country. Sustainable aviation fuel, something that’s in its infancy but shows a lot of promise. And in the meantime, as you mentioned, next generation air traffic control means that airplanes are just in the air less long. You have shorter hang time, so to speak, while these routes are being flown because you can better optimize the way the plane is moving around. We think there’s a 10 percent or 15 percent opportunity to reduce fuel consumption just from that one change. Now, I’m making it sound easy. A lot goes into upgrading the air traffic control system and all its complexity. But we need to be pursuing all of the above in order to do what we must do, which is a net zero economy by 2050.
ISAACSON: An infrastructure bill would not just be about transportation, of course. We have a lot of crumbling infrastructure. The mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, is coming on this show to talk about the water problem in Jackson, Mississippi. How do you make sure an infrastructure bill integrates and is holistic and not just about each sector doing its own thing?
BUTTIGIEG: It’s a really important point especially because we’re also adapting to the fact that the right answer on an infrastructure choice might change given the fact that water levels are rising. The truth is, not all of this has to get sorted out in Washington, in this building. Communities can do a great job of planning in an integrated way for about their future. We’ve got to make sure that we support and reward and encourage those integrated plans. And we’re doing it right now, even with the authorities we already have. For example, I signed off recently on a round of grants can INFRA, about $889 million available to communities and states working to improve their infrastructure. And for the first time, we explicitly included considerations like climate and racial equity to encourage communities to come back to us with a plan that really explains how everything they are seeking to do fits together. Infrastructure is everywhere. Yes, it’s roads and bridges. It’s also ports and waterways. By the way, the national air space is a piece of infrastructure, even though you can’t touch it in the same way as a bridge. And increasingly, digital infrastructure needs to be part of that conversation, too.
ISAACSON: Infrastructure bills used to be very bipartisan because there was a road for everybody or a bridge for everybody or new airport facility. And people are thinking this may be the opportunity to break the fever of the hyper partisanship we have in Washington and make this bill truly bipartisan. How much conversation, though, are you having with your old colleagues on Capitol Hill from the other party and how optimistic are you that there might actually be Republicans who say, let me help write and support this bill?
BUTTIGIEG: Let me tell you, I’ve had lots of conversations with Republican and Democratic senators and House members. We’ve had two meetings now led by the president in the Oval Office with members of both parties from the House and the Senate respectively. And what I find is that that appetite really is there, just like I find it among my former mayoral colleagues of both parties. There’s a sincere desire to get something done. Now, I’m not naive. Just because there is a sincere desire it doesn’t mean it will happen. Not in today’s Washington. But I’ll say this, if there’s anything that can still be done on a bipartisan basis in this town, I believe it’s infrastructure.
ISAACSON: But the COVID Relief Bill passed without any Republican support. Can you accomplish your goals without getting a few Republican votes?
BUTTIGIEG: Well, again, I think that there is sincere bipartisan interest in doing this. And we would much rather do this on a bipartisan basis. Now, when the vast majority of Republicans and Democrats across America want to do something, the question of whether that’s bipartisan here in Washington in the end is up to Republican legislators. They’ve got to decide whether to vote with the American people and we’ve got to decide how to put together a package that can earn that vote. I’m optimistic about doing it. But the bottom line is, we’ve got to get something done.
ISAACSON: And how do you make people feel comfortable that we can pay for that?
BUTTIGIEG: Well, you know, often the question of how are you going to pay for that is used to end a conversation. I think it’s the beginning of a conversation because on one level, it’s actually relatively simple. Now, I don’t mean to say easy. When I say simple, I mean, that there are basically three things you can do. You can do user fees, things like the gas tax that pay for roads based on how much you drive, things like taxes and collecting taxes is obviously a classic way of how governments pay for the things they do or you are borrowing against future fees and taxes. It basically comes down to whatever combination of one or more of those three things, fees, taxes and borrowing we’re willing to do. Now, here’s the good news. Return on investment for infrastructure spending is incredibly robust. Especially right now with historically low interest rates. So, whatever combination of those funding sources Congress is willing to put up will yield things that we absolutely need as a country and I also think are generationally important. You know, often a hesitancy to spend is expressed in the rhetoric of, you know, we don’t want our kids to have to pay for this. I think on some level that’s a responsible way to think about it. But we also don’t want a future generation to have to pick up the pieces of a failure to invest in American infrastructure or, worse, a failure to prevent climate destruction. That choice is in our hands right now.
ISAACSON: Mr. Secretary, thank you so much for joining us.
BUTTIGIEG: Thank you. Great to be with you.