Pete Buttigieg visits East Palestine, regrets not visiting sooner
Fox News correspondent Mike Tobin has the latest on the hazardous train derailment on 'Special Report.'
Over the past few months, it has become even more apparent that our nation’s infrastructure is in a state of utter disrepair, and the American people are losing faith in the leaders who are supposed to maintain it and make it better.
Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, who took 10 days to even acknowledge the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, has failed to address the many longstanding challenges posed by America’s crumbling infrastructure because he’s concerned about something else – promoting wokeness at DOT and in our culture.
During those 10 days while Ohioans fled their homes and feared for their health, Buttigieg found time to say one of the most overtly racist things a government official has said in recent memory; he insinuated that there are too many Americans of European descent – White people – in the construction industry.
BUTTIGIEG ALLIES 'EXASPERATED' BY CRITICISM OVER RESPONSE TO OHIO TRAIN DISASTER: REPORT
I don’t know about you, but I’m glad there are so many hard-working Americans of many backgrounds working in construction, and when I see these men and women literally building the structures that house us and the roads that connect us, I’m not thinking about their race. I’m just appreciating that they’re there doing the hard work necessary for our society to thrive.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg cared more about changing the NOTAM system from ‘Notice to Airmen’ to ‘Notice to Air Missions,’ than he did about the system's failure that caused mass grounding of aircraft. (iStock)
As a member of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and a small business owner that has run a family-owned trucking company for more than 30 years, I am committed to giving these people the tools to make our infrastructure the world’s safest and most advanced once again.
The same cannot be said of Secretary Buttigieg, whose focus on wokeness prevents him from assessing the root cause of transportation incidents in a way that is productive. There are three basic questions that people in the private sector ask every day to solve challenges:
- What is the problem?
- How do we fix it?
- How do we prevent it from happening again?
Buttigieg and the Biden administration more broadly have demonstrated that answers to these questions are not a priority. So, House Republicans are working to hold them accountable and are standing up for the American people.
For example, in a recent Transportation and Infrastructure Committee hearing on safety within the national airspace system, I asked the acting associate administrator for aviation safety about why the agency spent staff time and taxpayer money on a 176-page rule to change the name of the NOTAM system from "Notice to Airmen" to "Notice to Air Missions."
As you may know, in January, the failure of the NOTAM system, which provides pilots with critical information in real-time such as weather and ground conditions that may affect flight safety, caused the largest grounding of flights since 9/11.
Given that the FAA’s top mission is aviation safety, I wanted to know how removing "men" from the program’s name instead of say, upgrading the NOTAM’s decades-old IT system, supported that goal.
When you combine this with other problems at FAA and the disaster in Ohio, Americans are beginning to ask important questions such as what is the government doing with all the money it says is going to infrastructure, and is the Biden administration committed to protecting American lives?
An aerial image showing the rail car that is leaking chemicals in Perris, Calif. in 2022. (CAL Fire/Riverside County Fire Department)
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We need to provide vigorous oversight of DOT’s money going forward. After all, when Congress passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) in November 2021, it spent $1.2 trillion that at least in theory was supposed to fix these problems. Where did the $66 billion dedicated to rail go and why are there still trains coming off the tracks?
But oversight isn’t the only thing we need. We also need new leadership at DOT. The secretary’s poor leadership as the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, where he could not even fix potholes without the help of Domino’s Pizza, followed him to Washington.
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President Joe Biden didn’t choose him to lead one of the most crucial federal agencies because of track record or experience. He was hired to check a diversity box, which is literally making Americans less safe.
It's time for Mayor Pete to go back to Indiana. I am calling on him to resign immediately so someone serious about building infrastructure and transportation systems that are safe and meet the needs of our 21st century economy can start getting the job done.