Pete Buttigieg needed some money for infrastructure.
It was January of 2019, just weeks before he would announce his presidential exploratory committee at a hotel in Washington, DC. And like a lot of leaders of Midwestern cities, beset by climate change and inadequate infrastructure funding, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, was facing down another year of trying to fill approximately 22,000 potholes. Domino's pizza had a solution: A nationwide public relations contest that awarded money to one city in each state whose roads needed fixing. Residents of South Bend voted overwhelmingly in the contest for their city, winning a $5,000 grant that amounted to five percent of its $90,000 pothole-fixing budget.
Fast forward two short years later and President Joe Biden's Transportation secretary will soon find himself flush with approximately $210 billion over five years in discretionary grants. For the next few years, he'll be tasked with doling out those funds to largely popular projects in red and blue states across the country, including megaprojects like the Brent Spence Bridge connecting Kentucky and Ohio, a key reason why Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell voted for the bill. And of course, the money will mend the very same potholes he contended with as a mayor.
"The good news is that this is going to be the largest investment in roadways that we have seen, I think, since the interstate era," Polly Trottenberg, Buttigieg's top deputy at DOT, told Insider last week. "For state and local DOTs, that's one of the ways they're going to put that money to work right away on basic roadway repair and maintenance."
Biden will sign the bill into law on Monday, and with it come a number of new competitive grant programs that will make Buttigieg the most powerful Transportation secretary ever, said Jeff Davis, a senior fellow at the Eno Center for Transportation, an independent charitable foundation.
That's because Buttigieg will effectively be controlling the purse strings of an amount of money that is "at least five or six times more than has existed under a previous secretary," Davis added. In the recent past, such spending programs were more skewed to formula-based funding; now, Buttigieg's DOT will get to pick and choose which projects to back.
Buttigieg runs a federal agency established during the Lyndon B. Johnson administration in 1966—a little more than a decade after President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched the Interstate system. The most recent analogue of a DOT secretary managing such a windfall is Ray LaHood, who oversaw approximately $48 billion for infrastructure projects around the country while serving in the Obama Cabinet following the Great Recession . DOT's annual budget under Buttigieg will increase from $90 billion to $140 billion, and DOT officials acknowledge they will have to staff up to match the moment.
Buttigieg's rise from Midwestern mayor whose city benefitted from $5,000 he didn't ask for to fill potholes to presiding over administering hundreds of billions of dollars in a historic infrastructure package illustrates his dramatic political arc. He's now one of Biden's go-to Cabinet members on messaging, calling the legislation paired with the still-pending human infrastructure bill "the Big Deal."
"Secretary Pete may not have gotten his top choice but he's made the most of it," said former Obama White House spokesman Ben LaBolt, nodding to Buttigieg's hope for a foreign policy gig in the Cabinet such as Ambassador to the United Nations. "He's been out front on what may be the signature issue of the administration."
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