Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg at the Department of Transportation offices in Washington, DC. | Photo by Cheriss May for The Verge
The outgoing transportation secretary on EVs, robotaxis, Trump, Musk, and the work still left to do.
The outlook for electric vehicles is looking really shaky. Sales are up for most companies not named “Tesla,” but with Donald Trump promising to eliminate all of the generous subsidies and tax credits put in place by the Biden administration, that momentum could falter. Trump is also getting ready to unleash a flood of tariffs on foreign imports, including auto supplies. And he’s expected to relax tailpipe emission rules that could slow down EV sales even more — and allow car companies to sell more polluting vehicles.
Amid all this, Pete Buttigieg, who oversaw much of Biden’s EV policies, is trying to put on a brave face. While the incoming Trump team sharpens its knives, the transportation secretary is finishing out his days by approving as much spending as he can from the administration’s two landmark laws, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the climate-focused Inflation Reduction Act, before Trump can claw the rest back.
He’s also holding on to hope that Republican lawmakers, especially those who have directly benefited from the administration’s spending on EVs and clean energy, will resist Trump’s efforts to undo his predecessor’s accomplishments.
“For every conservative legislator publicly threatening to reverse our work, there’s two or three who look like they’re trying to take credit for it,” he said in an exit interview with The Verge. “And as long as that ratio keeps up, I think the bulk of our work will endure.”
Still, you can tell the election results and the coming turnover was weighing on Buttigieg, who seemed a lot more downbeat than in his previous interviews with The Verge. We also asked him what he wasn’t able to accomplish while in office and to describe his hopes for himself — and us — for the future.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Donald Trump has said he’s going to end the “EV mandate” on day one. Which of your policies do you see as the most endangered, and which are more likely to survive for the next four years?
I’m not that worried about having an EV mandate since there isn’t one, but I am concerned that he might take steps to make EVs more expensive for American consumers. And that would be unfortunate. The work we’ve done to make EVs more affordable is part of why there are more and more jobs being created in the industrial Midwest, in places like where I grew up that are seeing a level of auto industry growth that we haven’t had since the ’60s. And I think that needs to be kept up, especially because there is clearly a ferocious innovation competition with China. They’re using all the tools in their tool kit to try to edge us out, and we can’t let that happen.
I think the thing that has been the most effective in the short term has been the tax credits and making them more affordable. I think in the medium term, the thing that will matter the most is the charging network. Even though 80 percent of EV charging happens at home, we know that the other 20 percent really matters. And most of the projects that we set into motion will be physically online by 2027.
Given that it’s likely EVs are going to become more expensive over the next few years, how do you think the auto industry should respond to the elimination of these incentives? And how do you think customers are going to respond?
What we’ve seen lately is, despite some of the coverage and the stories that are out there every single year, more Americans choose EVs. I think that trend will continue even if there’s policy fluctuation because of the benefits in terms of the total cost of ownership. Having a vehicle with fewer moving parts and fewer fluids involved and that’s just cheaper to fuel will, in the long run, be why the market sends us in that direction.
Regardless, I think the important thing is to continue supporting a “Made in America” EV industry. And I’m concerned about that. The OEMs are going to do what makes the most sense to them in the given policy environment. They’ve made a lot of choices that there’s really no turning back for them. But of course, they’re going to need to modulate that up or down from year to year based on the market. That’s what businesses do, and that’s totally appropriate.
What sort of dangers do you feel exist for the climate from a transportation perspective, considering we’ve got an incoming administration that is rejecting the idea that climate change is an accepted science and seems ready to enact policies that will help worsen the effects of climate change?
The climate doesn’t care whether people care about it or not. It’s going to keep changing. And we need to keep adapting and doing what we can to prevent it from being worse than it already is. Obviously, it matters when you have an administration that cares about it versus one that doesn’t.
My experience as a mayor was that if cities, representing the bulk of global GDP, got together and said, “We’re not going to wait on our national capitals. We’re going to take action ourselves.” That’s how the C40, which became the climate mayors, was born. So I have a lot of confidence that state and local work will continue and that there are new stakeholders, including red states, working-class auto manufacturing families, who will be perhaps a surprisingly strong backstop on the continued importance of the growth of the industry in our country.
Have you heard specifically from any of these red state lawmakers in the so-called Battery Belt where these factories are going up, places like Tennessee and Kentucky? Have they told you anything that gives you confidence that maybe there’s going to be more pushback on the elimination of these policies?
Often, it’s more in what they don’t say than what they do say. The conspicuous decision of leaders in places like Georgia and Indiana not to try to pile on the anti-EV ideology because, of course, governors like cutting ribbons on good-paying building trades and manufacturing jobs. And that’s exactly what’s happening because of our work. If anything, I think there will be an attempt for others to try to take credit for it. But the most important thing is that happens at all.
Was the politicization of EVs over the course of the presidential campaign inevitable? Or do you think there was more the administration could have done to push back against that?
I think we did everything we could to stress that this shouldn’t be a Republican or Democratic thing. That when you’re in a high-stakes innovation competition with a country like China, you have nothing to gain by kind of over-indexing on old technology or telling people that what we did in the last century is going to work in this one without modernizing. I’ve just never seen a country win out by looking only to its past.
As we’ve seen in our time, everything from public health to transportation policy can get politicized. But again, I think the market will actually point in a pretty powerful direction here. And part of how I know that is you’ve got a country like China, which is conspicuously not enthusiastic about environmental protection, and they’re all in there doing that for a reason. The reason is economic strategy. And we better not be caught sleeping when it comes to our economic strategy. That’s a bipartisan concern.
The Trump team is also reportedly looking into canceling the standing general order on autonomous vehicle and advanced driver-assist crash reporting. That was another notable thing that happened under your watch. What do we stand to lose there if this sort of transparency is eliminated and we don’t have insight into some of these crashes?
To put it simply, I think kneecapping a safety initiative is not a good idea. I’ve seen lots of second-hand reporting on that. I don’t know what will actually happen. But what I know is that we need to make sure we have good information about the safety of this technology coming onto our roadways. And I say that not because I’m against that technology. On the contrary, I think it’s precisely because of the theoretically lifesaving potential that we need to get the rollout right as a country.
Trump also seems to be considering policies that favor his new best friend, Elon Musk. What concerns do you have seeing someone like Musk, with all of his conflicts and government entanglements, so close to power?
When you consider the power of any federal agency — certainly one like the USDOT, which has a lot of life-and-death responsibility — it’s incredibly important that that power be used in ways that are fair and objective. And we’ve sought to do that by calling balls and strikes without fear or favor. Sometimes that has meant that in the same month we are congratulating a company for some partnership with us in one realm, we’re also launching enforcement actions against them for some concern or violation in another realm. You have to be ready to call balls and strikes. And I hope there is enough public and congressional scrutiny to make sure that happens no matter who’s in charge here.
Do you think the Biden administration could have courted Musk a little more gently or strategically, given how he has emerged as this force in terms of his support for Trump and how much Tesla has been influential in the EV market?
Maybe, it’s hard to say in hindsight. One thing I’ve observed is that a lot of the players in this space — even though you would think it is hyper-rational given how technical and how economic it is — the truth is, there’s a pretty big emotion factor there, too. And I think it’s important to take that into account.
I also wanted to ask you about the ARPA project with infrastructure. That was a big announcement over the last four years. How do you see that sort of progressing into the next administration? Do you feel like there’s still going to be support for a Skunk Works-style project around infrastructure?
I think so. I hope so. I think there’s enormous potential here. I mean, some of the technologies that we use for transportation haven’t changed that much since the days of the Romans. And yet we know there’s evidence that everything from 500-year concrete to self-healing bridge components is potentially within our grasp. I mean, it could come to fruition in my lifetime. So given that some of those things are trillion-dollar ideas, we should continue investing the modest, comparatively modest millions that make it possible. And this is something, too, I hope is bipartisan. Innovation should be bipartisan. So far, I haven’t seen a strong Democrat / Republican valence about unlocking some of those technologies. We just need to be smart about which things the market can take care of and which things just don’t happen unless there’s government support.
A common criticism I heard about the Inflation Reduction Act was that a lot of money was being spent to incentivize cars, but not enough to get people out of their cars and walking and biking. There was an announcement today about $45 million for some active transportation. But compare that to the tens of billions of dollars spent on EVs, it seems kind of like a drop in the bucket. Do you feel like this was the right balance to strike, or do you think more could have been done?
That would be true if you looked at the IRA in a vacuum. But the truth is, even though we think we call the IRA the climate bill, in many ways the infrastructure bill was our climate bill as a department. What I mean by that is a lot of the things that went into supporting transit or supporting a new, better way to design our highways and bridges will mean just as much or more for carbon pollution reduction as what’s in the IRA. EVs help, but that’s only part of the story.
How are you personally feeling seeing all of these policies that you spent so much time on — so much effort, so much political capital to get enacted — now that they’re all on the chopping block or endangered?
I just can’t speculate or predict what will happen next. But what I do know is what we did was good policy and good work. One of the most flattering and convincing pieces of evidence I see for that is for every conservative legislator publicly threatening to reverse our work, there’s two or three who look like they’re trying to take credit for it. And as long as that ratio keeps up, I think the bulk of our work will endure.
And for those folks who are waiting with dread about what’s going to come down the pike in terms of transportation policy and climate policy — are we screwed, or do you think there’s some hope for the future?
As a federal official, I have sometimes been impatient with the limitations of the federal level compared to the power that our system places in state and local hands. I think going forward, maybe I’ll go back to my mayoral mentality and remember how much of our salvation comes from the local in this country. Again, some things are good policy in a way that endures no matter who’s in charge, even if they have a different vocabulary or a different emphasis. I actually think the realm of transportation work is one of the ones that will be the most durably bipartisan, even if, obviously, the next administration will show less interest in issues like climate change, labor union support, or racial and economic justice compared to this one.
As a last question, if you had another four years on this job, what are some things you would like to have done?
I just launched our Project Delivery Acceleration Council. And it sounds strange to launch something on your way out the door, but what I reminded that team of is that their work is going to be wildly important under the next administration, to make sure that we pay more attention to delivery. It’s critically important to fund these things, but you also have to bring out a lot more efficiency in the project delivery process. And it isn’t sexy, but it’s wildly important to get more value for our taxpayer dollar.
So as I think about the second half of this decade, when the bulk of these projects actually enter construction, that’s something I would have wanted to work on. I think I’ll continue to find some way to work on it on the outside, and I hope it gets continued bipartisan interest in [Washington, DC] because I think delivery is vitally, vitally important, not just on the legislative side.
The infrastructure law was a five-year bill and year five is coming up. Congress and the administration will have to negotiate what comes next. And it’ll be important to learn from everything good, bad, and indifferent that we’ve learned from the first infrastructure bill. And then from a safety perspective, I think the biggest piece of unfinished business remains the rail safety legislation — bipartisan, cosponsored by JD Vance, completely deserving of a vote and of being passed into law. And if the next administration is the one to do it, I’ll be the first to cheer for that because it’s just the right thing to do.