Pete Buttigieg is clearly laying the groundwork for a 2028 presidential run, even going so far as to grow a beard in what looks like a transparent rebranding effort. And frankly, it’s no wonder he thinks he needs a makeover; his time as Transportation Secretary was a train wreck — sometimes literally. His four years in the Biden administration were a nonstop showcase of incompetence and misplaced priorities. You’d be hard-pressed to find a single transportation crisis he didn’t bungle.
Now, we've got one more.
Do you remember how the Democrats and the media tried to blame Trump for January's deadly air crash at Washington National Airport? Even Buttigieg joined in on the pile-on.
Despicable. As families grieve, Trump should be leading, not lying. We put safety first, drove down close calls, grew Air Traffic Control, and had zero commercial airline crash fatalities out of millions of flights on our watch.
— Pete Buttigieg (@PeteButtigieg) January 30, 2025
President Trump now oversees the military and the…
We now know Buttigieg bears significant responsibility for the tragedy.
During Senate testimony Wednesday, a bombshell revelation exposed that a critical hotline connecting air traffic controllers at Reagan National Airport to the Pentagon has been "inoperable" since March 2022 — while Buttigieg was Transportation Secretary. The Washington Post covered it:
A hotline connecting air traffic controllers at Reagan National Airport and their counterparts at the Pentagon has been “inoperable” since March 2022, a Federal Aviation Administration official confirmed Wednesday, further evidence of poor safety coordination between federal agencies responsible for the airspace where a midair collision in January killed 67 people.
The line is maintained by the Defense Department, and the aviation agency was not aware of the outage during the three years it was down, Franklin McIntosh, the FAA’s deputy head of air traffic control, testified at a Senate hearing Wednesday. Aviation officials discovered the hotline wasn’t working after May 1, when controllers at National ordered two passenger jets to abandon landings because an Army helicopter was circling nearby at the Pentagon.
The Trump administration, upon learning of the outage on May 1, immediately ordered the Pentagon to suspend flights around DCA until repairs are complete. Pete Buttigieg allowed a critical safety issue to languish for three years without action — a glaring failure on his watch. By contrast, Trump’s Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, stepped in and addressed the problem immediately once it came to his attention. The difference in leadership couldn’t be more telling.
Nevertheless, Democrats are still intent on blaming Trump for a problem that began and wasn’t fixed under Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg. “The administration’s lack of a more aggressive, proactive mitigation approach is simply inexcusable,” said Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.). “FAA and DOD must coordinate better. We don’t need to wait for the completion of a lengthy investigation to know that.”
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It’s no shock that Sen. Tammy Duckworth is trying to shield the Biden administration from blame in this latest scandal, but let’s be clear: This dereliction happened under Pete Buttigieg’s watch. The same Pete Buttigieg who loves to talk about “putting safety first” yet somehow let a critical safety hotline stay broken for three years. For all his lofty rhetoric, Buttigieg’s actual record as Transportation Secretary speaks for itself — and not in a good way.
Buttigieg's tenure was a disaster from day one. He presided over shipping backlogs that crippled the supply chain, airline systems that collapsed repeatedly, and infrastructure projects derailed by poor management and woke priorities—like spending taxpayer money to “fix” supposedly racist roads. And who can forget his complete indifference to the environmental catastrophe in East Palestine, Ohio?
This latest failure is just another example in a long line of incompetence. Buttigieg didn’t lead, he spun. And the media, desperate to prop up the Biden administration, gave him cover every step of the way.
And now, 67 people are dead because his department couldn't be bothered to fix what amounts to a simple phone line. This is the federal government under Democrat leadership, where basic safety measures take a backseat to woke virtue signaling and political grandstanding.
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