Apologist have noted that Secretary Buttigieg is a Rhodes Scholar, Harvard and Oxford alum. So, “I went to Harvard” is the new “I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night”. The idea that a generic Ivy League credential is a magic Swiss Army Knife that makes you better at running anything from Waffle House to the air traffic control system is a weird take.
In the last few months, air, rail and supply-chain meltdowns have dogged hapless Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. These issues have effected millions of Americans.
A safety system outage forced the Federal Aviation Administration to temporarily ground all U.S. flights Wednesday for the first time since the 9/11 attacks. Just weeks earlier, a systemwide meltdown at Southwest resulted in thousands of flight cancellations and delays over the holidays. Last year, Congress had to step in to avert a nationwide freight rail strike after union workers rejected a Biden administration-brokered deal over the lack of paid sick leave.
Global supply chain snarls linked to the COVID-19 pandemic have caused massive disruptions to U.S. ports dating back to 2021, resulting in widespread product shortages and persistent inflation.
Feeling the heat, the Biden Administration has ordered Buttigieg to conduct an investigation of the flight system outage, which the FAA has preliminarily traced to a “damaged database file.”
Each time a crisis has arisen, it appears the former small-town mayor is marginally incompetent and ill-qualified. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), a top Republican on the committee that oversees DOT, called the FAA outage “completely unacceptable and just the latest example of dysfunction” at Buttigieg’s agency.