The outgoing transportation secretary talks about his record of holding airlines accountable, what might come next and whether to check a bag. (No.)
Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has been at the helm of the nation’s transportation infrastructure — including its aviation system — during a tumultuous four years. water treatment equipment
In 2021, his first year as secretary, the pandemic still had the travel industry in free fall, nearly shutting down airlines in the United States. Then, as air travel dramatically rebounded, airline policies, including cancellations and the perks included in a ticket, changed. Checked-bag fees rose. The golden age of ultra-low-cost carriers like Spirit Airlines waned, with these airlines beginning to increasingly resemble legacy carriers in offering more expensive fares. Then operational meltdowns of popular carriers like Southwest Airlines and Delta Air Lines disrupted travel for millions of passengers for days, underscoring the fragility of the systems underpinning air travel. And this year saw the busiest days of air travel ever, according to the Transportation Security Administration.
Yet passengers got new rights, with Mr. Buttigieg carving out a stance of aggressively holding the airlines accountable. At times he faced criticism from both political parties as well the carriers, but under his leadership, the D.O.T. proposed regulations targeting junk fees, ticket refunds, costs for families to sit together and the mishandling of wheelchairs. From 2021 to 2024, the federal agency also issued record penalties of more than $200 million against airlines for consumer violations, about triple the amount levied in the previous 24 years combined.
As Mr. Buttigieg leaves office, there are rules that haven’t gone into effect. And the next transportation secretary may decline to pursue ongoing investigations into frequent flier programs and Delta’s handling of the CrowdStrike outage.
In a recent conversation, Mr. Buttigieg discussed what he believes he has accomplished for airline passengers during his tenure, his experiences flying with his husband and their children, and what might be next.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
I’ll leave it to others to grade my performance, but we’ve been able to deliver the most transformative set of infrastructure investments in my lifetime. One way of thinking about it is, if I were to visit one project that we funded every day for the rest of my life, I would not live long enough to see even half of them.
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