Pete Buttigieg ’04 Calls Local Government ‘Salvation’ for Dems Under Trump

U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg ’04 said state and local government officials will play key roles in advancing the Democrats’ agenda under President-elect Donald Trump’s administration at a Harvard Institute of Politics forum on Tuesday.

“In moments like this, our salvation really will come from the local — the local and the state bodies,” Buttigieg said. “We would like a little more consistency in federalism, but a lot of the answers are going to come from mayors, from communities, from states that aren’t captive to some wacky ideological project.”

Buttigieg’s comments to a packed audience come just a week after Trump handed Vice President Kamala Harris a resounding defeat in the 2024 elections — a loss that Buttigieg attributed to Americans’ frustrations with the country’s economy.

Buttigieg said that though some people are “correctly upset with the administration because we haven’t solved their economic problem,” others have been misguided by misinformation that portrays the state of the economy as worse than it is.

“If we haven’t solved somebody’s economic problems, then we’ve got more to do,” Buttigieg said. “If we’ve done good work for somebody and they feel like they’re personally doing OK, but they don’t feel like a national economy is doing OK, that’s a different set of challenges.”

“That’s an information challenge,” he added. “And we gotta be real about both.”

Buttigieg’s talk is the first forum since the IOP landed in hot water last weekend after IOP President Pratyush Mallick ‘25 penned an op-ed in The Crimson urging the group to drop its nonpartisan mandate following Trump’s reelection.

IOP Director Setti Warren — who said the IOP would remain non-partisan in a letter to the editor over the weekend — opened the talk by reaffirming the organization’s commitment to remaining non-partisan.

“Before we begin, I want to emphasize the fact that the IOP takes great pride that we are a nonpartisan organization,” he said.

Buttigieg also discussed nonpartisanship later in the talk, saying that “being nonpartisan or bipartisan is not the same thing as being neutral.”

“If there are certain things that are red lines, like believing in democracy or supporting the Constitution, you can hold to those red lines and still disagree all day about fiscal policy, social policy,” he said.

Buttigieg delivered the talk in his official capacity as Transportation secretary, which he cited as a reason that he would “refrain from contributing to the takes on campaigns and elections.”

Still, Buttigieg delivered some subtle jabs at the incoming Trump administration.

“I think that universal virtues that are particularly prized in the Midwest would be humility, decency, and honesty,” he said. “Obviously the incoming leadership could not more extravagantly be different in terms of style from those Midwestern qualities.”

While Buttigieg said he had hoped that the country was moving toward “a normal dynamic among the two political parties” prior to the election last week, he expressed concern about the state of political polarization now in the wake of Trump’s reelection.

“We don’t seem to be that much further away from the edge of the cliff,” he said.

Throughout the event, Buttigieg returned to “unsexy but important” government investment in infrastructure and “politics of the everyday” as key methods for rebuilding Americans’ trust in government and improving bipartisan relations.

Buttigieg particularly referenced his track record as Transportation secretary, citing his “one-two punch” to pass policies like requiring U.S air carriers to automatically refund consumers in the case of a flight cancellation.

“First we use transparency to drive change, then we back it up with regulation to require those changes,” he said.

Buttigieg also discussed President Joe Biden’s legislative record in infrastructure investment, saying that infrastructure should remain a priority under Trump’s administration and could open an opportunity for bipartisan collaboration.

“There’s no such thing as a Republican way to fill a hole in the road or no Democratic way to pick up trash,” he said.

—Staff writer William C. Mao can be reached at william.mao@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @williamcmao.

—Staff writer Dhruv T. Patel can be reached at dhruv.patel@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @dhruvtkpatel.