The Exchanges

Q So if you see it, so I'll give you a specific example. In 2023, there were some pretty incredible outages in the FAA. We've all now learned that we have an incredibly brittle air safety infrastructure that needs to be upgraded. You saw that in 23, there was outages all the time. What do you do to stop that? And when you see the waste, How do you stop it?

A You know, that was an example where we needed to invest, right? So it's that tough situation and needing to swallow hard and go before Congress to the taxpayer and say, look, we need more funding for this. Uh, that's what we did. And by the way, this is one of the rare areas where I agree with my successor, who's done pretty much the same thing, uh, to make sure we got the funding to upgrade the technology. Now, this is one of the few audiences that might be nerdy enough that, that I can geek out a little bit and talk about The big upgrade to the communications backbone that, that we were doing, it was to go from TDM to IP, from, from copper to fiber, and to, I think a lot of people would be astonished to know that, you know, something as important and theoretically modern as our aviation system, uh, is working on TDM. Uh, so that obviously had to be upgraded. We launched a contract, uh, Verizon was the contractor, you know, obviously a multi-year, multi-billion dollar IT contract when you have to have, you know, not even five nines, but like, A billion to one chance of anything going wrong. 24 by seven by three 65. You know, it's challenging and it takes a while, but you know, that's one of the reasons why we felt a lot of urgency on that particular issue. But again, there's two ways of looking at this, right? Both of which are true. One thing is to look at the system and say,…

AI assessment note: “The big upgrade to the communications backbone that, that we were doing, it was to go from TDM to IP”

Q Musk. These are people who have been part of the Democratic Party for a very long time, huge donors to the Democratic Party, and they all made this sort of flip. Do you think it was just pragmatically based upon the desire to have less regulations, A better business environment to personally make more money, or do you think there were other things at work with the loss in twenty-twenty-four?

A Well, I don't think you can reduce it to any one thing, but I certainly think that's part of the story. Uh, look, uh, it's no secret that Republican policies tend to favor people who are wealthier, uh, and a lot of people who drifted away from the Democratic Party, at least the ones who were getting a lot of attention, like how could these Business figures, investors, billionaires have gotten away from, from Democrats and gone to Republicans might be kind of a, you know, dog bites man story, like not something that's wildly complicated. If you look at the fact that, you know, Democrats have been extremely concerned about wealth and income inequality, and, you know, you got a lot of very, very wealthy people. I don't think it was just that. I mean, I think there are a lot of things that kind of combined at once, but You know, for a lot of my friends who are scratching their heads saying, wait a minute, these are folks who are from the tech and science world. How could they back a president or administration that's been deleting references to science and kind of censoring science at least any time that climate is concerned? A lot of these guys are libertarian. How could they be on board with the, you know, the administration that is sending troops into streets and has really let it crack down on freedom that's Kind of something out of the fever dreams of my conservative and liber…

AI assessment note: “I don't think you can reduce it to any one thing, but I certainly think”

Q for us being the 101st, but in Kamala Harris's memoir, she points in part to your identity as a reason why you weren't considered as her running mate. Can you explain to us the role of identity in democratic politics, both perhaps you on the way in when you were nominated for secretary, and then maybe on the way out when you were not considered as a credible VP candidate?

A Let's just say I would love for identity to play a less central role in the politics of our country and in the politics of my party, and not just because I might have been passed over for, uh, for an opportunity, but just because I think it is, it has really dominated so many people's thinking in a way that makes it harder for us to build a message across identities. I mean, don't get me wrong. I don't think it, I don't think it makes sense to pretend that identity doesn't matter. I don't think it makes sense to pretend to be colorblind. I also don't think it makes sense to allow that to explain everything, which is one of the habits that's formed, I think, definitely on my party's far left that made it harder for us to get through, especially when you have a lot of people whose interests are shared. I'm thinking about the economic interest of poor people and low wealth people in this country, for example, who are black, white, and of every ethnicity and identity and gender, of course, who maybe didn't hear a unifying message that was speaking to them as a group. Because it felt like my party was, it was like a salad bar. Like, here's something for your group, and here's something for another group, and here's something for another group, and it just didn't add up into a story. Now, I would argue that Trump practices a kind of identity politics too, a sort of a white identity p…

AI assessment note: “I think identity has become too central to how my party thinks.”

Q that he said is that it was not that Joe Biden changed, but that the staff were nuts, and that Ron Klain was effectively a gatekeeper, and if you had reasonable proposals, they would go into some black hole and die. Can you give us a sense of what it was like to work under Biden and the, um, the positives, but also the negatives? Give us a fair representation.

A Yeah, and in the spirit of fairness, I should say, this is the only time I've, outside of military, it's the only time I've ever worked in the federal government, so I can't benchmark, you know, to compare one White House to another, one president to another, but I'll tell you what my experience was like. There's a high level of ambition trying to get big things done quickly, especially in the first two years when there was, it felt like there was that opportunity to work with both houses of Congress to make it happen, including just a ton of energy going into, well, among other things, spending time with folks like Joe Manchin, trying to make sure that we held together that, that coalition to do things like the infrastructure law. Um, there were calls I agree with. There were calls I disagreed with. Um, there were also a lot of times when it looked like something wasn't going to happen, and then somehow it happened. And that was where I do think it helped to have a president who spent as much time as he did in the Senate, because, you know, it really felt like the infrastructure bill was dead. We forget this now, because, because it happened, and it's kind of hard to imagine it was any other way. But, you know, it was proclaimed dead many, many times in that summer of Uh, uh, victory from the jaws of defeat. You know, the word gatekeeper gets used a lot for White House staff. …

AI assessment note: “The word gatekeeper gets used a lot for White House staff. I don't think that's unfair.”

Q the debate. The question is, um, what will job displacement and new job creation look like this time? What does Pete Buttigieg think? Do you think that we have A serious issue on our hands, or do you think we'll be able to navigate it? And then what's the government's role in it? When you're president, what will it look like if you inherit this chaotic AI job displacement potential?

A Yeah, I'm seriously concerned about it, and part of that's from growing up in the industrial Midwest. Like, you know, we were told, I grew up in northern Indiana, a lot of auto industry supply chain companies there, and in the nineties and 2000, a lot of trade and automation, but the truth is mostly automation, came in. And, uh, everybody was told, you know, don't worry too much about what you're doing today. The pie's gonna get so much bigger that everybody will be better off. And the thing is, the pie did get bigger. But the rest of that promise didn't come true, and people were pissed. People were pissed because they lost their income. But also, even after they got their income, if they went through a training program and got another job in a field that was growing, but it wasn't who they thought they were, it wasn't connected to their sense of identity or belonging, then you continue to have a displacement that's not just economic, but really deeper than that. And I actually think a lot of that Kind of leads directly to the populism and the nationalism that you see in this administration in this, in this political moment. So, uh, and the thing that really haunts me is You know, as much as any auto worker or electrical worker I know, like their sense of belonging and identity, you know, very much depends in many ways on being an auto worker or an electrical worker. That's ev…

AI assessment note: “Yeah, I'm seriously concerned about it”

Q What's your, what's your best guess in general for every dollar that gets given to the United States government by US taxpayers? What actually lands in productive programs that benefit Americans versus what gets leaked away? What's your best guess? Is it 50 cents of every dollar? 10 cents of every dollar? A penny? 90 cents? Like, what is your best guess? You've been in the bowels of these organizations.

A So my experience in transportation is that most of it goes to very good use. I mean, if you just break it down, uh, it goes to things that keep the aviation sector operating safely. It goes to things like Highways, roads, and bridges. That was the biggest slug of funding that we had in the infrastructure package. Uh, and when, you know, the general or the government accountability office or, or the inspector general, by the way, institutions that Trump is demolishing right now, but the organizations that do the auditing and really dig in on a bipartisan basis, um, often in terms of outright fraud, you know, they're gonna come in a number that's well below one percent, but, but, but, you know, I've also seen with my own eyes how...

AI assessment note: “they're gonna come in a number that's well below one percent”

Q you, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, are saying, hey, ban the billionaires. And we have this sort of movement that being a billionaire is in some way immoral or unethical. So let's start with some brass tacks here. Would you support, and obviously you're going to run for president again in 20, 28, and you're one of the lead candidates. Would you ever support a wealth tax?

A In principle, maybe. Yeah, I mean, you rightly said, you know, folks like Bernie are to my left. I don't know the details of the state and local proposals you just mentioned, but those sound on their face like they're further than I would go. But look, in reality, we tax across a variety of things, right? There's income tax, there's payroll tax, there's property tax. Wealth tax would be kind of along the lines of a property tax. And the thought, of course, is that you've got a lot of folks who have become incredibly wealthy. And importantly, the way taxation works now, less and less of the way the wealthiest people accumulate their income is actually booked as income, right? And this is why you have these stories of, you know, multi-billion dollar corporations or multi-billion dollar individuals somehow paying an effective tax rate that's lower than a teacher or a firefighter. And I think most people get that that's wrong. So I guess My overall take is, you know, everything has a balance, everything has limits, but if you're asking me the question, are the wealthiest people in America right now paying too much tax or too little tax? I would say the wealthiest are paying too little tax, and whether you adjust that through income tax, whether you adjust that through, you know, something like wealth tax, and there's a lot of ways to do it. I think what's important is that it's fai…

AI assessment note: “In principle, maybe.”

Q speed run? Just have the six or seven candidates, including yourself, just do three weeks. This would be like blockbuster television. Were you in favor of the speed run or not? Was there discussion of that? We're hearing that Obama and maybe some other people wanted to have a quick primary, and what do you think the outcome would have been? Would you have had a shot at, uh, winning?

A Yeah, there's, there's a lot of chatter of that, um, and I think in hindsight, we've obviously got to add, since the outcome of what did happen was not good, I think anyone serious in our party has to say, okay, what if we'd done that? And you could argue that it would have led to, I don't know, but you could argue it would have led to a different nominee. You could also argue it would have led to the same nominee, but that she would have been stronger, right? I mean, if, if she had become the nominee by prevailing over another half dozen people who wanted a shot, Presumably that kind of sharpening that, that happens, uh, would have served her well in the general. And, and let's remember that that's actually more normal, right? Like most countries don't drag out their, their presidential process for more than a few weeks.

AI assessment note: “you could argue it would have led to a different nominee.”

Q Do you think that there was censorship under the Biden administration for things like scientific truth? Let's just focus on COVID for a second and The back doors that it seemed that the Biden administration had to places like Facebook and places like Twitter to just suppress scientific thought and debate as you just talked about.

A So this is an amazing example of some of the false equivalencies that I've seen thrown around out there. So yeah, I, I would acknowledge, I think a lot of folks would say that, uh, you know, it, it came really close to the stove some of the times when the administration was trying to make sure that, you know, bad information or misinformation wasn't being pushed, uh, into the, Kind of public health conversation, and it was engaging social media companies that were trying to, you know, be responsible and do the right thing, and there might be moments that, you know, they got that wrong or went too far, but right now we're in a moment, right, where the President of the United States doesn't like being criticized by a comedian and has the head of the FCC, which regulates corporations that are trying to buy TV networks, go out and threaten them, And say, you know, you're, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. I mean, that is a whole different level of censorship, not to mention just the way they've gone through, like, every government website, right, and deleted anything that could accidentally be a reference to climate change. So, you know, I'm worried about the false equivalencies here. You could definitely say there were moments under the last administration or any administration where we could argue that, that having fidelity to free speech You know, you should have done…

AI assessment note: “there might be moments that, you know, they got that wrong or went too far”

Q What is the responsibility of the US government in your eyes with the tax receipts that they get? How do we understand that money is being spent appropriately and well versus pet projects or pork barrel spending or Frankly, just waste and grift. Where is that line? And give us some examples of how you would make sure that as tax receipts went up, accountability went up with it.

A Yeah, I think that's, that's super important. And, and people's willingness to pay taxes depends on some level on their, you know, sense that they're getting good value for their money. So I, I cut my teeth as a mayor. We didn't, we couldn't, uh, you know, print more dollars if we wanted to as the city of South Bend. We had a cash budget, uh, had to balance it every year. If we took on debt, we really had to think hard about how we were gonna pay on that debt. We made sure that any time we're asking people to be paying revenue into the city, they know what they're getting for that, whether it's police service or parks or trash pickup. I don't think that's the worst metaphor to think about how things should work at the national level too, right? We, we should believe that we're getting good services, good infrastructure. That was obviously what, what I worked on when I was at the federal level as a secretary of transportation. We should get good national defense and all the other things that we, you know, as a country are.

AI assessment note: “people's willingness to pay taxes depends on some level on their, you know, sense that they're getting good value”

Q Because I'm watching Mamdani and, like, that group go, hey, ban the billionaires, more taxes, and socialism, and here's all the handouts, we're going for it. And then there's guys like you, and, you know, the, I would say the, the more Clinton era, Obama era, kind of moderate Democrats now is, is kind of how I'd frame it. And then can those two ever coexist in the same party?

A I think both parties have their contradictions, and that's definitely true for my party. I mean, the way I view it is, one of the biggest problems we have as a society is this level of inequality we've hit. That like, historically, there's no evidence that any republic can reach this level of equality to hold onto it and continue to be a republic. And so the question is, what do you do about it? And you've got, obviously, a socialist left that says the answer is socialism. Uh, you've got, uh, Republicans who tend to say this is not a problem at all. And then you got where I think of as the center, or at least what I would like to be the center of my party, which is saying, yeah, we've got to do things. We've got to lean in. We've got to use, uh, the tools of the state, not in a socialist way, but, uh, in a way to try to have things be more balanced in this country. Um, is there a contest between kind of the center left and the far left or however you want to characterize it? Sure. But then, you know, I mean, today's Republican Party is a coalition of normal Chamber of Commerce business Republicans, more the kind of tech Republicans who to me are more libertarian, even though it puzzles me that they're for such a dramatic government control over society right now and Trump, but whatever. My point is you have, you have normal business Republicans, you have techno libertarians, yo…

AI assessment note: “Is there a contest between kind of the center left and the far left? Sure.”

Q How much money did you take out from that 300?

A Uh, we, we used it better. I would put it that way. So, uh, you know, we didn't, I mean, there were areas where we were able to kind of have, uh, uh, have a certain, uh, budget line item shrink, but in a city where the average per capita income was 18 or 19,000 dollars per person when I came in, uh, we weren't handing that over in tax breaks to wealthy residents. We were putting it to other use on, uh, on public safety. And fundamentals like that. But look, again, I agree that the doge we could have could do a lot of really good work. It could find duplicative regulations. It could find cases where we could move from input-based to output-based evaluation of our programs. In other words, instead of saying like, this is a meaningful program because how many billions went into it, figure out how much value came out of it. But the doge we got Was one that couldn't even count, that put information, sometimes that was wrong by three orders of magnitude on its own website, then erased its own information because they didn't believe in the transparency. The doge we got sent an email to every air traffic controller in the country During an air traffic controller shortage and suggested they quit being an air traffic controller and get something, quote, more productive to do in the private sector, only later on to be told, actually, that was a mistake. The doge we got apparently wasn't s…

AI assessment note: “we, we used it better. I would put it that way.”