House Republicans want answers from Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg regarding his department’s response after a Norfolk Southern Railway train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, earlier this month. In a letter released Friday, House Oversight Chairman James Comer of Kentucky and other GOP members of the committee said that the Department of Transportation “needs to provide an explanation for its leadership’s apathy in the face of this emergency.”
It’s a criticism that others have thrown Buttigieg’s way since the accident in which a controlled burn of the chemicals the train was carrying has prompted serious concerns about the long-term health and environmental impact of the crash. “I was taking pains to respect the role that I have and the role that I don’t have,” Buttigieg said during his visit to the town on Thursday, “but that should not have stopped me from weighing in about how I felt about what was happening to this community.”
That mea culpa was welcome, but it also raised a question: What should the secretary of transportation’s role be in a crisis like this one? Because there seems to be an awful large disconnect between Buttigieg’s actual job and the things Republicans are hammering him over.
Since becoming transportation secretary, Buttigieg has been one of the administration’s best communicators and the steward of billions of dollars worth of infrastructure funding. He’s also been in the bullseye as the point-person for the Biden administration’s response to the pandemic-fueled backlog in the supply chain that’s helped to boost inflation and last year’s cascade of canceled and delayed flights across major airlines.
But looking through the section of the U.S. Code that deals with the secretary’s duties, none of them seem immediately applicable to the crisis in East Palestine. There are likewise scant emergency or crisis powers offered to Buttigieg. The National Transportation Safety Board — which issued an…
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