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The next department in the series is also part of the Great Society, the Department of Transportation (DoT).
This podcast uses government documents to illuminate the workings of the American government, and offer context around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life.
Welcome to Civil Discourse. This podcast will use government documents to illuminate the workings of the American Government and offer contexts around the effects of government agencies in your everyday life. Now your hosts, Nia Rodgers, Public Affairs Librarian and Dr. John Aughenbaugh, Political Science Professor.
N. Rodgers: Hey, Aughie.
J. Aughenbaugh: Hello, Nia, how are you?
N. Rodgers: I'm good, how are you?
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm fine, and one of the reasons why I'm good today is, listeners, Nia and I are continuing our series about federal government cabinet departments.
N. Rodgers: Get your kicks on Route 66.
J. Aughenbaugh: Nia is serenading us with songs about various highways.
N. Rodgers: There have been some great highway songs. Ramblin' Man and the one with the Eagles, Take It Easy.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona. Of course, Highway to Hell. Fantastic song.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes or Stairway to Heaven. No, I'm sorry.
N. Rodgers: Well, I suppose stairs are a form of transportation. We're talking about the Department of Transportation known as the DOT. It's interesting to me how some departments, like nobody refers to the Department of Treasury as DOT, even though technically it would also be a DOT. It's just called Treasury. They don't use department of they just say it's Treasury. As we noted with agriculture, USDA. That's a common, and the Department of Transportation is always DOT and in Virginia, VDOT?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. In Pennsylvania, it's Penn DOT. In the transportation. Nobody's says the full name, it's always we get the abridged acronym. What's also very surprising is, again, this is a running theme through this series, Nia. Maybe you're aware of this. Again, I got my PhD in public administration and policy. I study this stuff. I did not know the Department of Transportation is oh, you can't say it's a baby. It's a juvenile department. I don't mean that there's a whole bunch of [inaudible]
N. Rodgers: It's a teenager.
J. Aughenbaugh: But it's a young department.
N. Rodgers: It is a young department.
J. Aughenbaugh: It is not created until 1966. Of all the things the Johnson administration did, I'm familiar with like most of them, I was completely unaware until we did research for this particular episode that it did not achieve formal cabinet department status until the mid '60s.
N. Rodgers: Well, listeners, we're entering that part of this series where things are now starting to be in what we think of as the modern state, modern government, and that's post civil rights. Now we're going to get several departments that are part of that cycle of American history. But I, for some reason thought that it was under Eisenhower. I think it's because of the highway system.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's because of the highway system.
N. Rodgers: I just assumed somebody who was in charge of that but apparently not. When I saw that in your notes, I was like, oh, no, does Aughie have that right? I have to admit because I'm a librarian. I fact-checked you on that. I was like, of course, he's right. But it was weird.
J. Aughenbaugh: Federal Highway Administration in the Eisenhower era.
N. Rodgers: You build a bunch of highways, but apparently, you don't have anybody to manage them.
J. Aughenbaugh: By the way, it wasn't just the Federal Highway Administration. The sheer number of subunits.
N. Rodgers: I think this is the most sub-united. Is that even a word? But you know what I mean? There has got the most sub-agencies under a department. I think of any of them, at least the ones we've seen so far.
J. Aughenbaugh: Listeners, this is going to take a while.
N. Rodgers: Can I just say though, wait, before we go on that anybody who doesn't think that President Johnson didn't have a sense of humor doesn't realize that the first official day of operation of the Department of Transportation was April 1, 1967, April Fools. That's great, I think that's funny. That's funny to me because it just shows a tiny little quirk of Johnson.
J. Aughenbaugh: Nobody in Congress went ahead and said, let's start it on March 30th or let's start it on April 2nd.
N. Rodgers: Like April 1st, that'll be memorable.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Anyway, you're going to tell us the organization because it's the billion administration.
J. Aughenbaugh: These are significant. The Department of Transportation has the Office of the Secretary, and 11 individual operating units, including the Federal Aviation Administration, the infamous FAA, which listeners, is the second largest unit in terms of budget, but it has the most employees. By the way, we're not talking about the screeners.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's TSA.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, that is the TSA.
N. Rodgers: But the guys in the tower are FAA, aren't they?
J. Aughenbaugh: Completely FAA. Yes. We'll get back to the FAA because they infamously attempted to strike during the Reagan administration.
N. Rodgers: We'll come back to that because foreshadowing, that's an interesting thing that happened there.
J. Aughenbaugh: Now, we also have the aforementioned Federal Highway Administration. By the way, nobody refers to it as the FHA because as we've talked about in our previous episode, the FHA is the Federal Housing Authority.
J. Aughenbaugh: But this is the largest unit in the Department of Transportation in terms of budget. Many of my students don't recognize this. The federal gasoline tax is collected by the FHA, the Federal Highway Administration, which then gets relocated to the states via a very complicated formula, which has been readjusted by the United States Congress at least a dozen times.
N. Rodgers: Because the federal government keeps part of it, but then they give part of it to the states because as the aforementioned VDOT, if you go to Highway 95, Highway 95 runs from Maine to Florida and it passes through all those states. The federal government doesn't come in and fix the highway. The state government comes in and fixes the highway with federal money. They say, this chunk of 95 gets repaved or widened, or a bridge gets built over it or whatever. The states don't have to pay for that because it's a federal highway.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: They get that money from the tax, but then the feds keep part of it for administration of highways or other roads that they do administer. It's very complicated to figure out who's actually doing the roadwork. When you pass those guys next to the barrels and they're holding the signs, they're working for somebody. But I'm not entirely certain that we always know who.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's a really good example of cooperative federalism, Nia. Because Nia, you go to the pumps to fill up your automobile. What a lot of Americans don't understand is within the price per gallon is the cost of the petroleum, of the gasoline and then there's going to be a state tax and then there's going to be a federal government tax. It's the federal government share that goes to the Federal Highway Administration.
N. Rodgers: The state share goes to local roads.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: That's the potholes in Richmond, thank you very much that try to eat my car on a regular basis.
J. Aughenbaugh: Or the state deciding to build a new state road because you have relocation of people within the state.
N. Rodgers: There's more people in the western end of the state. We have to have better roads out there or we have to have a new road out there.
J. Aughenbaugh: Those are state roads.
N. Rodgers: Also things like buses and light rail, a lot of that gets funded through gas taxes, whatnot.
J. Aughenbaugh: But when the feds then send the money back to the states via this complicated formula, then the states have their own procurement process where they accept bids from contractors to do work on federal interstate highways. When Nia goes ahead and says, we don't know where the money come from. Well, technically, we know at some point in time the money came from that gallon of gasoline you purchased to fill up your car. But the number of hands.
N. Rodgers: That it goes through.
J. Aughenbaugh: That it goes through, is truly phenomenal. It's a really good example of cooperative federalism. Because the feds don't send federal government workers to Manassas, Virginia, to work on a little chunk of the federal interstate.
N. Rodgers: Well, it's starts at VDOT and then sometimes it's contracted out and sometimes it's VDOT and it depends on the size and what they're doing. VDOT doesn't necessarily have people who build bridges, so they hire a company that builds bridges. It's a whole thing.
J. Aughenbaugh: Here are some other sub units or units within DOT. You have the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.
N. Rodgers: Motor carriers would be buses.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. Buses. Then you got the Federal Railroad Administration.
N. Rodgers: Amtrak, we're looking at you.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Then you have the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
N. Rodgers: Those are the people who determine how fast you can drive on an exit.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: You see the little signs that say 35 miles an hour on the exit and you're trying to take it at 60 and then you're, they were right as you try not to run off the road. Those guys test that.
J. Aughenbaugh: This is also the agency that gets called in when there is a 50-car pile up on an interstate. Then you have the Federal Transit Administration. This is the unit that goes ahead and is designed to promote if you will, public transportation. Yes. Then we have the Maritime Administration because there's a whole bunch of stuff that gets shipped and there's a leisure industry that is about boating.
N. Rodgers: There's also ferries that move people from one place to another, which is another form of public transit.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Then we have the St. Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation.
N. Rodgers: That's very specific.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Then we have a research and special programs administration.
N. Rodgers: Always.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: In every department this is their R&D.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Then this next unit is near and dear to Nia's heart. The Bureau of Transportation Statistics.
N. Rodgers: I love the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. I love the idea that we try to have any idea how many cars are on the road, how many people are killed in car accidents. But just all kinds of transportation. You remember that question they used to give you in math class where they're, one person leaves Petersburg at this number miles an hour and needs to be in Washington. Well, that's figuring out the train system. They can tell you whether it's faster to go by car or faster to go by bike. There's a lot of cool stuff.
J. Aughenbaugh: Time of day.
N. Rodgers: What time of day more people have accidents. What intersections more people have accidents. All those things which help us improve road safety as much as we can considering Americans drive like crazy balls sometimes.
J. Aughenbaugh: This is also the agency within DOT that will go ahead and conclude whether or not a particular interstate needs maintenance. Because of the sheer volume of traffic. This is the agency within DOT that tells us whether or not a particular road, just based on its traffic, needs to be widened or needs to be repaved, or we need to go ahead and put down concrete bases, etc. Then we have the last one, The Surface Transportation Board. This is a board that is comprised of government officials, interest groups, business and trade associations to come up with policy suggestions for the nation's transportation system. Yes.
N. Rodgers: TSA used to be part of that, right?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Part of the Surface Transportation Board?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes but when we had the 9/11 attacks.
N. Rodgers: We get the Homeland Security Act.
J. Aughenbaugh: Then we had this huge expansion of wanting to surveil and it was before they got on airlines.
N. Rodgers: A lot of the Department of Homeland Security was snow globing the rest of the government and figuring out what needed to be a part of security as opposed to other things.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because if you think about this, immigration and customs enforcement used to be part of other departments.
N. Rodgers: Right.
J. Aughenbaugh: FEMA was a stand-alone independent agency.
N. Rodgers: Well, and several of the intelligence sub-agencies got moved into DHS.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: As part of the history, can we note for the record that you have in your notes the first known proposal to create a DOT occurred during the Wilson administration.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. Because in the Wilson administration, what new form of transportation?
N. Rodgers: I was going to say isn't that when we get large-scale production of vehicles?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: We should recognize just for historical purposes, Henry Ford did not come up with the idea for a vehicle. That was in Europe years earlier. What he did was come up with the way to mass produce them so that the average American could eventually get a vehicle. At the beginning it was not the average American, it was wealthy Americans. But now it's such a car culture even the working poor often have a car.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. That was his signal contribution. There are some who lament Henry Ford's contribution and there are others who are just like, God bless Henry Ford. But his signal contribution was the mass production of affordable automobiles.
N. Rodgers: We do recognize it's part of this Department of Transportation history. The importance of the automobile and the problematic nature of Henry Ford's personal politics. Anti-Semitic, highly supportive of Hitler. He was not a particularly nice man. He was also not just a particularly nice man personally. He did a lot of union busting, he did a lot of injuring of individuals.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because from Henry Ford's perspective, I gave you a job which allowed you to go out and buy a home, buy one of my cars. What else am I supposed to provide for you?
N. Rodgers: But he also set standards where people had to go to church and they had to do all kinds of stuff. It's really interesting, his personal history. But regardless of how you feel about him as a human being and I think he's extremely problematic as a human, he did create or he did found an industry that has been the backbone of American consumerism and has been the backbone of capitalism. Before a car, people could not travel for work particularly far.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: You could go as far as a horse could take you in a day.
N. Rodgers: That's why urban designers and environmentalists lament Henry Ford. Because of the automobile, then you saw the creation of suburbs.
N. Rodgers: You saw urban sprawl and you see all kinds of things. You see a huge loss of public transportation because we leave things like trolleys and cable cars behind.
J. Aughenbaugh: This is part and parcel an element of American culture. Nia, earlier this week I read that the State of California shut down work on the Purple Line of the public subway system for Los Angeles. In part, they've been trying to go ahead and build that out for decades. But in LA and for most of the State of California, you try to convince a Californian to give up their car.
N. Rodgers: Although we'll see what happens when they can't buy gasoline fueled cars anymore, that will be fascinating. Then we get Johnson. One of the things about LBJ that you put in here that I just love is that he basically sent a note to Congress saying the way I took it was, if you don't sign this, I'm going to be forced to break your kneecaps. Wouldn't it just be better for everybody if you just signed off on this. He did that thing where he loomed over them like he does in all the pictures.
J. Aughenbaugh: What we're referring to as there was LBJ's treatment where he wanted to [inaudible] a member of Congress. But with this message that he sent to Congress, he was giving the treatment to the collective body. In this particular case, his threat was, I'm going to embarrass Congress with the sheer number of fatalities and lost business productivity because we can't get our act together in regards to creating a more uniform, safer, federal transportation system. That was his threat. I'm going to publicly embarrass you guys. Because his point was, we've now had roughly 45 years, 40-plus years of automobiles, of creating a national highway system, of states basically competing with one another. Who's got the best road system? Who's got the most dangerous? What state has the most potholes? Who has the worst drivers? Johnson was just like, but those are all negatives.
N. Rodgers: Well, and by 1965, a huge number of people owned cars.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: I am sure that he was also saying, we can't just have the Wild West with this anymore. We need an administration that has a structural response to transportation needs instead of haphazardly. Because before that, you're talking about all the things Aughie just mentioned being separate entities that weren't drawn together.
J. Aughenbaugh: Nia, to your point when they created the Department of Transportation, it brought 30 transportation agencies under one roof.
N. Rodgers: How many employees?
J. Aughenbaugh: Over 95,000.
N. Rodgers: I mean, that's a huge group of people who were doing disparate things because they weren't working together on a unified. I see what Johnson's saying. He's saying, but if we unify this, we will have a better plan going forward for American transportation. Now we've got 95,000 people and they're not working together as a group and we want them to work together as a group. But I do think it's interesting that he had to threaten Congress. But then again, he also was so used to having to do that to get what he wanted. I mean, he had to threaten Congress over the civil rights. He had to threaten Congress over all kinds of stuff. He probably was like on my list to threaten people today is the Department of Transportation.
J. Aughenbaugh: Again, for listeners, and if you're tired of hearing this, I apologize but think about this historically, transportation was typically viewed as a state concern.
N. Rodgers: Right. Which I could see that. I can see into the Federal Highway System.
J. Aughenbaugh: In part, FDR was forcing members of Congress, many of whom would have to go home and explain why their States were no longer in charge of x concerning transportation.
N. Rodgers: Aughie just said FDR, but he meant LBJ.
J. Aughenbaugh: LBJ, sorry.
N. Rodgers: FDR might have tried to pull something like that off.
J. Aughenbaugh: Both of those presidents used the same logic which was hey, the states are no longer taking care of this so the feds have to step in.
N. Rodgers: Well and don't make me make you go home and tell people why.
J. Aughenbaugh: There was pushback. Because again, members of Congress, you can go ahead and they frequently are criticized for becoming Washington insiders. But most of them do go home on a regular basis. You know they go home on a regular basis because their workweek in Washington DC is typically three-and-a-half or four days. Then they go somewhere and they usually go home.
N. Rodgers: It's either home or Aruba.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because they want to win re-election
N. Rodgers: In fairness, we say nasty things about congresspeople, but they really do a lot of constituent services.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because that's what gets them re-elected. But when you go home and explain to a whole bunch of state officials, Hey, you guys are no longer in charge of the ferry system between our state and another state. Well, it reminds me of the old quote from I Love Lucy. "Lucy, you've got some splainin' to do." Come on, right?
N. Rodgers: But the first guy had to organize the ever-living crud out of that. Like here's 95,000 employees in 30 agencies. Why don't you get to organizing that? I mean, that's a big job.
J. Aughenbaugh: Secretary Boyd for two years, basically, all he did was basically set up the organizational flowchart. But it doesn't stop with LBJ. Because LBJ decides not to run for re-election in 1968, Nixon wins. Again, you have to have a more nuanced, if you will interpret.
N. Rodgers: Approach to Nixon. Because Nixon gives us Amtrak, doesn't he?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. First of all, he bails out the Penn Central Railroad. Which for those of us born and raised in the mid-Atlantic and the Northeast, Penn Central Railroad was the major railroad hub for the Northeast and the mid-Atlantic. But then he launches Amtrak. This idea that our railroad system could be a government corporation. This is a Republican.
N. Rodgers: He's making government bigger.
J. Aughenbaugh: Again I completely forgot this and then he encouraged the Department of Transportation to get behind supersonic air travel. But then he pulls the plug, because it wasn't cost-efficient.
N. Rodgers: Although it's coming back.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, it is.
N. Rodgers: There's a theory that it will be more cost-efficient. I don't know if this is one of those things where people keep invading Russia, thinking that it'll be easier the next time. Because Napoleon and then Hitler, you just got to stop doing that because it doesn't work.
J. Aughenbaugh: [inaudible] in Afghanistan.
N. Rodgers: How many countries have to try to do this and fail before they go ahead and say, this just isn't a winning situation? They just can't.
J. Aughenbaugh: What happens in Afghanistan is like Las Vegas, it's Afghanistan.
N. Rodgers: I agree. But maybe somebody will make supersonic travel. I mean, the problem with that is people who wanted to take supersonic travel in the '80s and help me with the name of the one that went to France.
J. Aughenbaugh: What was the name of that?
N. Rodgers: But that airline went under basically because people couldn't afford to. In this world of people want a 200-dollar plane ticket to Hawaii, I don't know if they can make that work.
J. Aughenbaugh: Oh, Concord.
N. Rodgers: Concord. Thank you. Boyd had to be a bit in your face. But Nixon chooses a more moderate secretary. He's like, Just keep the trains running on time. Boy, hate to make a Mussolini reference here because the guy is not Mussolini.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, you're talking about John Bowlby, who was the former governor of Massachusetts, who was a moderate Republican. Again, this is still an era where you saw moderates in both political parties and they were usually picked by presidents to run agencies because they understood that you needed somebody with managerial experience, but who could run the department but understand the executive branch managerial skills that you need to run and it's a large department.
N. Rodgers: Ninety-five thousand people and sprawling, it covers a lot of stuff.
J. Aughenbaugh: You just think about the Federal Highway Administration, Nia. They basically have to work with all 50 states. Hey, Nia, it's not like you can go ahead and set up a regional office and say, okay, we'll go ahead and cover these eight or nine states with this one regional office. No, you basically have to interact with 50 different state department of transportations and by the way, listeners, all 50 states have departments of transportation. Which is why occasionally, people who run for presidency from the Republican party go ahead and suggest we should get rid of the Department of Transportation because it's redundant when all 50 states have Departments of Transportation. Yes.
N. Rodgers: There's an argument to be made there.
J. Aughenbaugh: But he picks a moderate. Then he's got to resign and we're talking about Nixon. So we get Ford.
J. Aughenbaugh: Ford then basically starts establishing a practice that you see throughout the rest of the history of the Department of Transportation. The secretaries for DOT are usually people of color or women.
N. Rodgers: A lot of diversity in the secretaries of this department.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, a lot of presidents use the DOT secretary position to address diversity concerns within their cabinet. Because Ford picks William Coleman, who is African-American. For our listeners if William Coleman's name sounds familiar, it's because Coleman worked with Thurgood Marshall in the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to bring a whole bunch of school segregation cases to our federal courts, and eventually the US Supreme Court.
N. Rodgers: If you've heard of Brown V the Board of Education.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: So you have Ford, and then it's a little quiet, and then we get Ronald Reagan who has my Libby.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Elizabeth Dole.
J. Aughenbaugh: His second Department of Transportation Secretary was Elizabeth Dole who as North Carolinians are very fond of referring to her, Libby Dole.
N. Rodgers: Libby Dole was all about.
J. Aughenbaugh: First of all listeners, don't think that Nia and I are saying that these cabinet secretaries who were picked perhaps for diversity reasons were unqualified.
N. Rodgers: Didn't kick butt when they were in the job.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes, because Coleman was eminently qualified and Libby Dole. Libby Dole pretty much could have done any federal government job. Because before she was DOT secretary and I know where Nia wants to go with Libby Dole, drunk driving and federal laws, the Supreme Court cases. But before she was DOT secretary, she had been an Assistant, a Public Liaison, a consumer advisor for two different administrations, a member of the Federal Trade Commission in both the Nixon and Ford administrations.
N. Rodgers: She'd been around the block. She knew how government worked.
J. Aughenbaugh: Worked. But then she gets into DOT and she pushes for the reduction of drunk driving.
N. Rodgers: The Supreme Court basically says cars have to have airbags and they have to have passenger restraints, otherwise known as seat belts. Part of that is Ralph Nader in the '70s, he's crusading about that and saying, this is wildly unsafe, not to be restrained in a vehicle going this quickly and they hit another vehicle that could potentially be going this quickly. But what Dole does is she authorizes the deadline. She's like, no, we got to get this done. Instead of dragging your feet, instead of trying to stretch that out, which is I'm sure what the companies all said, oh, no, it's going to take us years to be able to re-engineer the car, to have all these things. She's like, well, you got six months, get on it. It wasn't quite six months, but she stood up to industry, which I'm sure was expecting that a Republican would be sympathetic.
J. Aughenbaugh: What woman would basically cow-tow to their interests. And Nia is referencing a landmark administrative law case where the Supreme Court in 1983 in the State Farm case, it's the Motor Vehicles Association versus State Farm, where the Supreme Court just came out and said to the Reagan administration, you can't roll back what you already proposed as a regulation, which is every new automobile would have to have passive restraints known as seat belts and airbags. When the Reagan administration lost, Libby Dole is secretary of the department, and as Nia just described it she basically said to the automobile manufacturers, the Supreme Court has spoken. We're going to implement the ruling, and you guys basically have less than a year to tell us in the federal government how you're going to do this.
N. Rodgers: Make it happen.
J. Aughenbaugh: Make it happen. The Reagan administration also wanted a reduction in drunk driving and highway fatalities. What they did was they used the federal tax, gasoline tax money as leverage with the states. They basically said to the states, if you want your full allotment of federal highway maintenance money, you're going to have to raise your drinking age to 21. This led to another Supreme Court case. South Dakota versus Dole, where South Dakota said, you can't tell us what our drinking age is, because one, the 10th Amendment, but two the 21st Amendment, which will repeal prohibition, and said that states get to decide laws and regulations about the manufacturing, sale, and distribution of alcohol within our borders.
N. Rodgers: If I'm correct, the government won that case by saying, we're not telling you what you have to make your laws, we're just telling you we won't give you money, and we can attach whatever strings we want to the money.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes. The Supreme Court in that case, in a majority opinion written by William Rehnquist, who was a huge supporter of federalism, of states rights. Rehnquist went ahead and said, South Dakota, you have a choice, in the amount of money that the feds are going to hold back if you don't make the right choice is not coercive. It was like somewhere between 5-7 percent.
N. Rodgers: Right now if they had said it's 50/50 that would have been coercive.
J. Aughenbaugh: It would have been coercive.
N. Rodgers: But do you take 7 percent out of your budget and see how you operate? It was enough to make you sit up and take notice but you can still function.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: [inaudible] Libby Dole. I know that in some instances she may or may not have been problematic and there's a whole thing about that, but in North Carolina she's still a popular woman.
J. Aughenbaugh: Then she steps down to run her husband's presidential campaign in 1988. He lost out the Republican nomination to the vice president, who ends up being our 41st president. The first Bush. Her deputy Jim Burnley takes over. Burnley negotiates the sale of Conrail, privatizes Amtrak.
J. Aughenbaugh: Transferred Washington DC airports to a regional authority and he basically.
N. Rodgers: Busted the strike. We go from Libby Dole, who is a much more benign and moderate figure to guys like, maybe I'll just set fire a little bit to the Department of Transportation. Not hugely, but just enough to get its attention. But we should note for the record that Aughie and I were alive during the air traffic control strike.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. Basically listeners, in the early '80s, a bunch of air traffic controllers. Again, they're employed by the Federal Aviation Administration, the FAA, went in and said, "We have these high-stress jobs. We work long hours."
N. Rodgers: Our working conditions are terrible.
J. Aughenbaugh: Our working conditions are terrible and yeah, by the way, Congress hasn't given us a pay increase in a decade, which is basically true. They tell the Reagan administration, if you guys don't ask for more money and get us more money, were going on strike. They go on strike and the Reagan administration says, "Fine. We're going to replace you with a whole bunch of other air-traffic controllers." The case goes to the federal courts. The striking air traffic controllers lose because Congress never gave them the authority to bargain collectively. Eventually Burnley is the one who gets tasked and by all accounts he didn't complain one bit. He gets tasked with basically replacing all of the striking air-traffic controllers and does so like within a year. Again, this is another theme within Department of Transportation. We get secretaries who get stuff done. They don't screw around.
N. Rodgers: There are arguments to be made that that wasn't particularly best way to go about that. There were all kinds of issues involved with that and we could do a whole podcast and maybe we will do at some point a whole podcast on government worker strikes and how that works and what that means. But for awhile there, what I recall it meaning for my parents was them saying we will not get on a plane anytime soon.
J. Aughenbaugh: Flights were getting canceled.
N. Rodgers: Losing money and very unhappy.
J. Aughenbaugh: Again, the airline industry got deregulated during the Carter administration. Again, a lot of Americans don't understand that we've had Democratic presidents who have been in favor of deregulating industries, just like we've had Republican presidents who call for it. But the airline industry was making some serious coin in the early 1980s until you get the strike. Because there were many consumers like your parents, Nia, who were like, "Hey, we're not getting on a plane."
N. Rodgers: For all I know, my Uncle Bob is sitting in that tower and he didn't know what he's doing. Although in fairness to Burnley and Reagan, airplane crashes did not go up.
J. Aughenbaugh: No, they did not, no.
N. Rodgers: Which something people thought might happen. They were thinking that it would be relatively disastrous and in fact was not. It's not like they went and found people who weren't actually air-traffic controllers. What they did was hire out of small airports and train them in bigger airports, is basically what they did.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah.
N. Rodgers: Were you going to talk about Mr. Skinner?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Mr. Skinner for whom everything went wrong.
J. Aughenbaugh: Herbert Walker Bush, Reagan's vice president, wins the presidency and he picks a guy by the name of Sam Skinner to be a DOT secretary. Nia, what was his nickname?
N. Rodgers: The master of disaster. He was all about crisis management response. Think emergency response. Whenever you see governors declare an emergency or something like that, this guy was all about how we do that. It was a good thing he was interested in it because it happened to him over and over and over.
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm just going to give you the short list of disasters he had to deal with as secretary. There was the Pan-American flight 103, which exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland.
N. Rodgers: Which you wouldn't think would be his problem, except it was a bunch of Americans and it was headed to the United States.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right.
N. Rodgers: It was a terrorist bomb. Killed 300 people? No.
J. Aughenbaugh: Two hundred and seventy. The Scottish government actually asked the American Department of Transportation to help out with the investigation. Then he had a machinist strike at Eastern Airlines, which at the time I think was the third or fourth largest airline.
N. Rodgers: Eastern. What happened to Eastern?
J. Aughenbaugh: The company went bankrupt. That was in March of 1989. Later on that month, the Exxon Valdez oil spill occurred.
N. Rodgers: Oh, geez.
J. Aughenbaugh: Listeners, if you're interested in that oil spill, we actually have a podcast episode and I can't remember which season, but we went ahead and talked about it.
N. Rodgers: On disasters and disaster response.
J. Aughenbaugh: Then you had the Loma Prieta earthquake, which was in California.
N. Rodgers: Wait, that was the one during the World Series. Caused all the highways to pancake.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Just destroyed.
N. Rodgers: Lots of parts of San Francisco sunk because it's all built on like styrofoam or whatever. I don't know what it's built on, but it's built on something geologically that is not stable.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Absolutely. Terrible strata. But then less than one year later, we had one of the largest hurricanes to hit the Mid-Atlantic.
N. Rodgers: Oh my gosh. Which one?
J. Aughenbaugh: Hurricane Hugo.
N. Rodgers: Hugo was terrible.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because it basically came ashore in South Carolina and they just basically weaved the ocean back to the middle of the United States, back out to the ocean the whole way up the East coast.
N. Rodgers: What it did was soak. It was a flooding hurricane. In the sense of you get the hurricane damage, but you also get an enormous amount of water involved in Hugo. What was that like a year-and-a-half?
J. Aughenbaugh: First 21 months. Yes.
N. Rodgers: Well, hit the ground running, my friend.
J. Aughenbaugh: I remember seeing his face on TV like pretty much every night and his press conferences were just like models of efficiency. Every government official who is put in charge of an agency that might have to deal with disasters should watch his press conferences because he was so good at first giving out the facts and then just answering question after question. Sometimes the questions were the same. But he would be so patient and he would never get upset with reporters, even though they were trying to get him to give them some quote that could lead the news.
N. Rodgers: A soundbite. He didn't fall for that.
J. Aughenbaugh: He didn't fall for it. He was like the Jack Webb character on Dragnet. Just the facts, ma'am.
N. Rodgers: I will say the next one, the one for Clinton, Pena. Pena did not do that.
J. Aughenbaugh: He was more high profile.
N. Rodgers: If I recall his press conferences correctly, he was a little more impatient with the seeking of a got-cha moment. He's like, "No, I'm not here to do that. I'm just here to get it done and move on." His were very short, I seem to recall. But he's our first Hispanic American to serve.
J. Aughenbaugh: Then after that, Clinton picked, and this was widely praised, a former federal highway administrator, Rodney Slater, who was the second African-American after William Coleman. I remember Slater because Slater created the ISTEA program, which was this program designed to encourage local communities to seek out federal dollars for public transportation programs.
N. Rodgers: Improving streets.
J. Aughenbaugh: Streets and regional transportation systems to encourage economic development.
N. Rodgers: Got you.
J. Aughenbaugh: At this point in my bureaucratic career, I was doing a lot of economic development work and we were frequently applying for ISTEA money. It's actually the acronym is I-S-T-E-A.
N. Rodgers: Cool.
J. Aughenbaugh: But Slater also made sure that there wasn't a strike with Amtrak.
N. Rodgers: If that's in the '90s, that's all about merging and the whole corporate takeover, companies doing all that mess. Was happening, right where you have a lot of corporate mergers at that time in the '90s. That's the boom in the '90s before you get the crush in the 2000s.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Then the last DOT secretary I'm going to mention was Norman Mineta who was actually a Democratic member from Congress representing a district in California. He was the first Japanese-American.
N. Rodgers: He was under Bush, right?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, Bush 41. He was in charge of DOT when the 9/11 attacks occurred. He rather remarkably avoided a lot of the blowback because technically, it was his department that allowed airplanes to be used as weapons.
N. Rodgers: We've heard over and over in the 9/11 Commission Report that that was a failure of imagination, but I do think that an interesting thing to note about him is that he was in a relocation camp as a child during World War II which interestingly we call them relocation camps in the United States and they call them concentration camps in Germany.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah, I discussed that in my con-law class.
N. Rodgers: While people were not starved particularly in our camps, they were also not treated as humans. They were not treated as Americans. They were treated as.
J. Aughenbaugh: They weren't free.
N. Rodgers: If you're being held there, it's prison. You can't leave. Relocation camp makes it sound like you're going to go have a good time.
J. Aughenbaugh: George Orwell infamously wrote an essay about how language is used to make the despicable palatable. Yes, our enemies placed individuals in concentration camps, we placed them in relocation camps, right?
N. Rodgers: Yeah. We didn't put them to death. Can we mention a couple of other secretaries before we go onto [inaudible] ?
J. Aughenbaugh: Yeah. Go ahead.
N. Rodgers: Elaine Chao who served in Bush 43 and then served for Trump; she is the spouse of Mitch McConnell.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: Which is impressive. Then Pete Buttigieg who is the current as we are recording this, I mean, that could change tomorrow, but as we are recording because people sometimes just drop out of the government. But he's the first openly gay cabinet secretary, and so I like that transportation has a history of diversity, that it has a history of bringing in all kinds of voices. That's one of the positives of it.
J. Aughenbaugh: It's more than just diversity. This is something that I tried to express to my students. Diversity does not mean unqualified individuals.
N. Rodgers: Every one of those people was highly qualified.
J. Aughenbaugh: I'm reading a list here and you're talking.
N. Rodgers: Elaine Chao had been Secretary of Labor.
J. Aughenbaugh: You don't get all of these government positions simply because of who you know or who you might be married to, or because you are the first of X group, right?
N. Rodgers: But even if you do, you don't stay there. We're talking about people who've been successful in these jobs because they are talented individuals.
J. Aughenbaugh: Yes.
N. Rodgers: If you hire for the wrong reasons, you will not do well, but if you hire for the right reasons, if you hire someone who's talented.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because as I was doing research for this, Nia, I'm like, wow, talent. In Skinner, for instance, the master of disaster. I was just like, this is a mere nostalgia on my part. These were significant crises and there's nary a bad word said about the dude.
N. Rodgers: Well, like even Mineta, during a time of deep crisis in the United States was a very calm individual. He projected, it's going to all be fine. So criticisms, I know that we already talked about one, which is that it should be in the purview of the states to deal with transportation. Maybe you and I could do a whole, what should be in the states and what should be in the federal government at some point, but my argument, my criticism, and I know we don't want to go on and on, but my criticism for the Department of Transportation is crumbling infrastructure. Like y'all need to fix stuff. You need to fix the bridges and you need to fix the roads. Every time I drive across a pothole, I think nasty thoughts about VDOT, like in Virginia. I also do it in North Carolina. I think of NCDOT. So I'm an equal opportunity grumpy about the Department of Transportation person. I wonder sometimes, where the heck is the money going if?
J. Aughenbaugh: The Department of Transportation, like many of the departments that we have discussed in this series, Nia, have at times conflicting purposes or missions.
N. Rodgers: Exactly.
J. Aughenbaugh: Because the business community wants a good transportation system so they can ship commerce and make money, right?
N. Rodgers: Yeah.
J. Aughenbaugh: They want their workers to be able to get to work, they want to be able to attract good workers who don't get stuck in traffic jams for an hour and a half to work and an hour and a half from work. On the other hand.
N. Rodgers: Consumers don't want to pay egregious amounts of taxes at the.
J. Aughenbaugh: But then you also have concerns about safety. How do you go ahead and craft a transportation system that does not lead to major injuries and fatalities, right?
N. Rodgers: Right.
J. Aughenbaugh: Then you have climate change issues because as we've already discussed, the American love of the gas-powered automobile.
N. Rodgers: It's slowly destroying the planet.
J. Aughenbaugh: The planet. See greenhouse gases.
N. Rodgers: Exactly.
J. Aughenbaugh: Then you got congestion, urban sprawl, Americans wasting so much of their lives just sitting in traffic. They're not doing anything productive. It increases stress. It harms Americans' physical health because they're sitting in so much congestion. Then, as numerous scholars have pointed out, how we have built our roads, where we have built our roads either encourages economic opportunity or discourages it. Let's face it, the Department of Transportation in the late '60s and throughout the 1970s, frequently destroyed communities of color in low-income communities to go ahead and build stuff like interstates or exchanges.
N. Rodgers: Diversity at the top did not translate to equity in the regular folk.
J. Aughenbaugh: That's right. This is a department that reflects one of those ongoing tensions that we've seen in a number of the departments in our series, which is, they have conflicting purposes and missions, right?
N. Rodgers: Right.
J. Aughenbaugh: We've seen it in agriculture, we saw it with interior, right?
N. Rodgers: Yeah. I'm going to have a lot of work to do when I'm president to fix all that. That's what that comes down to.
J. Aughenbaugh: Then you go ahead and hire somebody like me and say, okay, Aughie, fix it, and I'll be like, huh? What?
N. Rodgers: Yeah, fix it, but don't cost me the next election. How you want me to do that? Anyway. Well, thank you, Aughie. It's been an excellent episode and I look forward to our next one.
J. Aughenbaugh: So do I. Thanks, Nia.
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