Tag: pete buttigieg

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg Orders Suspension of Private Drone Flights in North Carolina’s Hurricane Helene Flood Zone — Immediately Issues Clarification After Backlash

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has ordered a suspension of private drone flights in North Carolina’s Hurricane Helene flood zone, only to backtrack amid intense backlash.

The deadly storm has left a trail of destruction across North Carolina, with 94 confirmed deaths in the western part of the state alone. Hundreds remain unaccounted for, and residents are desperate for help.

However, instead of expediting rescue efforts, FEMA and the Biden administration seem more focused on suppressing the efforts of private citizens who stepped up where the federal response has faltered.

Buttigieg’s Department of Transportation took to social media to announce, Drone pilots: Do not fly your drone near or around rescue and recovery efforts for Hurricane Helene. Interfering with emergency response operations impacts search and rescue operations on the ground.”

Many on social media rightfully pointed out the absurdity of the ban.

One user wrote, “The USDOT and FAA don’t know drones are saving lives and aiding rescue efforts by flying insulin to inaccessible regions, locating trapped and isolated individuals, and providing imagery to the world.”

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Pete Buttigieg Given Brutal Reality Check After Using Faulty Analogy to Mock Americans for Refusing to Buy Electric Vehicles

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg this week used a faulty analogy on Fox News to taunt Americans for refusing to buy overpriced, environmentally damaging electric vehicles. But Americans on social media gave the inept and elitist Buttigieg a brutal reality check afterward.

Buttigieg was a guest on “America’s Newsroom” with John Roberts and Sandra Smith when he embarrassed himself. Roberts opened by telling Buttigieg about the collapsing Tesla sales and auto companies laying off large chunks of their workforces at electric plants.

He then pivoted to asking why the Biden regime continued to try to shove EVs down everyone’s throats. Buttigieg responded by spinning EV statistics before mocking Americans resistant to EVs being stuck in the past, comparing the situation to people who resisted the cell phone revolution in the early 2000s and wanted landline phones forever instead.

Relevant transcript:

Roberts: Tesla sales fell 8.5% in the first quarter of this year. Ford this week is laying off two-thirds of its workforce at the F-150 electric lighting plant. It’s also scaling back a battery production facility because of sagging sales.

EV sales are nowhere near what this president wanted or expected, yet the administration continues to shove them down consumers’ throats. Why?

Buttigieg: Let’s be clear that the automotive sector is moving toward EVs, and we can’t pretend otherwise. Sometimes, when these debates happen, I feel like it’s the early 2000s, and I’m talking to some people who think that we can just have landline phones forever.

Social media users quickly jumped on the flaws in Buttigieg’s arguments. There were reasons why cell phones were better than landlines, whereas EVs have several drawbacks compared to gas-powered cars and the only way for EVs to be “competitive” is to crack down on traditional vehicles.

Moreover, landlines cost almost nothing compared to electric cars, and many Americans still use them.

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Buttigieg Knew: State AGs Warned Transportation Agency Of Airline Debacle Months Ago

Shortly before Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in September that airline issues would ‘get better‘ before the holidays, a bipartisan group of attorneys general warned him that regulators’ lax oversight over the industry was about to lead to chaos.

According to The Lever, federal officials stood by as Southwest Airlines executives, “flush with cash from a government bailout,” showered themselves in cash and dividends, instead of shoring up fundamental issues that have contributed to this week’s travel mayhem.

Four months before Southwest’s mass cancellation of flights, 38 state attorneys general wrote to congressional leaders declaring that Buttigieg’s agency “failed to respond and to provide appropriate recourse” to thousands of consumer complaints about airlines customer service. -The Lever

“Americans are justifiably frustrated that federal government agencies charged with overseeing airline consumer protection are unable or unwilling to hold the airline industry accountable,” the AGs wrote in August, urging Congress to pass legislation which would arm state officials to enforce consumer protection laws against airlines.

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Biden-Buttigieg DOT fails to track aviation imports while prioritizing equity, climate justice

The Transportation Department and the Federal Aviation Administration do not track imports of plane parts, creating serious vulnerabilities that could increase the risk of supply chain disruptions, according to a new report by the department’s internal watchdog.

The DOT and FAA are not required to track aviation imports, but the “COVID-19 pandemic caused major disruptions in the aviation supply chain and highlighted the need for Federal intervention to address associated vulnerabilities,” the Transportation Department Inspector General wrote in a report published last week. 

“We identified several vulnerabilities that increase the risk of aviation supply chain disruptions,” the IG reported, “including the lack of visibility into supply chains, dependence on sole-source or limited suppliers, and lack of access to rare earth metals and elements.” 

The report came in response to a request from Republicans on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and its Aviation Subcommittee after members asked in April 2021 how the agency tracks critical aircraft imports and the number of aviation parts produced exclusively in China or India. 

Overall, France is the leading source of U.S. imports of aviation products, with 24% of the total. Canada ranks second, with 17%. China, accounting for 2% of U.S. aviation imports, comes in at number 10.

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Pete Buttigieg often flies on taxpayer-funded private jets, flight data show

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, an advocate of increased government action to curb carbon emissions, has taken at least 18 flights using taxpayer-funded private jets since taking office, Fox News Digital has learned.

Buttigieg has traveled across the country — visiting Florida, Ohio and New Hampshire, among other states — and out of the country using a private jet fleet managed by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), according to flight tracking data reviewed by Fox News Digital. The flight records align with Buttigieg’s schedule of external and public engagements obtained by government watchdog group Americans for Public Trust (APT).

Buttigieg’s predecessor, Elaine Chao, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump, faced criticism for using the same jets on seven occasions in 2017, costing taxpayers nearly $94,000, Politico reported at the time. And Trump-appointed Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price was forced to resign after reportedly taking 26 private jet flights that same year, costing taxpayers about $1.2 million.

Bipartisan leaders on the House Oversight and Reform Committee had opened an investigation into several senior Trump administration officials’ use of government-owned and private aircraft for travel days before Price submitted his letter of resignation.

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Buttigieg floats ‘monthly transportation payment’ that ‘covers everything’ to replace car payments

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg suggested that transitioning to a “monthly transportation payment” from monthly car payments could be in America’s future.

Buttigieg also said a “monthly mobility dividend” could lie further out in the future.

“What I mean by that is if we’re looking way out into the future, where we have things like, let’s imagine distributed energy generation where you have resources at your house, whether it’s a dramatically more efficient, even solar panels and wind resources,” Buttigieg said Wednesday at an event hosted by the liberal think tank New America.

“From your home, you can put more into the transportation system than you get out of it through things like energy, so that you would participate in creating so much value that you’d actually get a net dividend on it, instead of paying into it on a net basis,” he added. “Now, that’s pretty far out.”

A “more intermediate goal” in the U.S. would be transitioning from monthly car payments to a “monthly transportation payment that’s quite a bit less than a car payment that covers everything,” said Buttigieg, a Democratic presidential candidate in 2020.

“We’re actually seeing certain glimmers of this now,” he said. “So some of the rideshare companies, for example, are starting to look at mobility as a service where you have some kind of interface, and it’s neutral on whether you’re on one of their bikes, or in one of their rideshare things or just on public transit, or some combination thereof, or it even leads to a train ticket or something.

“All you do is you tell your smartphone, you know, ‘Hey Siri, book me from the street corner I’m standing at to my cousin’s house in Louisville,’ and then Siri figures it out, and you pay once, and it may or may not be a single seat ride, but off you go. That’s a vision, I think, that’s well within our lifetimes, if not within our grasp.” 

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