Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has been on paternity leave since August and no one seemed to notice until the country found itself in a new crisis involving clogged ports and empty store shelves.
It’s very nice that Buttigieg and his husband have adopted two infants, but you have to wonder why he has been secretly on leave for so long, especially in light of this new problem.
From Politico:
Can Pete Buttigieg have it all?PETE BUTTIGIEG has been MIA.While U.S. ports faced anchor-to-anchor traffic and Congress nearly melted down over the president’s infrastructure bill in recent weeks, the usually omnipresent Transportation secretary was lying low.One of the White House’s go-to communicators didn’t appear on TV. He was absent on Capitol Hill during the negotiations over the bill he had been previously helping sell to different members of Congress. Conservative critics tried (unsuccessfully) to get #WheresPete to trend and Fox News ran a story on October 4 with the headline: “Buttigieg quiet on growing port congestion as shipping concerns build ahead of holidays.”They didn’t previously announce it, but Buttigieg’s office told West Wing Playbook that the secretary has actually been on paid leave since mid-August to spend time with his husband, Chasten, and their two newborn babies.“For the first four weeks, he was mostly offline except for major agency decisions and matters that could not be delegated,” said a spokesperson for the Department of Transportation. “He has been ramping up activities since then.” As he does that, Buttigieg will “continue to take some time over the coming weeks to support his husband and take care of his new children,” the spokesperson added.
The news garnered a lot of criticism on Twitter:
Buttigieg’s ability to serve in this role is also being questioned.
Joe Concha writes at The Hill:
Amateur hour: Pete Buttigieg’s inexperience exposed as supply chain breaks downThree years ago, the only people who’d ever heard of Pete Buttigieg were likely to be residents of South Bend, Ind., the town of 103,000 people where he served as mayor.South Bend is home to Notre Dame University. It has a bus station with a fleet of 60 buses, a small train station and a small regional airport. So, who better for Team Biden to nominate as secretary of the Department of Transportation, which employs more than 58,000 employees – more than half the population of South Bend – and has a budget of $87 billion?After a quiet first nine months in office, the former mayor has his first crisis on his hands: a massive supply-chain breakdown exploding across the country that will impact every American, particularly the lower and middle classes.
It’s not like we weren’t warned.
Buttigieg looks like he is in over his head. Unfortunately, it’s the American people who will suffer as a result.
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