WASHINGTON — Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg failed to replace outdated air-traffic-control systems while in office — with his agency instead shelling out tens of billions of dollars on a DEI agenda, according to federal spending records and airline-industry insiders.
In one meeting, Buttigieg — who is said to be eyeing a 2028 presidential run — told industry executives that air-traffic-control upgrades would just allow them to fly more planes, “and so why would that be in his interest?” sources said.
What his department was really interested in was handing out hundreds of diversity, equity and inclusion grants totaling more than $80 billion over four years — at least half of the DOT’s entire budget for a typical fiscal year, records show.
“He was definitely pushing an agenda,” an air-industry official said, noting the transportation secretary had “little to no interest” and took “definitely zero action” toward air traffic control modernization.
Buttigieg spent his time in Biden’s cabinet blaming the airlines for their delays and “vilifying” the industry as a whole while denying his department’s DEI agenda led to any air-traffic-control staffing shortages or was maintaining an ailing safety system that hasn’t been updated since the Carter administration, sources told The Post.
The flying public paid the price, insiders said.
“At first, [the Department of Transportation] and he were reluctant to say there was an air-traffic-controller shortage or that the shortage had anything to do with flight delays or flight cancellations,” the air-industry official said.
Chris Meagher, a spokesman for Buttigieg, rejected both claims and pointed to increased air-traffic-controller hiring under the former transportation big, as well as software changes to improve efficiency at airport runways, new flight routes projected to cut up to 100 hours off travel time annually and the development of communications technology to decrease flight delays.
Former President Joe Biden’s infrastructure law also provided $5 billion to improve air-traffic facilities’ towers and power systems, he noted.
“Suggesting that Secretary Buttigieg chose not to pursue air traffic control modernization is absurd,” said Meagher, adding that Biden’s budget request for fiscal year 2025 included another $8 billion in funding that congressional Republicans blocked.
“Secretary Buttigieg’s focus was always on safety — not just in aviation, but also on roads and bridges, where 40,000 Americans die on our country’s roads each year. Fixing issues with air traffic control was a priority.”
The DOT’s Bureau of Transportation Statistics shows that most flight cancellations (54.3%) were caused by weather during Buttigieg’s term, whereas a little more than one-third (34.7%) were attributable to air carriers. Just 10.6% were due to failures in the National Aviation System.
Nearly 80% of flights were on time between January 2021 and 2025. Almost 7% of delays were due to air carriers, another 7% for late-arriving aircraft, and 5% was attributable to the aviation system. Fewer than 1% were attributable to weather.
Airline-industry officials acknowledged that carrier delays persisted coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic but argued much of the infrastructure law’s funding “went to maintenance” of facilities and equipment, which is roughly $3.5 billion annually, not “modernization.”
They argued that while hiring improved in recent years, there was still a high dropout rate and surging retirements from veteran air-traffic controllers.
“If you start with a thunderstorm early in the day, and it ripples throughout the day, which is the way it usually works … by the time you get to the eighth flight … it’s just tagged as a late-arriving aircraft,” an industry official said.
“No matter what the original cause of the delay was, that always gets tagged to us as our fault. So it’s a complicated story.”
Despite the requested changes to the air-traffic-control systems early in his term, Buttigieg seemed more interested in being “good on TV” than fixing the archaic systems that were flying up to 182 million passengers per year, officials said.
The Federal Aviation Administration has been chronically understaffed for years, with the agency employing only around 80% of the target for certified professional controllers at least since fiscal year 2017, which airline officials argued was the main factor forcing delays and cancellations.
In January 2023, the agency ordered the first nationwide grounding of flights since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks that left thousands of passengers stranded. The 2023 grounding was due to an FAA system outage.
In an urgent letter to Buttigieg’s DOT in April 2024, air-industry trade association officials warned that at the current rate of hiring, it could take as many as 90 years for the FAA to reach its targeted staffing levels in some of the critical New York air-traffic-control centers.
At the same time, the focus of the department under Buttigieg also shifted, with roughly 400 DEI-related grants approved, according to a review of federal spending between 2021 and 2024.
Just 60 grants for diversity, equity or inclusion initiatives were approved during the previous administration, totaling no more than a few billion dollars.
Programs such as “Justice40” ended up shelling out 55% of around $150 billion in infrastructure investments to “disadvantaged communities,” pursuant to an executive order Biden signed to “advance equitable outcomes.”
Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure law in 2021 provided much of the funding, but some Democrats were critical of the outcomes — including a $5 billion equity effort to build 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations that resulted in just seven being built by June 2024.
“Internal White House polling showed that airline issues and airline consumer issues were” key polling successes, an industry official said. “At this point that White House didn’t have a lot to sink their teeth into from a PR standpoint.”
Meagher said the department’s DEI grants didn’t delay “the work of the FAA” and were “a separate, siloed transportation mode.”
“You can walk and chew gum at the same time,” he responded. “FAA operates completely separately than other modal administrations. So what happens at FHWA doesn’t have a meaningful effect on FAA or NHTSA because they operate independently. It’s separate staff, separate budgets, separate programs.”
Buttigieg often lashed out at the airlines, blaming the industry — not the FAA which controls airspace nationwide — for canceling flights and bilking passengers for “junk fees.”
Just 12 days before the election, Buttigieg’s DOT moved to implement a federal rule giving passengers compensation for every delay and cancellation of up to $1,000, even if it was higher than the original fare, prompting a blistering statement from a top airline trade association calling it a political stunt.
“Secretary Buttigieg is proud of the work he did to improve the rights and protections of consumers – like making refunds automatic when airlines cancel a flight, proposing a rule to ensure parents can sit with their children for no charge when they fly, and ensuring individuals that fly with wheelchairs are compensated if airlines damage them,” Meagher said.
“USDOT also ensured nearly $4 billion in refunds to consumers as a result of investigations into consumer complaints.”
David Grizzle, who served under former President Barack Obama as the FAA’s chief counsel, acting deputy administrator and chief operating officer of its Air Traffic Organization, pointed out that paying “less attention to aviation than highways or bridges” wasn’t abnormal for a transportation secretary.
It’s “a very big job, and it covers seven different modes,” Grizzle noted, while acknowledging, “There certainly were no remarkable achievements in aviation during his [Buttigieg’s] term.
“The shortfall in budget is something that really began in the [2010s] and has really gotten worse over time,” he added.
As of last month, an Emerson College poll of registered voters found the former transportation secretary leading the 2028 Democratic presidential primary field with 16% support, followed by ex-Vice President Kamala Harris at 13%.
An Echelon Insights in July showed him in second place for the potential primary, trailing former Harris by 15 percentage points, 26% to 11%, in support from Democrat and Democrat-leaning voters.
With the passage of President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill earlier this month, Republicans have now approved $12.5 billion in additional spending for Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to revamp the old Federal Aviation Administration systems.
“It’s not so much that prior administrations have been especially indifferent; he’s just been exceedingly attentive,” Grizzle said of Duffy. “I’ve been on blue ribbon panels in Trump and Biden. … He will stand out for decades as one of the most engaged secretaries we’ve had.”
