JON GABRIEL: You know what Biden is missing? That key Nerd to guide the White House.
In business, this might be the chief technology officer, chief financial officer, or something else. On a ship, it’s the Engineer. When The Jerk orders The Nerd to make more widgets; The Nerd tells The Jerk they need the larger Widgetmaker 3400 and 670.2 more square feet of factory floor. He’s read the latest research, studied the schematics, knows what’s possible and how to make it happen. The Nerd might not have social skills, but hand them a spreadsheet and a user manual and they won’t leave their office before knowing everything about everything.
If I walk into a company, I look for each of these roles. It might take a while to suss out since official titles vary. Maybe the chairman really calls the shots while the CEO inherited that title from their parents. But if the organization doesn’t have this Iron Triangle, I know it’s chaotic, inefficient and has high turnover.
The administration may thought the nerd was going to be played by Pete Buttigieg, but he was too lazy to learn his part:
In the case of the latest FAA failure, which grounded more than 10,000 flights, there were complaints for years about the FAA’s creaky, outdated Notice to Air Mission (NOTAM) system. (The complaints had even prompted Representative Pete Stauber (R., Minn.) to propose reforms before any of this happened.) Yet the only discernable step taken by Buttigieg was to rename NOTAM in December 2021 from its original name, Notice to Airmen, which was deemed insufficiently gender-inclusive. It speaks volumes about Buttigieg’s values, and the depth of his understanding of DOT’s responsibilities, that this was a higher priority for him than making sure the planes would not get grounded.
It hasn’t helped Buttigieg that there is still no Senate-confirmed head of the FAA. Confirmation should be easy in Chuck Schumer’s Senate, but nominee Phillip Washington — who was nominated in July 2022 after the prior Trump-appointed head stepped down in March — still has not even had a confirmation hearing. This has less to do with Republican opposition than with the baggage that the nominee, presently the CEO of Denver International Airport, brings to the job.
Washington, who ran the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transit Authority from 2015 to 2021, was already under fire for lacking long experience in aviation, and then the news broke in September 2022 that he had been named in a Los Angeles County search warrant involving allegations of corruption in a no-bid contract given “to a nonprofit group headed by one of Los Angeles County Supervisor and Metro board member Sheila Kuehl’s friends to shore up Kuehl’s support.” He had other issues: “In one case, he issued a no-bid contract for a nonprofit group to establish a sexual harassment hotline for the agency with a cost that worked out to $8,000 a call.” There is a whistleblower, who
claims that Washington ordered her to pay a bill of $75,000 to Peace Over Violence in 2015, before the MTA had even authorized the contract. “He stated he’d rather not upset any of Supervisor Sheila Kuehl’s friends rather than dispute the veracity of the bill,” according to the warrant’s account of witness testimony, adding that Washington said “he would rather pay the $75,000, so he could later use that to his advantage when he needed a political favor from Supervisor Sheila Kuehl.”
It is unlikely that Buttigieg had much to do with Biden’s nomination of Washington, but he obviously didn’t have the knowledge of the field and its players necessary to push back at the choice. That is a recurring issue: Being out of his depth, Buttigieg has to leave the serious work to others. In the rail-freight strike, the Biden administration deployed Labor secretary Marty Walsh as its point man, while Buttigieg — as Jim has again covered comprehensively — was doing public appearances at the Detroit Auto Show, appearing on late-night talk shows, and pushing Democratic talking points about inflation, climate, and race.
And as a result:
