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Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg expressed deep concern over the Trump administration's chaos.
The gay former transportation secretary warned of the ramifications of the second Trump administration's chaos.
On the Tuesday night debut of MSNBC’sThe Briefing with Jen Psaki, Pete Buttigieg laid out a stark assessment of the Trump administration’s dismantling of federal safety and national security systems, raising alarms over politicized firings, degraded aviation oversight, and mounting risks under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s leadership.
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Buttigieg, an out gay Navy reserve intelligence officer, former transportation secretary, and one of the Democratic Party’s most skilled communicators, criticized the removal of Alvin Brown, vice chair of the National Transportation Safety Board. Brown, a Biden appointee and the only Black member of the five-person board, was abruptly fired Tuesday as the agency investigates several deadly transportation incidents, including the January 29 midair collision near Washington, D.C., that killed 67 people, when a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter struck an American Airlines jet, plunging both aircraft into the Potomac River near the runway of Washington National Airport.
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“This is a very bipartisan body,” Buttigieg told Psaki. “I have never heard of a White House in modern times removing somebody from the NTSB. And they’ve not provided any explanation or reason why.”
The Washington Postreports that officials revoked Brown’s access to his office Tuesday morning and the agency scrubbed his biography from the organization’s website. NTSB staff were notified of his dismissal by email. According to the Post, safety experts described the firing as unprecedented. “This is the first time in modern history that the White House has removed a board member,” said Jeff Guzzetti, a former FAA and NTSB investigator.
Buttigieg, who led the Department of Transportation for four years, said the move compromises public trust in aviation safety and signals a broader campaign to politicize independent agencies.
Meanwhile, Newark Liberty International Airport, in New Jersey, continues to suffer extreme delays and cancellations. According to NPR, the airport has been hit by staffing shortages, outdated FAA tech, poor weather, and a key runway closure.
“It’s obviously a real concern, a major concern,” Buttigieg told Psaki, responding to the Newark disruptions and broader aviation instability. “When you become Secretary of Transportation, you know that your most important priority is safety. I understood that, my predecessors understood that, and my successor says that he understands that."
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He added, “I hope and expect that he does too, and everything else takes a back seat to that.”
The former transportation secretary also rejected blame-shifting by his Trump-appointed successor, former MTV Real World cast member Sean Duffy, who claimed on Fox News that the Biden administration failed to modernize FAA infrastructure. “It’s just politics,” Buttigieg said. He mentioned that under his tenure, the agency reversed a decades-long decline in air traffic controller staffing and launched modernization contracts to replace obsolete systems—efforts he now fears are being derailed.
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The administration’s purge of expert leadership isn’t limited to transportation. Buttigieg also addressed Hegseth’s plan to cut 20 percent of the military’s top brass. He warned that such shake-ups appear rooted not in strategy but in ideology. “What we need and deserve is some level of confidence that, frankly, they know what they’re doing.”
Earlier this spring, Buttigieg called Hegseth “unfit to lead” after The New York Times revealed that the defense secretary used an encrypted Signal chat to share classified details of a Yemen airstrike with individuals lacking security clearance—including his wife, brother, and personal lawyer.
“This is the highest level of fuckup imaginable,” Buttigieg wrote in March. “These people cannot keep America safe.”
Buttigieg’s condemnation followed The Atlantic’s earlier report that Hegseth had accidentally included editor Jeffrey Goldberg in a similar Signal thread that unfolded in real time with a live military operation.
Beyond security breaches, Hegseth’s actions have targeted LGBTQ+ service members and families. Hegseth has banned gender-affirming care for transgender troops, blocked enlistment of individuals with a history of gender dysphoria, and frozen promotions for out trans personnel. His directives have prompted a series of court challenges, including a preliminary injunction in two courts blocking enforcement of the military ban. On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for implementing the ban as the cases proceed.
The secretary also faces a federal lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of military families, accusing him and the Department of Defense Education Activity of First Amendment violations. The suit alleges that DoDEA schools, under Hegseth’s orders, canceled Pride and Black History Month programming, banned LGBTQ+ books, and stripped health curricula of references to consent, puberty, and gender identity.
In his interview, Buttigieg called for Democrats to move beyond reactive politics and articulate a bold, forward-looking vision. “This is not a question of accommodating things that we don’t agree with or watering down or changing our values,” he said.
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Buttigieg added, “It is a question of making very clear to everybody how your everyday life is different if we are in charge compared to if they’re in charge—what your life could be like if wages went up the way that we propose that they be raised, what we would do with the money if we successfully stopped the tax cuts through the wealthy that are at the core of Donald Trump’s economic agenda, what we think could happen in a country where we had paid family leave and some of the unfinished business of fixing our health care system.”
He added that growing public disillusionment with government is fertile ground for authoritarianism. “We would not be in this situation if the government, the economy, and the politics of our country were healthy,” Buttigieg said. “Proto-authoritarian governments don’t just come out of nowhere.”
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