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Pete Buttigieg Will Be Joe Biden’s Secretary of Transportation

Photo: Allison Zaucha/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Pete Buttigieg, the former South Bend, Indiana, mayor and (for a brief moment) plausibly electable Democratic presidential candidate, will run Joe Biden’s Department of Transportation, Politico and other outlets are reporting. It’s a bit of a surprise to most observers: South Bend is a small city without a huge transit system, and the buzzed-about figures were high-profile big-city rail-and-road experts like New York’s Polly Trottenberg and Sarah Feinberg and Chicago’s Rahm Emanuel. But transportation is a technocrat’s game, and putting a Harvard and McKinsey alumnus in place does make a certain kind of sense. And given how good the trains are in northern Europe, maybe he can pick up an idea or two from his Norwegian reading.

Pete Buttigieg Will Be Joe Biden’s Transportation Secretary