Mitt Romney Joins in Buttigieg Pile-On: ‘He’s Not Ready For the Responsibility He Has’

Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) joined the chorus of Republicans criticizing Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on Thursday, submitting that Buttigieg lacked the experience to run a Cabinet department.

“He’s not ready for the responsibility he has,” said Romney when asked to evaluate Buttigieg’s performance in office. “He was a fine mayor, from what I understand, but the position he’s got really would be better served by a person who’s managed a large enterprise, a state, or something of the scale he’s now dealing with.”

Buttigieg, who served as the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, before mounting a longshot presidential campaign in 2020, has contended with a series of crises in his position. He was first scrutinized for his handling of widespread delays and cancellations at airports over the holidays, owing largely to malfunctioning systems at Southwest Airlines and the Federal Aviation Administration.

But “even before Southwest’s meltdown,” reported the New York Times in January, “the Transportation Department had received a flood of consumer complaints about flight delays and cancellations, and Mr. Buttigieg had faced calls to take more aggressive action to penalize airlines for their failings.” In a bipartisan letter sent to Buttigieg in August, a group of state attorneys general argued that a “vacuum of oversight” from his department had allowed “airlines to mistreat consumers.”

More recently, Buttigieg has been knocked for what critics say was a slow-footed, partisan, and misleading response to the derailment of a train carrying toxic materials, which crashed in East Palestine, Ohio, on February 3. Initially, Buttigieg did not comment on the incident, and when he did, he implied that the crash resulted from the repeal of rail regulations by the Trump administration. A Washington Post analysis of the crash later found that what Buttigieg was referring to played no part in the derailment.

Buttigieg has admitted that he “could have spoken out sooner” about the incident. The 41-year-old has been regarded as a rising Democratic star since his overperformance in the 2020 primaries and a top Biden administration surrogate since he was confirmed to his position but has increasingly come under fire for handling his more basic duties.

A number of Republicans have come for Buttigieg in the aftermath of the derailment. Marco Rubio called him an “incompetent who is focused solely on his fantasies about his political future & needs to be fired,” and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said he was “more interested in pursuing press coverage for woke initiatives and climate nonsense than in attending to the basic elements of his day job.”