(Unedited) Podcast Transcript 508: Biden Administration’s Transportation Policy Legacy
November 13, 2024
This week we’re joined by Dani Simons, currently of Alstom but formerly Assistant to the Secretary and Director of Public Affairs at USDOT, to take a look back at how Biden Administration policies evolved from ideas to bills such as the IIJA and Inflation reduction act. We also discuss Buy America, the impacts of outside criticisms from different sides of the political spectrum, and the importance of storytelling.
You can listen to this episode at Streetsblog USA or find it on our hosting page.
Below is a full AI generated unedited transcript:
[00:02:42] Dani Simons, welcome back to the Talking Headways podcast. [00:02:50] Dani Simons: Jeff, thanks so much. It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me. [00:02:53] Jeff Wood: Yeah. Well, thanks for coming back. And for folks that might not be familiar with your work or listen to episode 301 in the depths of the pandemic, can you tell people a little bit about yourself? [00:03:02] Dani Simons: Sure. I’ve been working in sustainable transportation for about 25 years now. It’s a field I am passionate about. Very passionate about. And I think for me, it’s so fascinating because touches all aspects of people’s lives. And I’ve been very lucky to work both in the nonprofits base and local government. [00:03:22] I think when we talked last time, that was that we is doing public partnerships for them and working a lot on a product they had called Moody’s Carpool, which was an unfortunate casualty of the pandemic. And I am coming to you now kind of freshly off the stint with The Biden Harris administration leading up public affairs for U S D O T and working as a advisor for secretary of the judge. [00:03:43] Jeff Wood: Nice. [00:03:44] Dani Simons: So I worked for the Biden Harris administration for a little over two and a half years, starting from right around inauguration day until about a year ago. And. For a number of reasons, partly because I have young kids, uh, we wanted to get back to New York and get back to a pace of life that was a little bit more sustainable. [00:04:00] And I was trying to think about what I wanted to do next wasn’t easy in the administration kind of environment and pace. And I was fortunate to be introduced to some of the folks at Alstom and I was really fascinated because I had come from a place where we talked a lot about how we were going to be creating good paying jobs for all of this investment in American infrastructure and how we were going to be You know, creating these good paying American jobs. [00:04:25] And I was really interested because Alstom was doing that. Alstom is a global company. It’s been around for, you know, about a hundred years is about 80, 000 people around the globe has strong regional and local presences and they are manufacturing trains in upstate New York. And as a person who now identifies as a New Yorker, it was exciting to me to come back to my adopted home state. [00:04:54] And to work for a company that was creating Good manufacturing jobs in the state and to kind of see what it was like, where the rubber hit the road from all of this, like, good policy talk to actually going into the private sector and understanding sort of how that worked and how companies actually operated under this by American framework and how companies were kind of seeing the investment in transit and rail and how they were actually, you know, turning that. [00:05:17] funding to real projects. And so it’s been, it’s been a fascinating year. I’ve learned a lot. Some of the stuff that’s happening with Buy America is really interesting to me and to kind of see where people feel really strongly and want to uphold it and where people, you know, really want to push through for the sake of expediency and want to kind of take shortcuts through it. [00:05:37] You know, policy is complicated, and figuring out sort of how to implement it is complicated, and I think we’re kind of at the intersection with that right now, with the conversation around Brightline West and where those trends should be made. [00:05:50] Jeff Wood: I’m just interested in the general kind of theme about it all because, you know, we can dive into the weeds about the Brightline West and all that stuff, but I think it’s actually more interesting to talk about kind of the state of manufacturing, uh, transit vehicles and everything else in the United States versus everywhere else. [00:06:05] And the regulations that we have that we are trying to follow, like the crash regulations that we used to have for commuter rail and trying to get around that to build train sets for Caltrain and things like that. So I feel like there’s a change in discussion, or at least an evolution in discussion about Manufacturing the United States, because all of these things that we’re trying to do in the United States, it’s been kind of piece by piece and one off because of just the, the rareness of transit operations. [00:06:28] And there’s the, you know, there’s the big players like the New Yorks and the Philadelphia’s and the Chicago’s, et cetera. But then if somebody else wants to build a commuter train in Denver, for example, then they kind of have to go and see what is out there. And I feel like in Europe, There’s a number of manufacturers and people are going to buy stuff and, you know, try to put it on their tracks and they have regulations that work for them. [00:06:47] And so I, I’m just interested in this overall theme of manufacturing. U. S. based vehicles versus kind of the ones that exist in Japan or in China or in wherever else, you know, it’s just such an interesting topic. [00:07:01] Dani Simons: Yeah, I mean, I think one thing that’s interesting to me is like the way that Buy America works is if you have the kind of follow through and commitment on Buy America, because I mean, I think this is probably true about lots of different spaces, but. [00:07:15] You’re taking the United States kind of at the start of a lot of these investments in the green economy, and I include, you know, transit and passenger rail in that, but you could look at offshore winds and you could look at electric cars and a lot of those other things as well, right? Like, we just, in terms of the level of investment that we’ve had in those spaces and the kind of level of adoption that we have compared to China or places in Europe, it’s very small. [00:07:40] And so. When you are investing, you’re kind of taking a bet and you’re taking a bet on two things. One, that there’s going to be some sort of continuous pipeline of funding for these types of things or consumer demand for these types of things, and two, that there’s going to be some sort of long term commitment for buy America, because you have a government sometimes that says like you have to, you must, there’s rules from the FRA and FTA and Amtrak that like a certain percentage. [00:08:07] Of the content has to be domestic content and sometimes the threshold is very, very high for the trains that we’re building for Amtrak. I think we have about 95 percent domestic content. And so, you know, you take a bet on that, but then what happens is that you have these sort of cycles of feast and famine, and sometimes just famine, in terms of federal funding, especially for transit and rail, and so you might get one big contract, and you might sort of live off of that for five or ten years, and then it’s done. [00:08:37] And then when that happens, and there’s not sort of a next wave of funding that’s on the horizon or present then, you have to downsize your factories, you have to, you know, lay people off, you lose expertise, you lose talent, you lose a supply chain that might have gotten built up, and to start that back up again is, uh, there’s a lot of friction to that, there’s a lot of, you know, bulls in terms of time and costs to do that, and I think there’s The kind of story that we tell about the factory in Hornell, New York, which is in the southern tier of New York, the, you know, pretty rural part of the state, I think it’s actually considered to be part of Appalachia. [00:09:15] The factory there was pretty much almost mothballed until about 10 or 15 years ago, where we got the contract for the Acelas for the next generation of Acelas for Amtrak. And that was because the funding for transit and the funding for building railcars just really hadn’t. And so, you know, that place was down to like a 200 employees and we were able to build it back up. [00:09:39] There are, I think, over 650 employees that are there now. And it’s really had a huge effect on the community because when you build up a staff and a workforce, and this was a lot about what we talked about at DOT, you see that that has a ripple effect in the community because all of a sudden those people want you by home. [00:09:59] And there’s actually new condo development that’s going on in Hornell. You’ve got suppliers that are coming in for visits. So you need to build a new hotel for people to stay there. And so there’s a new business class hotel that’s opened in the last couple of years in Hornell and there’s jobs that are associated with that. [00:10:13] You want to go out and get a drink after work. There’s a new cocktail bar in downtown Hornell called Hush and it looks very fancy. And you know, you see all of this kind of ripple effect in the local economy and that’s a really good and powerful thing, but that only can be sustained. If you have a steady pipeline of investment and you have a commitment to buy America, it is much cheaper for us to make stuff in Mexico. [00:10:37] And there’s times when a contract has a lower buy America contract requirement, and we’re going to do some part of that at our huge factory in Saigon, which is, you know, an hour outside of Mexico City. It’s just cheaper to do it. If there is a commitment to buy America, then we will gladly also do that work in Cornell or in Plattsburgh or at one of our other facilities and that has been creating jobs in the U. [00:10:59] S. And I think it’s a policy question about whether or not it makes sense for the government to gently subsidize in that way. And the return is creating these jobs and those jobs in return, creating more and more jobs and investment in local communities and places that really haven’t seen that kind of investment and really need that kind of investment. [00:11:17] And I sit on the side of like, Yeah, like we should do that. I think that was one of the things that really inspired me about my time with the Biden administration and really made me want to come work at a company like this and a company that doesn’t just create jobs in the U S but creates union jobs and has been steadily working in the eighties, about one out of every five Austin employees in the U S is a member of a union, which is pretty cool. [00:11:40] Jeff Wood: Well, that kind of gets us into like the larger discussion that we wanted to have, which is this kind of introspective thinking about your years at the Biden administration. Then also I just hit 500 episodes today. So we’re, you know, we’re feeling a little bit introspective as well about kind of all the stuff that we’ve talked about over the last 11 years or so, whether we move the needle. [00:11:59] Or connect the dots in the right way. And it seems you’ve been feeling the same way about your time in the Biden administration. So perhaps it’s, uh, it’s a good time to ask you kind of initially what pulled you into work there? Because I feel like there’s an origin story there and a start that we should go through before we get to like the meaty and nitty gritty. [00:12:15] Dani Simons: Um, well, first congratulations on 500 episodes. That is a huge, a huge milestone. And I know that the newsletter has been going for even longer and, um, I’m a huge fan and it’s a great [00:12:26] Jeff Wood: resource. Thanks so much. [00:12:28] Dani Simons: And. I feel like that origin story is important because I think, um, I don’t know how you feel about this. [00:12:35] I feel like I’ve always sort of had this North Star in my career where I’ve really cared about climate and equity, and I’ve always thought about transportation as kind of a way to address both of those topics. And I think I was a person who, you know, obviously I worked for the Biden Harris administration, so that says something about my politics. [00:12:57] And also in the last election, it was so. Clear to me who I was going to vote for that. To be honest with you, I didn’t dive deep into Biden’s policy platform before I voted for him. I just went, I voted for him, seemed clear enough. Um, and then I sat down afterwards and you know, we were still deep in the pandemic. [00:13:15] There wasn’t a lot to do. I started to read through his transportation platform and, um, you know, he was known for assembling some of the best ideas from some of the other people he competed against in the primary. And what I saw in his transportation platform was just incredible to me because he really centered transportation at this nexus of climate, equity, and jobs. [00:13:40] And I read this and I just thought like, aha, like, he gets it. This guy who’s going to be the next president of the United States, like, gets it. Like, this is where it’s at. And I felt really excited about that and you know, sometimes those visions and those words don’t really carry through and we’ve all seen lots of good plans and there’s very little follow through and execution on them. [00:14:04] And I think what impressed me so much was that from probably the day that he found out that he won and that he was going to be president, he started to assemble an A team of people to help execute on these ideas. And he really brought in people who were transportation expert. He brought in people from Capitol Hill who knew about how you actually drafted legislation and how you move things on the hill. [00:14:31] He brought in people who had worked in the past administration, who had seen what had worked and what hadn’t worked and were able to kind of like spring forward a little bit faster to start the next administration and really like by the time we got there on kind of day one. There was the framework of what became the American Jobs Plan was already starting to be drafted and they were being put on paper and we weren’t, you know, taking the first six months to dream that up, like we were ready to kind of get on it right away. [00:14:59] And that to me was also really impressive. Like the president was someone who didn’t just have a nice plan with some happy words. Like he really understood that the kind of people that you needed to assemble to try to start to execute that. And then you have on top of that, I think his choice of secretary of Buttigieg to lead up USDOT was amazing because I think you had a secretary and secretary Buttigieg who is. [00:15:25] One of the best communicators in the country and I think really helped people connect why these investments in transportation were going to make a difference in their everyday life and really help sell what became the bipartisan infrastructure law. And for me, that was just a really incredible journey, our first year in office to be able to be part of that team and moving that forward. [00:15:48] Jeff Wood: What is that mix of people who can kind of write bills and get those things going versus like the bigger ideas? You know, you mentioned the policy posts that were there before the election, but I’m just curious, like, in terms of the sausage making or at least the putting together the ideas. On the paper that can actually be put into bills, but also make all these connections. [00:16:08] How does that work out? Or how do you put that together? [00:16:12] Dani Simons: I think you had a lot of smart people who came from, I would say, a variety of different sectors. You had Carlos Monjene, who was one of my favorite people in this experience, who was the, we would say S3, but the undersecretary for policy, and he had served under secretary Fox. [00:16:32] In the Obama administration. And so he kind of had like a sense of the federal land. You had people like Robin Hutchinson, who had come in from a local government from Minneapolis. And she was really driving a lot of the thinking and ideas around roadway safety. You had people like Christopher Coase, who is, you know, brilliant on transportation policy and had. [00:16:57] I think a lot of vision for equity and the connections between land use and housing and transportation. You had some really smart folks who were thinking about kind of the economic pieces of this and how the kind of job creation tied in the macroeconomic pieces of this tied together. And then, like I said, you had people who had come from the Hill, you had people like Andrew Rogers and Andrew Wishnia, who both had come over from the Hill, and they both were really, really smart on environmental policy, but also really understood the way of Capitol Hill and how to drop things, how to work with the Hill. [00:17:29] And you had Mohsin Saeed, who is our assistant secretary for governmental affairs and now is chief of staff. And he also came from the Hill and just really understood, like, how to work with people and build bridges on the Hill and how to, how to work it through. And so you had a really good combination of people who, I think, that kind of mix of having some people who, Had really good policy ideas. [00:17:51] And so people who’ve had the kind of pragmatic knowledge of how to make those things work in the DC context, I think was really helpful. [00:17:58] Jeff Wood: Yeah, it sounds like it. I also want to talk about those initial kind of pillars and there seem like they’re fairly general. So how do you get from like general to more detail? [00:18:07] Dani Simons: I think one thing that I really admired. About the president and about the way that this all kind of unfolded was that he did have these themes in his campaign that translated into kind of the key priorities of the White House. I think even if you go in the next couple months to the White House website, you will still see the priorities that are listed on the White House website have stayed consistent since day one. [00:18:31] Three of them are around fighting climate change, advancing equity. And growing the American economy and helping build a stronger middle class. And I think those were our North stars. And I think the granular stuff just needs to be kind of aligned sometimes to those goals. And I think there’s so many things you could do and so many different ways you could take things. [00:18:57] And I think it’s helpful to have those kind of touchstones and that consistency. So you can always ask yourself, like, is what I’m doing laddering up to that thing or not? And if not, maybe it’s just, you know, not the right course, or maybe it’s a distraction or maybe it’s an add on. But I think it helps to kind of focus and helps to kind of prioritize and also helps to kind of put bounds around things that otherwise could get quite sprawling and bewildering. [00:19:21] Jeff Wood: I’m also wondering kind of like how you hear the commentary on the outside. And so I’m wondering what it feels like to be inside and kind of getting bombarded with all of this. Uh, you’re missing this, or you left out this, or you should have added this, or that’s too much of that, or whatever it may be in terms of the, uh, the gallery that’s, that’s throwing tomatoes at you. [00:19:44] Dani Simons: Yeah. I mean, I think like the politically correct answer to that is, you know, you try to listen to as much as you can. You try to take it in, you try to not take it personally, and you try to figure out where there’s themes and kind of things that are getting repeated and try to think about how you. You know, maybe address that and how you do that in a constructive way. [00:20:04] I will say just very honestly, and maybe not as politically correctly. Um, I think that it is possible that progressives and people in progressive transportation didn’t I think that’s always appreciate some of the wins as much as they could have and celebrate them. I think there’s a tendency to go to what’s wrong. [00:20:23] And I think that’s built on like years and years of people not doing very much or doing the wrong thing, that there’s a lot of distrust and suspicion. And I think there’s a lot of feeling of like, well, that’s what we’re here for. Like in the progressive space around the left, we have to keep pushing because if we’re not pushing it, we’ll never get there. [00:20:38] I just remember, and again, social media is not real life, let’s all remind ourselves that, but like, I think on the day that we announced like the first round of Reconnecting Community Awards, there was also some video that the Secretary had put out about one of our international transportation policy initiatives, which is like a very small part of the department and a fairly small budget, but like had to be sometimes lifted up because there are people that work on that and it is important for them, and instead of People coming out and sort of celebrating reconnecting communities. [00:21:05] Everyone was like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like your international policy, why are you doing anything international? You know, we’re so far behind the world. And it’s like, you guys, like we just launched the kind of biggest, most progressive new piece of funding and program that the, you know, federal government had seen in at least eight years, probably much longer than that. [00:21:22] And. People kind of didn’t take a moment to be like, let’s take like 10 seconds to celebrate that. And so sometimes that would feel difficult because you are really like in there fighting day in and day out around that. I also think that people, and I mean, this is partly like a failure of the federal government to tell its own story. [00:21:42] It’s partly because there are times when the federal government truly isn’t doing a lot. And it’s partly because people are busy and have a lot of other things to do in their lives. So they’re going to think about this, but people don’t have like the clearest understanding of what the federal government can and cannot do. [00:21:57] And sort of what is and isn’t possible. And I think. I, you know, always go back to something that we talked about when I was at New York City DOT under Jeanette Sade Khan and just this idea of like, all we can do here is steer this tanker ship like a few degrees. But if we can do that at this scale, it’s going to make a meaningful difference. [00:22:19] And I think that’s something that I would think about a lot in federal government. And I think with something that also sort of helped me, uh, you know, some of those comments would come in and people would be saying like, what about this? And what about that? And there’s too much this and not enough that [00:22:35] Jeff Wood: I’m sure I’ve said that a few times, a number of those things being a more progressive transportation. [00:22:41] It’s [00:22:41] Dani Simons: very, a lot of that is very true, you know? [00:22:43] Jeff Wood: Yeah. But also it’s like the expectations versus reality. Of like what comes out at the end versus what was promised at the beginning, right? Like you, you have these lofty goals and these big lists of things that you want to do, but then at the end, after all the, you know, the horse trading and whatnot happens, you had 20 billion for reconnecting communities and you only end up with a billion dollars. [00:23:01] Right. And so people are like, well, you only got 1 billion. So it’s like very upsetting, even though it’s like a program that is an amazing idea and something that can be built on in the future, if you get the right people in office, but it’s just like one of those things that. I feel like there’s that before and then the after, and the after sometimes is a little bit of a hangover. [00:23:19] Dani Simons: Yeah, and I think one of the things about Reconnecting that’s interesting is like, once all the work put in to build that program and to kind of build the policies around that, and then the funding went from this vision of, The 20 billion to the 1 billion a year. And I think what happened was that people started to think about, okay, like, are there other parts of funding that can actually accomplish some of these same goals that we’re trying to do with Reconnecting? [00:23:46] Can we encourage people that are coming out of the woodwork because now they’ve heard about this program called Reconnecting and they’re kind of surfacing all of this pent up desire across the country to do projects like this. Can we direct them to other streams of funding that their project might be qualified for and try to do that matchmaking and try to build the kind of technical capacity on the ground to be able to take federal money and put it to things like this. [00:24:11] And so it opened up opportunities in ways that I think weren’t clear to people at the beginning, and there’s a lot of reconnecting projects that are happening now under the auspices of different pots of funding. So even if all the funding wasn’t in that. One program, that one program helps kind of become like a front door to take in a lot of those projects and then you can figure out different ways to help those groups. [00:24:36] Find the funding because it exists. And honestly, some of that funding is with FHWA and is highway funding because you can use highway funding to build highways and you can also use highway funding to take down highways. [00:24:46] Jeff Wood: The funding’s flexible. I feel like it’s that, uh, office space scene with the Bobs, right? [00:24:51] Like I’m a people person. I take the drawings from the engineers to the, to the people who do the work and et cetera. Well, that’s interesting. You talk about capacity, because I think that’s another thing that is part of the larger discussion of like how things get done at different levels of government and how the federal government can actually facilitate some of that. [00:25:11] Sometimes it’s paper that came out maybe a little while ago, but it was kind of rehashed and I posted it in the newsletter talking about, you know, basically why road paving costs so much in some places and not others. And one of the things that came out of it was that. If you have government capacity, people to look over instead of hiring consultants, you actually might be able to lower the cost. [00:25:31] Or if you have more bidders, you can lower the cost. Or if you have, you know, the ability to look in deeper into like what you’re actually trying to get out of it, you might be able to lower costs. And so that, that issue of capacity is kind of important one that I think part of this large expenditure of money builds capacity in some respects, but then you also have to be very prescriptive about it too, I imagine. [00:25:51] Dani Simons: Yeah, I would also take it in a different direction, which is that one of the interesting things about the bipartisan infrastructure law that I feel like people talked about in the beginning, but just to kind of, like, Again, like if we are coming to the end of the Biden administration and kind of bring up is that it, it had an unprecedented amount of money that could go directly to local governments. [00:26:11] And in some cases, even nonprofits and community organizations that were working on projects, which usually doesn’t happen with federal money, usually federal money, the huge majority of that flows through states. And then it’s up to state DOTs to kind of do what they will with it. And there haven’t been traditionally a lot of even grant programs that local governments qualify for. [00:26:30] And so with reconnecting, it was an example of a program that cities and nonprofits could actually apply for. And it turns out that like a lot of cities and nonprofits don’t have the capacity to take money from the federal government. They don’t know, you know, we don’t make it as easy as we should. Um, there’s a lot of risk management and a lot of risk aversion, I would say. [00:26:52] And. I think there’s also just like lots of people, just regular, normal American people who have never heard of like a step or a tip or how to like get into the, you know, transportation funding scene. And that’s where you can actually start to make some difference. And if you can actually start to like access some of these federal resources, whether directly or through your state, that can be huge. [00:27:16] And. Helping people kind of understand that, figure out how to do that, figure out how to be able to work in those frameworks is powerful because otherwise that money does just sort of go to the states or to cities that can afford to hire consultants that basically write these grant proposals for them, or, you know, cities that are large enough to have staff that can manage federal funding and that, you know, puts other communities at a disadvantage. [00:27:42] I think One story that sort of stood out to me in terms of capacity was the kind of level of capacity that some of the tribal communities have or don’t have and what that meant in terms of resources they were able to access or not access. And. Our general counsel in the beginning was from Colorado and we had a, I can’t remember what his title was at the time. [00:28:03] He wound up being a Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tribal Affairs. And they went out on a little bit of a road trip to visit some government partner in Colorado and New Mexico. And it was during a time where we were making some of the first rounds of grants for, uh, Bridge program and the bridge program for the first time had some funding for off system bridges, which meant that local communities could actually apply directly for the funding. [00:28:30] It didn’t have to necessarily up to the state. Usually these bridges kind of wound up being last on the list of priorities for a state because they were, you know, small bridges, low volume traffic, but they had got into, you know, pretty awful seat disrepair because there had been such underinvestment. [00:28:46] And John and Orlando sent back these photos from New Mexico, from a tribal community that was relying on pontoon bridges that had been surplused after the Vietnam war. These were meant to be temporary bridges used in a time of war to get across rivers in the rainforests of Vietnam. And tribal communities in the year 2022, we’re still using these as their lifeline and their link to all sorts of services. [00:29:20] If you had to drive the docker, you were driving over these Vietnam or temporary bridges. And I think that says something about the capacity of these communities to be able to access the types of money it takes to be able to build. The kind of infrastructure that you need, and we should be able to expect that every American should have access to, that they should be able to have a safe bridge and good working order. [00:29:46] That they can use to get to the doctor’s office if they live in a rural community. And so there was some stuff like that, that I really thought about a lot in terms of both capacity building and then also sort of where we were able to have some funds go more directly to some of these large. [00:30:01] Jeff Wood: Yeah. We would talk with folks from National League of Cities and, you know, they’ve set up a system for helping smaller communities and folks with less capacity to apply and to try to, you know, get the grade. [00:30:11] And it’s, it’s interesting to hear how many places, you know, need that help because it is a complicated process. And I understand a lot of it’s to keep down waste and fraud, and there’s good reasons behind a lot of the regulations and stuff, but it also is very hard for some places to go after some of these funds that they desperately need. [00:30:29] It’s also interesting to go back and look at that American jobs plan fact sheet from March of 2021 and see what was followed through on, but also, you know, look back at it with some 20, 20 hindsight. I’m wondering if, if there’s anything in that plan that stuck out to you that wasn’t there, or maybe things that were there that you were excited, made it through the process. [00:30:49] Dani Simons: There is a lot in there. Actually, I sort of fell in love with that plan when [00:30:54] Speaker 3: I first started [00:30:55] Dani Simons: it, uh, and it’s probably a bad idea to fall in love with things like that because they’re always subject to change and there’s a lot in there that I was excited about in terms of workforce development and training. [00:31:07] That didn’t really wind up getting through. And some of it came through and chips and some of it came through an IRA and little parts of it came through and, and the bipartisan infrastructure law. But, you know, I think that there was some really great stuff in there. You know, there was some really great stuff in the American jobs plan about the care economy. [00:31:23] And I think that feels really important to me as a mom. And also, you know, someone who is hopefully a few years away, but kind of in the squeeze generation where my parents are getting older and I have young kids and I think. I have a lot of hope that maybe we will be able to get back to some of that because I think those things were really important and important for the people who do that work because those are very hard jobs. [00:31:43] I think in terms of what did come through, I mean, even though at a lower dollar value, the Reconnecting Communities Program, I think, is one that I feel very passionately about and I think, you know, it’s one where when you kind of look at some of the projects that are getting funded and look at the impact that’s having on those communities, I think I just feel proud that we were able to get that done and hopefully it will continue to grow over time. [00:32:08] You know, I would travel with the secretary a fair amount, but there were lots of times when I felt like I was kind of home in the back office, minding the shop, and had a lot of great people on the road, that I would often tune in when he would do a press conference, because I like to hear, you know, how his speeches went, and I’d like to hear the questions that reporters were throwing, and it just helped me with my job, and, you know, a lot of times, You watch one of these things and you kind of, you’re like, watch one, watch them all. [00:32:34] And there’s not that new stuff. But the one for the Reconnecting Communities grant that was given at Buffalo for the Kensington Expressway, I tuned in and you know, it’s Majority Leader Schumer and Governor Hochul and there’s the Congressman and the Mayor and the, you know, it was a whole host of politicians standing up. [00:32:54] And then this. Women stood up, probably like somewhere between mid 60s and mid 70s, and her name was Stephanie Barbara Geter, and she just touched my heart. Like, I think I cried when I watched her give her speech. And she just reminded me of people I had worked with earlier in my career in Providence and in other places. [00:33:15] And she stood up and she said, I want young people to know that nothing happens quickly. And she said that with like this weight of like experience. And then she said, but you know, elected officials for once in my lifetime, gathered together and decided that they would deliver the goods to the community. [00:33:35] And we were almost in shock. We were like, okay, we heard that before. Right. But guess what? They brought all the bacon. And she went on to talk about kind of the experience of working on this project for years and years and years and, you know, always hearing that people supported what they were doing and were trying to kind of cobble together bits and pieces of it. [00:33:55] And finally, there was this program that actually are letting them get going to put this community vision into action and finally do this project. And it’s going to include local hire provisions that Senator Gillibrand had worked on and help support some of the local businesses there. And you can just see what an impact this is going to have. [00:34:14] And there are tens of thousands of projects like that going on now across the country that have been on someone’s list, maybe in a plan on a shelf for years and years that are finally getting done. And that’s Incredible. And I think a lot of them are projects that have something to do with safety, which I feel like is really tied to climate and equity. [00:34:39] They have things to do with climate, whether that’s resilience or fighting climate change. They have to do with equity, you know, whether that’s a reconnecting project or whether that’s making sure that people have better access to transit so they can get to jobs. And it’s kind of hard to tell the story of that, like, in its totality, and people talk a lot about, like, why isn’t this more of a national story, or why isn’t this, like, broken through? [00:35:02] But it’s a story that’s touching tens of thousands of places across the country, and I think that kind of is, it’s more of a quilt that gets knit together than like one, you know, final picture that you see on a wall, maybe more of a mosaic than like a painting. [00:35:17] Jeff Wood: I feel like reading the plan made me kind of mad at politics. [00:35:20] So like, I realized that. People don’t want to sit down and read these papers and manifestos, but there are really things that impact people’s lives in there and more so than maybe some of those political hot topics that are on the news shows every single day or in your Twitter thread every single day. [00:35:36] And it’s, it’s frustrating because those things, the little things, uh, matter a lot to a lot of people, but we end up talking about all this other stuff that In the end, it might impact a couple of people and it might move the needle in terms of voters because it’s such a hot button topic, but in the grand scheme of things, maybe it just doesn’t, doesn’t matter as much as, as this does as infrastructure, as care economy, as the things that, you know, we care about. [00:36:01] Dani Simons: Yeah, I think that’s really true. And I think the president and I think Secretary Buttigieg were both really excellent at always bringing it back to how this was going to make a difference in people’s lives. You know, the secretary was really focused on, you know, how is this going to be something that matters to people? [00:36:17] People would come up to him when he was mayor and they would come up to him at the grocery store and talk to him about the pothole they needed sold on their corner. And he had a great rap and really talked about how, You know, infrastructure is like kind of the fundamental underpinning for everything else that we do in our daily lives, but that people shouldn’t have to really think about it, right? [00:36:37] Like people want to just take it for granted and they only really talk about it when it’s not for them. And we should be doing more to make it work for people so that they can go on about their daily lives and deal with things they need to do. And it’s not a tax on their time. It’s not unsafe for them or making them feel like their kids are unsafe. [00:36:56] It’s just helping them. You know, live a life where they have access to opportunity and they can do the things they need to do. [00:37:03] Jeff Wood: I feel like, um, and this isn’t like a knock on the secretary, but like as somebody who’s deep in the weeds every day and I know I’m not everybody, right. I I’m in this space where I just get so much information and I can get bored pretty easily with some of this stuff, but just like watching him go on James Corden or on Stephen Colbert, which I watched really a lot during the pandemic. [00:37:22] Uh, I got bored with him talking too, because it’s like all these like higher level platitudes and things that are above. And I was like, I want you to get into the weeds. I want you to get into details. Like. I don’t think Stephen’s actually going to ask you about, you know, transit manufacturing or, or whether, you know, the size of vehicles is too big for pedestrians that are dying on the roads every day. [00:37:41] And so I think that’s an interesting perspective from me, but a lot of people probably don’t share that. [00:37:47] Dani Simons: I will say if you ever wanted to go into the weeds with him. On a topic like definitely hop in the car with him when he’s on his way to prep for any sort of like press event or public speaking and he will grill you for like an hour and a half on the ins and outs of like how, you know, the FAA policy works and like how the air traffic control systems, radar regions, the, you know, different technologies inside the plane and like, Just wants to know every single detail about every single thing. [00:38:15] So he is definitely in the weeds. I think he does realize that most people who are watching Colbert are not necessarily there with them. Uh, he does kind of try to translate that into language that regular folks can resonate with, but yeah. [00:38:31] Jeff Wood: But nerds like me want that conversation in the car. Maybe like that’s, that’s the thing is like maybe the next secretary or if Pete lasts longer, I don’t know if he wants to go and do other things. [00:38:39] It seems like a busy job, but it feels like there’s a lot of folks in the spaces that we run in that would love to see like that podcast, right. Or that trip to work where you talk about the details and there’s lots of potholes in that too, right? Because if you show that the behind the thinking, then, you know, it’s easier to pick apart things as well, I guess too. [00:38:57] Dani Simons: Yeah, I mean, I think it, I do think there were some places where he would kind of go a little bit more into the weeds, if that was kind of the audience. There was a woman named Carrie, who was our press secretary, who now is in my old job, who I really love working with. And I think one of the things that she was great at was really making sure that we followed through on the vision of making sure he would see it. [00:39:17] Talking to audiences that transportation secretaries didn’t always talk to, and so sometimes that would mean like talking to popular mechanics and like going really granularly into like, he always really loved to talk about recycled asphalt. That was like a big thing for him and like alternative technologies for asphalt. [00:39:33] And like, he would really go deep in a week there and there’s definitely times he did interviews about that. And then since he would be talking to like, you know, I think he did one of the things that Carrie did, I think it was right after I left, he did an interview while running with runner’s world to talk about roadway safety because runners happen to really care about roadway safety, but it wasn’t like a topic that he would usually see in runner’s world that much. [00:39:54] So. You know, really trying to match kind of the level and tone of what he was talking about to the, to the audience and find a way to connect to people where they were, which I think was really important for him. [00:40:05] Jeff Wood: When I ran at the university of Texas, we hit our fair share of car hoods and got calls from those people to our coaches saying that we messed up their cars, but they were going to mess us up worse. [00:40:14] And so our coaches were okay with it to a certain extent. They couldn’t say that outwardly, but, uh, I, I bashed a couple of hoods myself. Um, no damage, but just, uh, don’t run me over when I’m running. [00:40:26] Dani Simons: Yeah, I think that’s fair. Self defense. [00:40:29] Jeff Wood: How hard is it to create like an actual theme behind transportation spending aside from like creating jobs and fixing broken things? [00:40:36] I mean the thing that we talk about on the podcast a lot of just this idea of access, right? And thinking about that in a greater context. And so I’m wondering about that theme building and how that works. [00:40:47] Dani Simons: I mean for us the theme building was really from the top down like the president’s priorities were, you know, helping fight climate change, advancing equity, Good paying American jobs and really, you know, restoring the American economy and building a stronger middle class. [00:41:02] And I think those were the themes that we were working with, and I’m sure different administrations were different ways. For me, it was helpful to have those as north stars throughout the work that we did and kind of to be able to stay in alignment. And I think. We were successful in that, and I think the kind of themes you saw running through the American Jobs Plan and then saw running through the Bipartisan Protection Law really tack to those pillars, and I think it’s helpful to keep a group of people, it’s 50, 000 people across USDOT, a lot of them are at FAA, but, you know, even if it’s like 10, 000 people that are working on this, like, you know, more directly, It’s hard to keep those people aligned. [00:41:43] It’s hard to keep people marching in the same direction. And so to have some of those key themes are very important, I think, to kind of guide people at that higher level. You know, there’s really talented people who are career staff at USDOT, who are very passionate about roadway safety, some of them are very passionate about innovations, some of them are very passionate about private equity, they, you know, span across administrations, but they’re really looking to the political appointees and to the leadership for kind of how they move and what they prioritize, and so having those Your themes and continue to repeat them and not having those change every single day is really important for steering a ship. [00:42:22] That’s the size of an organization. [00:42:26] Jeff Wood: What frustrates you? [00:42:28] Dani Simons: One thing that really frustrated me that I feel like I still take personally after all this time, even though it’s not about me, but it’s about someone who I really cared about. I don’t know how many people listening, like, know the name Stephanie Pollack and how people are followed in this space, but Stephanie Pollack was the acting administrator for FHWA. [00:42:45] MassDOT. Stephanie had served under both Democrats and Republicans. She is a person who speaks her mind, uh, and a person who was very clear coming into the administration that she was there for a good time and not a long time. She was someone who always Spoke her truth and someone she really, I think, pushed us to a higher standard. [00:43:06] And Stephanie, you know, I don’t think she knew how much of a limb she went out on, but she kind of went out on a limb and crafted a memo that went out with FHWA funding that internally had the horrible nomenclature of the, the ban memo, the building a better American memo. And the memo basically said something that used to be so common sense that Mitt Romney embraced it, which was just like. [00:43:30] You should prioritize state of good repair before you go do stuff and you should prioritize safety in every single project that you do. And it was a policy model, like it was a suggestion. It was like a suggestion to the FHWA regional administrators of things to consider when they were working with their state partners. [00:43:49] It was not binding in any way. It was not legally required. It wasn’t putting new restrictions on grant money. It was just like a, hey, like. We’re new in town. This is like our sort of philosophy for how we’re going to approach things just so everyone knows these are some kind of things we should be considering when we’re looking at these projects. [00:44:10] That became a huge lightning rod. That was something that the Republicans hit and hit and hit and hit and really weaponized, even though it was like such a common sense, truly fiscally conservative way to approach things. It just became like another flashpoint that they were trying to kind of make into a culture war and it’s really unfortunate because I think it was personal. [00:44:34] Um, they went on attack around a lot of our, especially a lot of the women who have been appointed to acting administrator roles and they tore into them and it was very disheartening to see. I think between Stephanie and And Carlson, who had been heading up NHTSA, who, although, you know, didn’t have as much safety background, I think, as people wanted, had a phenomenal environmental background and was doing a lot with the kind of emissions standards piece of the work that NHTSA does. [00:45:03] And a couple of others, and it was just really hard to watch that part of it. That was very frustrating. It was like, to think about the fact that like, you had to uproot your life, take a shot that your career was going to be better after serving in an administration, that you’re actually going to be able to get something done. [00:45:21] You were bringing a very specialized skillset, and then you would come in and try to get something done, and like, you weren’t being attacked on your ideas, you were just being attacked purely for, like, a political talking point, was a really tough thing to watch, and demoralizing, frankly. [00:45:37] Jeff Wood: Yeah, the state DOTs don’t want to be messed with, it seems like, and they really should be, um, is that where that came from? [00:45:44] Dani Simons: I think the state DOTs don’t want to be messed with, but really I think that, I mean, I try to be as bipartisan as possible, I think transportation is bipartisan, but I think that there are a group of Republicans who are doing everything they can at every moment to try to just win political points and to try to paint the Anything that the, uh, you know, democratic administration was doing at like so far left that it was just like, so out of touch with the American people and anytime they could find a way to do that, they would kind of pounce. [00:46:11] I have this amazing screenshot, which I got off to send to you from Fox news and it’s the Laura Ingraham show. And the headline in the background is like secretary Pete highway to hell. And it was like him with like, he had drawn. devil horns and like flames were like coming out behind his head and I can’t even remember what that was about to tell you the truth but it was like a moment he probably said something about roadway safety and like people shouldn’t speed because that’s dangerous and they were like all over it. [00:46:39] It doesn’t matter like it doesn’t matter that that’s common sense that they also want their kids to like live to see another day, they to see a political point. And they’re there to press it, and they’re there to kind of jump on that. There’s another screenshot that I took. I can’t remember if it was Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert, but like, went on some terror about like, electric vehicles, and electric vehicles threatening people’s manhoods. [00:46:59] So there’s Secretary Buttigieg. I’m like, on CNN and the Chiron or something like. Secretary Buttigieg says his car is not related to his vision of his manhood or something and it’s like, I can’t believe that this is happening. Like, I can’t believe that I’m even seeing this with my own eyes, that this is on like a major cable network. [00:47:16] It’s just ridiculous. That stuff was not my favorite part of DC. I feel like we got a lot of good stuff done. I feel like we were always navigating around those kind of potential landmines. And, you know, partly the downside of having a very high profile secretary and became, you know, sometimes the lightning rod for stuff like that. [00:47:33] And some of the people in his administration that were kind of the next tier down also kind of took some of that heat as well. [00:47:39] Jeff Wood: How hard is it to not poke that bear though? I mean, like, safety is That memo was pretty simplistic, like you said, and we’ve worked with Stephanie before. When I was at RA, I did some TOD planning with her. [00:47:50] You know, she’s a pretty smart person and really thoughtful. And I feel like it seemed silly for this thing to blow up about this little memo, but was it because of The memo or is it because they wanted just to find anything that they could to press on? [00:48:04] Dani Simons: Um, I found that social media would become like kind of a proving ground and they would kind of like text and stuff out See what’s done and then they would try to pop that into more mainstream media or they would kind of pop it into like a hearing or sometimes like a Hearing would become like a proving ground and they could see If, like, the thing that they were saying in the hearing then got picked up in the media, then they would, like, continue to kind of press on it and make it a bigger deal. [00:48:27] I, I think that the BAM memo was, like, a combination of things. I think some of it was, like, they did get some press pick up off of it, and they thought it could be effective in talking about how we were, like, you know, Anti highway or against building new roads. Cause that was like a huge, you know, headline, which was like, of course, the opposite, like if people on the left were like, you guys are building too many new roads and the people on the right, like you guys want to, you know, not just like not building roads. [00:48:50] You want to tear them down. Like you’re crazy. Um, which is probably how we knew we were like, I’m one of the little space. So I think that was, I think that was part of it. I think to your point, like there were a lot of state DOTs that still feel like Want the freedom to do what they want to do. And there’s some great CQTs that are taking a more climate centric approach now, which is great to see Colorado being one of the pressure in California and a few others. [00:49:13] There were other folks where it was just truly about the politics and they, they could go really hard and they would politicize things. Ann Carlson was on loan to us from the UC system. And for years, Right wing think tanks and interest groups have had a tactic where the UC because California has some of the most robust and extensive sunshine rules in the state of just papering them with requests for documents, requests for documents, requests for documents. [00:49:43] And because the university system doesn’t have the hugest budget in the world, they don’t have like a very baroque legal team that just like fends these off, like one or the other, like professors, if there’s like requests for documents have to, you know, make them available. And so people working on climate issues would just constantly be attacked with like this weaponization of requests for documents that basically took hours, hours of their time away from their research and away from their teaching. [00:50:09] So she was already subject to that in the UC system. And then when she was up for confirmation hearing, there were people who were actively trying to. Tear her down on, they were trying to get her fired from her old posts at the UC system in addition to just not getting her confirmed and it was, um, you know, that was wild to watch and that was a lot about just the politics of going after a woman who actually did a lot of research about climate change and law. [00:50:34] Jeff Wood: Yeah, what should we think about the legacy of all of the bills that passed? I mean, it’s impressive that they got passed. I mean, it was a vote here and there that could have or couldn’t have happened. Obviously, the plans are put together, but passing them is what really matters in the end, right? I’m wondering what the legacy is going forward. [00:50:50] Dani Simons: I think the legacy of this bill is going to be fundamentally, there are going to be jobs today and in the next five to 10 years, and there’s going to be a stronger foundation for the American economy going forward. One of the first trips that I took was to Pittsburgh, and we got on a barge and we rode underneath some of the bridges that span across Pittsburgh, which are, you know, legendary, but these bridges were built. [00:51:16] Over a century ago, and I can’t remember whose speech it was, but one of the elected that spoke at the press conference that day, you know, said something which really resonated with me, which is like, you know, if you brought back the workers who built these bridges and showed them that their work had stood the test of time, I’m sure they’d be proud, but they’d also be confused as how, as why it took us so long to just build a new one, because they could do it a hundred years ago, like what became so hard that we don’t build anything now. [00:51:44] And. You know, that’s very important for us to be able to have a strong competitive economy, but I think that the way that the policies have been written and the programs have been written, my hope is that more of these projects are going to be better for the environment, better for equity. safer and that we’re starting to kind of turn that ship by a few degrees. [00:52:06] I think this is a five year bill meant to be spent over 10 years and so I think it’s going to be both a long lasting but also kind of slow moving transformation and that’s always a complicated thing for politics. Like people want to see things in a year or two years or four years and this is going to take a little bit longer than that because the projects that we’re building are going to hopefully last for the next 25 or 50 years. [00:52:29] Hopefully it won’t have to last for 100. And the other thing I think is, you know, for people now to start mobilizing and thinking about what they want to see and whether that is a reauthorization of this bill or a next transportation bill and how we keep raising the bar from where we are here. [00:52:46] Jeff Wood: I’d love to see next one focused on access and access to a lot of things, care, infrastructure, health, all that stuff, um, and more broadband thinking about public goods and whatnot. [00:52:55] Danny, where can folks find you? If you wish to be found, [00:52:58] Dani Simons: people can find me on Twitter and LinkedIn, probably most of all. And I welcome engagement and being found and happy to continue the conversation with folks out there. [00:53:09] Jeff Wood: Awesome. Well, thanks for joining us. We really appreciate your time. [00:53:12] Dani Simons: Thank you so much. [00:53:13] And congratulations on 500 episodes and here’s to, I think, 500 more. Should I wish that on you? [00:53:18] Jeff Wood: Yeah. Yeah. Let’s do it. [00:53:20] Dani Simons: All right.
