The day I met Pete Buttigieg in his Washington, D.C., office in April, his morning had begun with an NPR interview conducted out of a van parked outside his house. His twins, who are not yet three, were up before 6:30 a.m., and their noise had already taken over. The early wake-up left no discernible impact on Buttigieg: He is the same indefatigable person he plays on TV — eerily intense eye contact, emphatic hand movements, crisp bullet points — a role he plays frequently as one of the Biden administration’s most ubiquitous surrogates. As Matthew Yglesias once noted, “The Secretary of Appearing on Television continues to be excellent at his job.”

Buttigieg’s actual job, though, is secretary of the Transportation Department, which is currently overseeing a series of overlapping crises. In late 2022, Southwest Airlines melted down, canceling nearly 17,000 flights smack in the middle of holiday travel, the largest airline disruption in U.S. history. In early 2023, an FAA outage grounded all domestic departures, leading to more than 1,300 cancellations and over 10,000 delays. Around that time, a freight train derailed near the town of East Palestine, Ohio, and spewed toxic fumes into the community’s air and soil. Meanwhile, about 100 people die every single day in car crashes on American roads. And this year, part of a Boeing plane fell off in midair, sucking passengers’ clothing out of the gaping hole and bringing scrutiny to a company that has allegedly cut corners with little blowback from the government. It would seem like an ideal moment to have a young, ambitious, famous politician at the head of an agency that has long been led by anonymous bureaucrats and captured by the industries it nominally regulates.

The large conference table we sat at was littered with Notre Dame coasters from the university adjacent to South Bend, Indiana, the town where Buttigieg was elected mayor at age 29. Military medals and regalia were stacked along a table behind him; Buttigieg served as a naval reservist and was deployed to Afghanistan for seven months in 2014. His desk was adorned with photos of his kids and his husband, Chasten Buttigieg. (There were no visible trinkets from his multiyear stint as a consultant at McKinsey & Company.) Contained in these objects is Buttigieg’s political persona: a patriotic climber who broke barriers as a gay man; a Harvard graduate and Rhodes scholar who devoted the early part of his career to fixing potholes in his hometown; a show horse and a workhorse all in one.

He entered Transportation on a wave of optimism about what he might do. “I had such high hopes for him,” said Loretta Alkalay, an aviation lawyer and adjunct professor at Vaughn College of Aeronautics and Technology. “He was not necessarily who we had picked,” said Greg Regan, president of the Transportation Trades Department at the AFL-CIO, but Regan was excited about having “a political celebrity running our little part of the world.” As Buttigieg nears the end of his first and quite possibly only term, however, the high hopes have dimmed. “He has a lot of power,” said John Goglia, a former member of the National Transportation Safety Board and professor at Vaughn. “He really hasn’t used his influence.”

Buttigieg has pushed through some changes to protect airline passengers’ rights as well as to improve road and rail safety. But he didn’t fully spring into action until recently, even as the transportation sector was in desperate need of systemic change. “It’s been a slow start,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren. That means some of what he has proposed is at risk of never becoming reality, while plenty of other options to transform the sector languish untouched.

Buttigieg described taking a deliberative approach to staking out his agenda. As South Bend mayor, Buttigieg told me, he had announced a safe-streets initiative early on “and we got clobbered,” he said. “People hated it.” He had to expend a lot of his political capital to get it through, and the slow pace made for a frustrating experience, he explained. At the outset of any four-year term, he said, there are two approaches: “What you have to do is either lay groundwork that won’t pay off for a while or deploy capital and upset people in order to get things done.”

At Transportation, he opted for the first approach, lying low at first instead of muscling through aggressive reforms. More than once, he told me he wanted rules and directives to be “bulletproof” when leaving his office. “It’s got to be really tight, which means it takes time and money and people to get it done,” he said. Two new consumer rules designed to protect fliers, finalized in April, are crowning achievements, but they weren’t started until at least a year into his tenure.

As a 42-year-old who has already run for president, Buttigieg, unlike most of his predecessors at the department, is clearly going somewhere after his role at Transportation. His future in politics may depend, in part, on how people will judge his performance at his biggest job yet and how they will view what critics call his inexperience and his timidity in the face of powerful corporate players. Because Buttigieg has another political persona he has long sought to shake — one whose caution is more associated with calculation than prudence and whose vaulting ambitions have outpaced actual deeds.

What you make of Buttigieg’s tenure may depend on your point of comparison. He has run laps around his predecessor, Elaine Chao — a “nonentity,” according to Peter DeFazio, a former House representative who spent his entire career on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. He has also gotten more done than other secretaries, most of whom were bureaucrats from the transportation sector or were meant to represent the bipartisan bona fides of a president’s Cabinet. (Ray LaHood, anyone?) “Secretaries of Transportation often don’t enact transformative changes,” noted Eric Dumbaugh, associate director of the Collaborative Sciences Center for Road Safety.

But as Congress has come to accomplish less and less, what the executive branch can get done on its own means more and more. (The Railway Safety Act, put together in the wake of the East Palestine derailment, has sat for over a year without a vote.) Many in the Biden administration have taken this lesson to heart. Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission and Jonathan Kanter, head of the Antitrust Division at the Department of Justice, for instance, are completely redoing the merger-review process in a bid to prevent monopolies from forming. Khan has also banned noncompete agreements and pursued a number of companies, including Amazon, for harmful practices. Rohit Chopra at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has doggedly gone after junk fees, overdraft fees, and tech companies pushing their way into banking. National Labor Relations Board general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo has aggressively pushed the limits of workers’ rights.........

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