Buttigieg’s Harshest GOP Critics Want to Make His Rail-Safety Policies the Law

R epublican senators have been outspoken about their feelings on Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.

On February 14, Senator J. D. Vance (R., Ohio) said, “Yesterday, Pete Buttigieg had the opportunity to address this problem. He instead talked about the excessive amount of — this is not a joke — too many white men in the construction industry. . . . The secretary of transportation needs to focus on real problems, not fake problems.”

On February 16, Senator Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) said, “Yes, my gosh, [Buttigieg] should have resigned after the rail strike. He should certainly resign now.” Hawley has reiterated his call for Buttigieg’s resignation since then.

On February 21, Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) said, “[Buttigieg] is an incompetent who is focused solely on his fantasies about his political future and needs to be fired.” When Buttigieg fired back on Twitter, Rubio said, “Please resign now.”

Yet Vance, Hawley, and Rubio are now joining with Democrats to expand Buttigieg’s power and make significant portions of his response to the recent East Palestine, Ohio, train crash into federal law.

Senators Sherrod Brown (D., Ohio), John Fetterman (D., Pa.), and Bob Casey (D., Pa.) have joined Vance, Hawley, and Rubio to introduce the Railway Safety Act of 2023, purportedly to prevent derailments similar to the one that occurred in East Palestine on February 3. The bill is 18 pages long, and it contains the phrase “the Secretary shall” nine times. That means the bill expands the power of Pete Buttigieg, the secretary in question.

In many cases, it does so in exactly the ways that Buttigieg wants. The bill would mandate two-man train crews, increase the maximum fines for violating safety regulations, move up the deadline to comply with an existing change in tank-car regulations, increase federal funding for hazmat training, and require shippers and rail carriers to notify state authorities of hazardous-materials shipments — all things that Buttigieg called for in the DOT’s February 21 response to the accident.

As I wrote last week, not one part of Buttigieg’s policy response would have prevented the accident in East Palestine. Parts of it, including the crew-size mandate, are sops to organized labor. Other parts, including the maximum fines, have nothing to do with the Ohio accident at all. Perhaps these senators would like a different secretary of transportation, but Buttigieg is the guy right now, and he’s the one who will be exercising the new powers this bill gives him.

The bill even goes further than what Buttigieg called for on the issue of railcar inspections: It gives him the power to “create minimum time requirements that a qualified mechanical inspector must spend” when performing inspections. Note that the “qualified mechanical inspector” is written into the law to protect union jobs. Automated technology might at some point be able to perform this task better as it continues to develop, but passing this law would forestall that progress.

We do not yet have any evidence that insufficient time for railcar inspection contributed to the East Palestine crash, but we should get an answer to that question from the National Transportation Safety Board when it completes its investigation. Waiting for the NTSB report before making any statutory changes would be a wise idea regardless.

One thing we do know at this point is that wayside hotbox detectors, which use infrared sensors to measure the temperature of wheelsets at fixed points along the tracks as trains pass, might be an issue for regulators to look into. Buttigieg’s DOT already is looking into it, in fact, and this bill would give Buttigieg the power to require railroads to install hotbox detectors every ten miles on segments of track that carry hazardous materials, while also giving him broad rulemaking authority over the devices. Currently, hotbox detectors are not required by the Federal Railroad Administration.

According to a 2019 FRA report, there is one hotbox detector for every 25 miles of major freight railroads’ tracks. “Train accident rates caused by axle and bearing-related factors have dropped 81 percent since 1980 and 59 percent since 1990 due to the use of [hotbox] detectors,” the report says. That means without regulation, the technology has been adopted voluntarily by the railroads, and it’s had a good record of success. The FRA has found only five derailments that were suspected to have been caused by burnt bearings in wheelsets since 2021.

The NTSB’s preliminary report said that the East Palestine train passed two hotbox detectors that showed no problems before a third one alerted the crew to an overheated wheelset, at which point it was too late to prevent the derailment. The distance between the first two detectors was already ten miles. The distance between the second and third was 19 miles.

A bearing can overheat and burn off in as little as one to three minutes, according to the FRA. Traveling at 50 miles per hour, that’s a distance of 0.8 to 2.5 miles. If the idea behind mandating a maximum distance between detectors was to catch every overheating wheelset, a ten-mile limit still wouldn’t be enough. But that shouldn’t be the goal, because there is a point of diminishing returns to any technology. The impressive record of hotbox detectors at the national level indicates that the railroads have done pretty well making use of them without federal interference. Remember: Railroads have every incentive to prevent derailments, too.

A national unfunded mandate (which is what this regulation would be, since as written it requires railroads to pay for and install the additional detectors) in the hopes of preventing five derailments per year seems like an overreaction. It would also have the potential to make Americans less safe: Overland transportation of hazardous materials is done by trucks when it isn’t done by trains, and making rail transportation more expensive increases the incentive to put hazardous materials on highways.

The bill co-sponsored by Vance, Hawley, and Rubio has won praise from Chuck Schumer, who said he will work to see it enacted. Just two days ago, Schumer was repeating the debunked line that the Trump administration’s deregulation caused the Ohio accident. Why should Republicans support ineffective legislation that incorporates the policy recommendations of someone they believe to be incompetent, and which will be pushed through the Senate by someone who was lying about the record of the previous Republican administration?