Tenure of Pete Buttigieg atop the Department of Transportation is coming to an end this month

at a critical juncture for many of the industries the agency oversees.

The former presidential candidate and mayor of South Bend, Indiana spent much of the Biden administration

juggling crises in the rail and airline industries, navigating a high-stakes transition to electric vehicles and overseeing

the distribution of billions of dollars in funding from President Biden's infrastructure bill.

I spoke with him as he prepares to leave office.

Secretary Buttigieg, welcome back to the News Hour.

Thank you for having me on.

You've spent your final weeks as Transportation Secretary touring the country,

touting the Biden administration's policy achievements. How do you see the infrastructure investments

shaping the future of transportation in particular in this country? Well, I think the bottom line

is that we are leaving the condition of America's transportation systems much better than we found them.

And a big part of that is the projects that we're funding through President Biden's infrastructure package.

The number now stands at 66,000 and counting in terms of projects getting support.

More than 10,000 of those are complete.

Many more are just entering into construction. So we're creating a lot of jobs while we're at it, making our transportation systems better, safer. It's not happening overnight. The better part of this decade will continue to unfold with improvements, all made possible by the work that we did during our four years here. On that point, President Biden in a new interview with USA

today said that he regrets the slowness of the infrastructure rollout. He said, historians will talk

about how great the impact was, but it didn't have any immediate impact on people's lives. He

continues, I think we would have been a hell of a lot better off had we been able to go much

harder at getting

some of these projects in the ground quicker. What do you make of that? How does that strike you?

Well, I think what he's getting at is the nature of the beast here, where some of the most

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