Meet Donald Trump's Pick To Oversee The Railroads
Forbes Talks
Forbes Media LLC
5 • 4 Ratings
🗓️ 6 January 2025
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The president-elect’s nominee to lead the Federal Railroad Administration has longstanding business ties to an heir of the Mellon banking fortune.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi everybody. I'm Brittany Lewis, a breaking news reporter here at Forbes. |
| 0:06.1 | Joining me now is my Forbes colleague, staff writer Zach Everson. |
| 0:09.6 | Zach, thanks so much for joining me. |
| 0:11.0 | Thanks for having me, Brittany. |
| 0:13.0 | This month, Donald Trump will officially be reentering the White House and you have some news |
| 0:19.0 | on someone he's picking for a key role in his |
| 0:21.1 | administration. This is your headline that Trump picked a business associate of mega donor |
| 0:25.3 | Timothy Mellon to lead the Federal Railroad Administration. So first of all, the person that we're |
| 0:29.8 | talking about is David Fink. So to start off the conversation, who is he? So Fink is a fifth |
| 0:36.6 | generation railroader. |
| 0:38.3 | He was Donald Trump's pick to lead the Federal Railroad Administration, which is an agency |
| 0:42.4 | within the Department of Transportation responsible for rail safety and infrastructure |
| 0:47.2 | funding. |
| 0:48.2 | And he has worked with Mellon going back decades. |
| 0:52.3 | And before he worked with Mellon, his father, who's also named David Fink, also worked |
| 0:56.8 | with Mellon. |
| 0:57.8 | So talk to us about how that partnership came to be and what's the relationship with the |
| 1:02.3 | patriarch, David Fink, to Timothy Mellon? |
| 1:04.7 | Sure. |
| 1:05.7 | So the elder Fink, Mellon met the elder Fink back in the 70s, according to Mellon wrote in his memoir. |
| 1:13.3 | At the time, Fink was a manager at the Penn Central Railroad, and Mellon was kind of in |
| 1:18.9 | between jobs, which is something you can do when you're in heir to that fortune. |
... |
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