Pete Buttigieg: Federal Agents Are Losing Public Trust

Pete Buttigieg: Thanks a lot for having me on. Glad to be with you.

So first up, are you running for president?

I’m a long way from any kind of decision like that. But I do know that as somebody who has a level of national visibility and really cares about the issues going on in the country, that I should be speaking out, traveling, trying to reach different kinds of audiences, and that’s what I’m doing.

And listening, right? You should be listening.

Yes, absolutely.

As much listening. Well, let’s talk a little bit about ICE because I think you recently, about a couple of weeks ago, you had a tweet. This was after Rénee Good and Alex Pretti were shot and killed by ICE agents. 

You tweeted, “If there was ever a moment for libertarians and conservatives to step up and join the rest of us, we’re in it. Americans have to unite and stop this descent from a freedom-loving nation into the kind of place where masked, militarized government agents are sent to politically noncompliant areas to roam the streets, terrorize civilians, and deploy violence with impunity.”

To which I say, absolutely I would, for the record, Reason, which has been around since 1968, we don’t have house editorials, but all of our writers opposed the PATRIOT Act and then the Homeland Security Act of 2002, which created DHS and ICE. What should we be doing in terms of removing illegal aliens who are in the country? Just as a kind of starting point?

Well, look, I think there is a kind of common sense consensus among most Americans, left, right, and center, that if somebody is a danger to society, if somebody has a criminal record, then they need to be dealt with. They need to be deported and/or dealt with in our criminal justice system. And I don’t think there’s a ton of disagreement with that. And I think a lot of people who voted for this administration did so believing that they would prioritize the most dangerous, the people with the worst criminal records. After all, they said that they would.

The challenge, of course, is we’ve seen something that’s gone so far beyond that, where you have people who have been in this country, everything legal other than they don’t have permission to be here. Everything else, paying taxes, often having work permits, doing what they’re supposed to do, as well as people who are a hundred percent legal. People with some kind of asylum or refugee status. And even United States citizens, all being caught up in being on the abusive end, the business end, of this administration’s immigration policy. So I think we can start with a reasonably consensus place that says that, “Look, if you’re here and you shouldn’t be and you’re dangerous, you got to go.” And not have it follow from that, that it’s okay to see all of this abusive behavior coming from federal immigration troops, basically, agents in our cities.

How much is it? It’s stuff like the masking and the rush to hire thousands of new ICE agents. Clearly, the training couldn’t have been as good as it was going to be beforehand. You’ve talked a lot about this. I certainly do in my writings, about a loss of trust and confidence in government institutions. People don’t trust ICE; they don’t trust the police. They certainly don’t trust the government or the media or the church the way that they used to. How do you go about changing ICE quickly so that people are more comfortable actually helping it do its legitimate functions?

Yeah, this breakdown of trust has obviously been going on for a long time. I think it’s a huge problem. I wrote a whole book about it about 5 or 6 years ago now. And it’s only become more serious since then. And I thought a lot about how trust, in particular between law enforcement and citizens, is earned, because of my time as mayor. Where I oversaw a police force, we had a lot of challenges with that police force and its relationship to the community. And part of where trust was earned was that people knew each other, the members of the community and the members of the police department. The policing worked best when people trusted those in uniform, they’ll keep them safe, turned to them when they needed help, when they had information that could help solve a crime.

Was South Bend a sanctuary city by any chance?

We didn’t have that kind of formal policy. We did believe that there was a distinction between what our police were supposed to be doing and what federal immigration were supposed to do. And that was important because I was very worried that if local residents thought that our police were out there conducting immigration raids, they were going to be less likely to talk to us when we needed their help to solve a crime, including a violent one.

One of the arguments for a variety of sanctuary city policies is that it actually helps with local law enforcement substantially.

But another thing is, I think it’s inconceivable in at least any police department I’ve ever seen, that you would have your police officers at a community-level be unwilling to show their face. So that’s a good starting point to think about. Shouldn’t that community model have at least some relevance to what we expect from our federal law enforcement?

Another way to put it is, if we’re going to give you the power to use deadly force on American soil, potentially against citizen or non-citizen alike, there’s some really basic things we’re going to need from you in terms of, first of all, I think showing your face and identifying yourself and having a body camera, so there’s a record of what you’re doing. But also of course, more deeply, a level of accountability and a level of responsibility and a level of training, of course.

How do you respond to people? Conservative critics will say, “Well, ICE is uniquely doxxed all the time. That people are following them home, that they’re at a particular level of risk that no other type of law enforcement is.” You hear this quite often.

I think we should approach this in a fact-based way. So what I’ve seen in terms of people losing their lives and being physically harmed, is that happening much more frequently to people who are being abused by ICE than to members of ICE. 

But let me be clear, it is completely wrong to harm or dox anybody, including anybody doing their job as a federal employee or law enforcement. But we have ways of dealing with that, right? Part of what the FBI does is if there is a threat or a physical attack directed against anyone federal, from federal law enforcement to a member of the US Cabinet, the FBI should be dealing with that.

But ICE has now been given more money than the FBI itself. And the question comes with, if you pump that much money and that much authority into a law enforcement agency that’s supposed to have a very specific, relatively narrow mission, what are they going to do with it? So I think it’s a real problem when this administration tries to make it sound like ICE is the victim, including trying to make it sound like they were the victim in cases where they killed somebody. And I think it shows you how removed from reality they are. But I also, I want to confess, as somebody who had many late-night arguments with conservative and libertarian friends over beers as a college student where they would invoke the idea of federal agents running amok through our streets. I never believed…

Jackbooted thugs. Jackbooted thugs.

Yeah. So I feel like in a way, I was right on one hand and they were right on one hand. I think they were right that that’s more real than I ever could have imagined. I still think I had a point in what might lead us there. Which turned out to be the kind of administration we have. But that’s precisely why I think people in my party ought to be reaching out to conservatives and especially to libertarians saying, “We’re not going to agree on everything, but there’s got to be some common cause here.”

Let’s talk about those common causes a little bit. More broadly, Reason’s motto is “Free Minds and Free Markets.” We like civil liberties and economic liberties. Being able to run a business the way you want, watch the kind of culture that you want to watch, things like that. What’s the Buttigieg agenda that will speak to libertarians who tend to be kind of politically—certainly in a partisan way—homeless. Often vote Republican, not my personal experience, but many of that. What do you have to offer libertarian voters who would definitely be enough to sway any kind of election that we’re going to be seeing over the next couple of years?

I think the core of what I have to say is that I am driven by a commitment to freedom, and I think as anyone libertarian views themselves as having that same core commitment. To me, there are three things, three categories of things, that the government has to do in order for us to be free. One, it has to provide basic services, because you’re actually not free if you can’t get clean, safe drinking water out of the tap or if you don’t have national defense. Two, it has to constrain anybody who could make you unfree. This is traditionally the thing progressives are more interested in. Right? I would say that means if your boss can make you unfree, if your neighbor can make you unfree, if your cable company can make you unfree, there can be a role for government.

But then the third part is, in order for you to be free, the third thing a government has to do is constrain itself. And this is the area that I think, honestly, it was conservatives and libertarians who paid more attention to, or talked about it more, for most of my lifetime in most of the kind of commentary spaces that are out there. But the now is a moment that I think all of us are alive to. So I guess what I have to offer is a politics where of course we’re going to have a push-pull tug-of-war on exactly what it means to make good on those three things.

Right.

But the result should be that if we get government right, make it maybe more powerful in certain ways where I think it should have more power to deal with monopolies, for example, or with inequality, but also make government less powerful when it comes to surveillance and intimidation and some of the other things we’re seeing on the streets of American cities right now that we would in fact enjoy more freedom as Americans.

Yeah. Let’s talk about some of the big-picture issues, which have to do with things like the national debt. Taxes get lowered incrementally, etc. But generally speaking, we are usually pulling in somewhere between about 15 and 19 percent of GDP as tax revenue. Spending has really skyrocketed from being close to that to now being in the 20, 25 percent range of GDP. I was watching a clip of you on a podcast recently, and you were talking about how like if there had been a legitimate Department of Government Efficiency, that would’ve been a good thing. How do we restrain spending where we’re spending $6–7 trillion where 5, 6 years ago we were still spending under $5 trillion?

Yeah, I mean, this is where I think there’s a real tragedy in what DOGE did, not just because they were very, in my view, very destructive, but because they missed a chance to make real change that could have made government run more efficiently. And here too, even though my federal government experience was running a very large agency with a very large budget, my original instincts were fashioned when I was mayor of a city with a comparatively small budget, about $300 million. We did our budget in cash. I couldn’t go print money. And if we wanted to do something more, we either had to do less of something else or to figure out a way to do it for less money. 

And there are certainly opportunities. I saw them myself. 

I saw, to take a very small example, our database for customer complaints about airlines running on 1980s technology that meant that the time, and therefore money, associated with running it for department staff was just overwhelmingly more than it had to be.

You go from there all the way up to things that we know happen, certainly in the DOD. My time in Afghanistan, I saw a building that was built at enormous expense, never used and then tore down over the years. We know there are many examples like that. Now, I also think if we’re going to talk about spending, which we should, we also have to talk about revenue. I think there is a happy medium, a reasonable place where giant corporations aren’t paying zero. Where very wealthy people aren’t paying less proportionately than school teachers and firefighters. That is not so heavy in tax that it stifles innovation and growth, but is enough that we’re not looming this big debt.

But what can be done to, as I was saying, tax revenue, and this is something… If you go back to the 1950s, even when the top marginal rate was in the ’70s or ’80s or even ’90s, the revenue that’s generated tends to be pretty stable because billionaires… Companies pass costs on to customers or employees. Billionaires, they’re the ones who are creating the new pathways to avoid taxes, even while the top 1 percent pays a massive amount of taxes, we have the most progressive tax system in the OECD, so there’s taxes, we can talk about that. But spending, we went from $4.7 trillion to $7 trillion. We peak in COVID and then nothing fully comes down. What are the big ticket items that we really seriously, I have to say, it’s not just a question of we’re going to squeeze a bunch of people to close gaps, we shouldn’t be doing this as a federal government.

Well, this is where I probably will part ways with a lot of conservatives, but I think there’s still some common ground to be found. I think if we really did a scan of wasteful contracts, I think we would find a lot, and not only in the national security side of the house. I think a lot of IT generally in the public sector, multi-billion dollar IT projects wind up becoming overwrought, unaccountable, or at least very difficult to connect the inputs to the outcomes. The money going into it, to the results you get out.

By the way, there’s a real opportunity here. I am concerned to the point of being skeptical about what AI could bring. But also recognize that AI could bring a chance to automate parts of our bureaucracy. A lot of things that are lumbering, whether it’s IT improvements or just the way paperwork moves in our government that could be made more efficient. I think that the underlying cost of providing a certain level of results in healthcare could be driven down if we use technology in the right, accountable way.

Let’s talk about that a little bit, because obviously automation is the great disruptor, not trade, not free trade and not foreign companies undercutting us. Manufacturing, mostly manufacturing jobs, which peaked as a percentage of the economy in the ’40s during World War II, it’s been going down since, and most of that was automated away. So there is a way that in healthcare, say something could be automated and it would be quicker and more efficient and ideally cheaper. What’s a case study of that? What could that actually be doing?

Well, if you look at the American health care system and the fact that we pay more per patient and get worse outcomes per patient than a lot of peer countries, that would suggest since the kind of state of modern medicine, the forms of therapy that are known to the medical community in different countries are relatively similar, that it has something to do with our system. Now, I’ve proposed a form of coverage that I think would help with that.

But whether we’re talking about public coverage or the private system we have or something in between, it’s very clear that a lot of this has to do with how claims are handled, which kind of tests and just procedures are used when they’re not needed versus when they are. A lot of things that would seem to suggest that a higher share of the healthcare dollar goes to administrativia than should. And a lot of…

That’s a difficult word to pronounce, but it’s an important one.

It’s one that I think about all the time, because we have…

Administrativia.

I’ve dealt with a lot of it. That’s definitely a big factor there. Again, thinking back to my time trying to deliver infrastructure projects. A lot of why the infrastructure dollar in the U.S. doesn’t seem to go as far as it does even in Spain or Germany, places that have strong environmental protection, strong labor standards, and still seem to be able to deliver more per buck than we can. That has to do, again, with that kind of bureaucracy.

But I don’t want to leave your earlier question about what we need to do less of, without making one other point. Which is, we have a lot of backdoor subsidies or just open subsidies that we probably need to think about. Fossil fuel being probably the one that I would point to the most. I can’t tell you how many times I was on Capitol Hill, we were talking about EVs. I talked to somebody who, from the right, who sounded like they had a principled objection to supporting a certain form of propulsion or energy or transportation in this country. That was why they were against our policy of using tax credits to make EVs cheaper. But seemed to have no interest at all in reconsidering the form of propulsion and transportation that we subsidize enormously, which is of course on the fossil side.

Do you see a role for just spinning certain things off from the government? As secretary of transportation, you oversaw the air traffic control system. You mentioned peer countries in Europe, places like Germany, England, closer to home, Canada, have privatized or corporatized their air traffic control system. Where they basically say, “OK, the airlines, you guys do this.” They upgrade the technology, they have a very vested interest in making things efficient and safe. They’re using new technology as opposed to the kind of Cold War technology we’re still doing. 

Do you see either in something like the air travel control system, or then also they’ve privatized most of their airports and they’ve taken away the kind of fake national security warning, which is one of the reasons why we really can’t have companies that are owned by foreign—that are based in foreign countries do airports or ports here. Is there a role for instead of saying, “OK, the government can do this more efficiently,” is like, “Hey, maybe we actually give this to the private sector most affected by it”?

So I’d take that up in a results-driven way. And I wouldn’t be dogmatic about it. So air traffic control is one where I’m more skeptical of that idea. And to be clear, a lot needs to change in our air traffic control system, but I do want to point out that the system as it stands, has delivered an extraordinary standard where America went something like 15 years and billions and billions of passenger enplanements with zero crash fatalities. So again, I’m not saying that means we should be content with the status quo, especially some of the old technology that’s there. But I do think that there’s a very real risk of throwing out the results with the bath water.

But to your broader question, I definitely saw for myself a lot of models where there was opportunity. Ports is one area where there can be lots of different models. In L.A., Long Beach, the landlord, so to speak, is public, but then you have terminal operators kind of working within that. I think that it would certainly, we could certainly learn a lot from a place like the U.K., which has had airport models. Not perfect, but some pretty impressive project delivery, in the U.K. example. And then on rail, an area where we’ve really struggled to mobilize private capital. One of the projects that I was happy to support is set to bring high-speed rail between Las Vegas and Southern California. That was a public-private partnership, couldn’t have happened without private investment, without private leadership, really, to make that happen.

So then why should the public be involved in that? And I’m not trying to bust your chops, but we have a privatized freight rail system, which is incredibly good, and it’s virtually all maintained by private dollars. But if there’s a market for a passenger line—a high-speed line, or even a minimum, a decent sized line—why shouldn’t the private sector be doing that? Because they’re the ones who are going to benefit from it mostly and their passengers and things like that. 

Why not take the public out of that partnership?

Yeah, well, I think I have maybe a dimmer view than you do about the freight rail system. I think it’s gotten so consolidated, there’s so little competition. Some of the people who were even madder at the railroads than I was were their customers. I would hear from companies that because they had to choose between, at best, two alternatives, and sometimes only had one to move their product, were sure that they weren’t getting a very good deal. And I think it’s something we should look at. Where do you have these areas where you’re just going to almost, unless there’s some intervention, almost inevitably wind up coming down to a monopoly or a duopoly. I’m worried that our airlines could eventually get to a scenario where it’s kind of Coke or Pepsi.

But to the philosophical question you’re asking. I guess to me, it makes most sense for the public to be involved when there is some kind of benefit that just isn’t going to be captured by the private investors. And I think passenger rail is an example of that. Which is why while I was happy to support a private-sector-led effort on the high-speed rail. It was also one that I think either party couldn’t have made it work without the others. You had to have a public part there too. If you look at Japan, there’s no question that there was a colossal return on investment on those high-speed rail lines. They put them in starting in the 60s, and the value of the real estate, the value that was created around them at a national GDP level was enormous.

But we’re not real… I mean, if you’re talking about connecting, first off, California’s high-speed rail, which has gotten a lot of federal money literally is a… I mean, we should have just been flushing that money down the toilet for all that it’s brought us. 

But in Japan, there’s a different density of population in places. There has been a mostly privately funded rail system from Miami going up to Orlando. So in places where it makes sense. And Amtrak, the nation’s passenger rail system, it makes sense to run a line from Boston to D.C. and maybe a little bit further south. But then you have these other lines that go through multiple states where hundreds of dollars per customer are being held up for something that just seems to be pork-barrel spending really.

Well, I think that every geography, definitely every market, has its own characteristics. But I wouldn’t short America’s suitability for more rail. And I say that comparing places like where I live, the Midwest, to the kind of population patterns of Europe. Obviously, when you’re talking about the West, it’s a little bit different. But again, the West is what furnished this example of the high-speed rail from Las Vegas to Southern California.

I also think the more we can develop a domestic industry, the less it might need public intervention. High-speed rail has more in common with aviation than it does with regular speed rail, in terms of the intensity of creating the technology, the rolling stock, that kind of thing. And I do believe the more we’re actually in the habit of doing it on US soil, the better we’ll get at it. And in many markets you would hope, I mean this is what I hope will eventually happen with things like electric vehicles, the public touch can get lighter and lighter and the market can do what it does best more and more.

So let’s talk a little bit about tariffs. If we’re talking about electric vehicles, and again, I’ve seen you recently speak out about Trump’s tariffs, which are ridiculous. And I don’t know, can we say economically illiterate or whatever? But they were stupid ideas to begin with. And it was chilling to see how many economists, particularly people who, for decades even, were free market economists and then suddenly saying, “Oh, you know what? We should give a second look to tariffs.” They brought nothing but the best trade, biggest trade deficit with Japan and things, or with China. Manufacturing jobs have actually decreased since Liberation Day, all of this kind of stuff. You mentioned EVs. Should we be lowering… Should we be allowing more Chinese or foreign EV cars to come into the U.S., because they would be cheaper and that would be good for the environment and it would be good for consumers?

Well, I don’t think everything cheaper is automatically better without scrutiny. So Chinese technology is a good example. It’s one thing if we’re talking about certain kinds of low-stakes consumer products. It’s another, if we talk about what we know China is doing. Which is not exactly a free market approach. They’re using enormous amounts of excess capacity so they can prop up an industry so that they can take it over from us because they know the economic stakes of dominating the future of the auto industry. So this is one, I think a good example, where to me it makes sense not to be too dogmatic.

I think there are places where protection is appropriate because we have an industry of strategic importance. But that doesn’t mean that you do the kind of tariffs this administration is doing. As you pointed out, they haven’t even led to increased manufacturing employment. Manufacturing employment is down under this administration. So they’ve really been self-defeating according to their own stated goals. The one thing they have done is they’ve increased the prices all of us pay. The last estimates I saw said it was about a thousand bucks per household last year, set to be more than that this year. And that’s a very real cost despite the administration rhetoric making it sound as if somebody else pays that. We definitely pay that, right? 

Oh, and you don’t need a lot of dolls at Christmas, right? You only need one or two dolls, or something like that.

Right. What was it? You get a pencil and a doll or whatever the president said.

But can I ask, what’s your kind of… You’ve said you don’t want to be dogmatic. And I think that comes through. But what’s the limiting principle to say, “Well, you know what? Generally speaking, free trade is good.” Or “We don’t want tariffs.” But then Chinese EVs, and in the ’70s, and certainly, obviously, you grew up in the South Bend area… So I spent much time in Ohio as well, and I went to graduate school in Buffalo. I know the Rust Belt pretty well. And I know the arguments against: “Well, these cheap foreign cars, these cheap Volkswagens, these cheap Japanese cars, these Korean cars are even worse.” Like ,there’s always going to be a moment where in order to protect an incumbent or a domestic industry, we’ve got to hold tariffs up.

But it always seems like all that does is it doesn’t save industries; it just kind of makes them bleed out longer. And then they kind of have to adapt more quickly at the end. So I guess what’s your limited principle in saying, “OK, this is a public benefit of X amount, so we should intervene in the market”?