WATCH: Kaylee McGhee White slams Buttigieg for inexperience in wake of FAA outage
Steff Thomas
Video Embed
The Washington Examiner’s Kaylee McGhee White criticized Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on Friday, saying if he can’t run the department efficiently, he should resign.
“What’s so frustrating about this is that the Transportation Department is probably one of the only government agencies that we actually shouldn’t abolish. We need it to work properly. We need it to run smoothly,” White said on Fox Business Tonight, citing the response to the recent Federal Aviation Administration system outage as an example of Buttigieg’s inexperience.
PILOTS BLAST FAA FOR ‘ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE’ AND ‘INCLUSIVE’ SPENDING OVER SYSTEM UPGRADES
“And if Buttigieg can’t ensure that that happens, then he needs to resign. And the sooner that he does so, the better,” she told host Dagen McDowell.
The FAA announced earlier this week that the outages were likely due to personnel incompetence. A preliminary review supported that conclusion, confirming that the troubles were caused by a damaged database file, but not likely a cyberattack.
Even in light of those developments, Buttigieg has remained relatively quiet. White questioned why President Joe Biden’s head of transportation hasn’t spoken up.
iFrame Object
“Notice how silent he’s been over the past week or so since this happened. It’s not him who’s out in front of the cameras. It’s the White House. It’s Joe Biden. It’s Karine Jean-Pierre. Where is the guy who is supposed to be running this agency?” she asked.
“I think that says all that we need to know,” White added.
When asked how the administration would likely move to solve the technical challenge, she said they would likely try to “throw money” at it and ignore the true problem: the workforce.
“Democrats love to throw money at things when they think that you know there’s a problem,” White said.
“But … more money is not going to fix this problem. This was a problem of negligence. It was a problem of a systemwide failure. It was a personnel failure, as the report says,” she said.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
White said that it was a top-to-bottom failure, once again pointing out that Buttigieg’s only leadership experience was being the mayor of a Midwestern city and that he got the job because he “sucked up” to Biden on the 2020 campaign trail.
“It was always obvious that the only reason that Buttigieg got this job was because he dropped out of the 2020 primary when he did, and now we’re all stuck facing the consequences,” she said.
“And those consequences include constant supply chain delays, a massive holiday travel breakdown, and now we have this aviation blackout. It’s been problem after problem after problem,” White added.