Buttigieg: Rail Accidents Have Increased over Past Year Despite Us Doing All We Can Because Congress Hasn’t Acted

On Friday’s “PBS NewsHour,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg stated that the Department of Transportation has “taken so many steps on rail safety policy” since the East Palestine derailment and is “doing everything we can with the authorities that we already have,” but accidents have gone up despite this because Congress needs to act.

Buttigieg said, “For our department, the process mainly has to do with making sure things like this can’t happen again, which is why we’ve taken so many steps on rail safety policy and are pressing Congress to do more with the power that it has.”

Co-host Geoff Bennett then asked, “Well, despite intense scrutiny from regulatory agencies since that derailment, rail accidents have actually increased over the last year. Why? What accounts for that?”

Buttigieg responded, “Well, I think this demonstrates why we need that Bipartisan Railway Safety Act in Congress. Don’t get me wrong, we’re doing everything we can with the authorities that we already have, focused inspections, a new rule that we recently finalized requiring emergency escape breathing apparatus to protect crewmembers on trains carrying those kind of hazardous materials, audits, and safety advisories, other measures. But the simple reality is, we need a stronger hand. And Congress could and should give that to us with the Bipartisan Railway Safety Act.”

He continued, “I’ll give you just a couple of examples: One thing that that legislation would do is it would lift the statutory cap that prevents my department from fining a railroad anything more than low six figures, even for an egregious violation that leads to a fatality, which is obviously not enough to get multibillion-dollar corporations to change their behavior. It would also accelerate the adoption of safer equipment and standards that, on our own, it would either take too long or we simply lack the authority to do. Now, there was a lot of noise about this a year ago, but now, one year later, I think because of intense lobbying against this by the railroad industry, it has been very difficult to get many members of Congress on the record on whether they’re for or against this Railway Safety Act, even though it had both Republican and Democratic co-sponsors at the time.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett