Buttigieg talks holding rail industry accountable after toxic train derailment l GMA

One on the talk, the train to railmen in Ohio, the Biden administration announcing new steps this morning to hold the rail industry accountable. Secretary of Transparency, Pete Buttigieg is joining us live this morning, Mr. Secretary. Thank you for joining us this morning. You know, you've got two real big missions right now, helping the people on the ground in East Palestine right now, preventing something like this from happening again. What is the administration doing on both fronts? That's right. So one of the biggest things to support the people of East Palestine is to make sure that they have access to the public health support they need to the environmental resources they need.

That's why the EPA administrator Michael Regan will be on the ground there again and why CDC is going out there. But there's another side to the story, which is making sure that we move forward on rail safety in this country. The NTSB, National Transportation Safety Board, is an independent body and they are independently doing their investigative work. But we don't have to wait for their final report to know that some things need to change. And so today, we are pushing forward a three-part drive on rail safety, things that we're doing at the Department of Transportation to raise the bar, things that we need help from Congress to do in order to hold rail companies accountable, and things that this industry needs to do differently. I got to tell you, ever since I came into this job, I have seen the power that multi-billion dollar railroad companies wheeled and they fight safety regulations, tooth and nail, that's got to change. The future cannot be like the past and I am calling for that change to begin right away.

You're saying it should begin right away, but Ohio Senator JD Vance has said that the administration was loosening rail regulations. No, I'm happy to talk with him more if he wants to understand the work that we're doing. For example, we are advancing the requirement on two-person crews on trains. Believe it or not, the rail industry has been pushing to be allowed to have trains have only one human being on board. Imagine what happens if there's an issue on a train that's a mile long or longer and there's only one person to check on something three-quarters of the way back in the train. Now, the last administration froze that rulemaking. We have been advancing that in order to push safety.

We have been working to make sure that we have more authority to hold rail companies accountable. And so one thing that Senator Vance and others in Congress could do to help would be to give us more teeth by raising the fines. Right now, even for the most egregious kind of safety violation, like ones involving hazardous materials that result in fatalities, Congress has passed a statute that caps our ability to fine at about $250,000. And that might sound like a lot of money for somebody going through daily life, but to a multi-billion-dollar company like Norfolk Southern, it is dust. So I'm urging Congress to do things like work with us to raise the fines. Work with us on fortifying tank cars. Under the Obama administration, a rule went into effect, calling for a stronger type of tank car to be fully rolled out across the industry by 2025.

That got pushed back by an act of Congress to 2029. The administration is coming. And calling on Congress to work with us to move that date back up, but also the rail industry can do that without us making them. And I hope they will make that change while we simultaneously work on the regulation. The administration is coming to some fire for its response. And the mayor of East Palestine said it took nearly two weeks for the White House to contact and there were shots of where is Pete Buttigieg at a town hall meeting last week? What's your response to that? When are you going to go to East Palestine? Well, I am planning to go. And our folks were on the ground from the first hours.

I do want to stress that the NTSB needs to be able to do its work independently. But when I go, the focus is going to be on action. Look, I was mayor of my hometown in the last eight years. We dealt with a lot of disasters, natural and human. And one of the things I noticed very quickly is that there's two kinds of people who show up when you have that kind of disaster experience. People who are there because they have a specific job to do and are there to get something done. And people who are there to look good and have their picture taken.

When I go, it will be about action on rail safety, like the actions that we are calling on Congress to help us with, that we're calling on industry to take, and that we are undertaking our cells as a department to help make sure that these kinds of things don't happen in the future. Secretary Buttigieg, thanks for your time this morning. Thank you.

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