‘New voice with new ideas’: Biden describes Pete Buttigieg as key to sweeping infrastructure overhaul

President-elect and Treasury nominee say US could tackle climate change while creating new jobs

President-elect Joe Biden described his pick for transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, as a policy innovator who can help push an ambitious plan to overhaul the country’s infrastructure through Congress.

Mr Buttigieg described himself as “humbled” to be offered the job, saying he “had a love for transportation, even from childhood”. The former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, touted his work to upgrade that city’s infrastructure “to help prepare for a more sustainable future”.

He talked about his “constant battle” with potholes and how access to better transportation can help lift poor Americans out of poverty due to “isolated neighbourhoods”. The Transportation nominee also said the incoming Biden administration has an “opportunity” to address climate change and inequality via its transportation policies.

The media-savvy former presidential candidate even said he intends to turn “infrastructure week” – which became a running Washington joke when the Trump administration would try to put a scandal behind it by talking up an infrastructure bill that never happened – into more than a “media punchline”.

Mr Biden noted he got to know his Treasury nominee while they both were presidential candidates, calling him “one of the smartest people you’ll ever meet” and a “policy wonk with a big heart."

But the most eyebrow-raising part of Mr Biden’s remarks on Wednesday were his comments about a potential infrastructure package.

The president-elect, much like the man he will replace, talked about the economic benefits of upgrading the country’s roads, bridges, sea ports, tunnels and airports.

“There’s so much we can do,” noting the US has one of the world’s top economies but ranks just 10th on quality of infrastructure.

He also said the United States could address the changing climate while also boosting its own economy.

“When I think about climate change … I think about good-paying union jobs,” Mr Biden said, in comments later echoed by Mr Buttigieg.

The former Delaware senator who once took Amtrak daily to Washington also said he wants to build transportation systems that would connect rural areas to urban centres “for the first time”.

But all of that will come with a hefty price tag. Paying for such an ambitious and sweeping package is part of what prevented a serious “infrastructure week" under outgoing President Trump.

Mr Biden appeared to throw a bone to Republicans, who are leery of devoting so much taxpayer-funded monies to anything but the Pentagon budget, when he talked about using “public-private partnerships” to pay for some infrastructure work.

The Trump administration did lay out such a plan, but it was so reliant on hard-to-raise private monies that even most GOP lawmakers dismissed it immediately.