Pete Buttigieg to be Joe Biden’s Secretary of Transportation over Rahm Emanuel

The president-elect and former Indiana mayor appeared to develop a friendly relationship along the 2020 campaign trail

President-elect Joe Biden will tap former Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg to serve as his Transportation secretary, according to new reports.

The former mayor of Indiana and 38-year-old Democrat, who ran for president against Mr Biden in the 2020 primaries, gained national prominence along the campaign trail and was considered a top pick for the position in the incoming administration.

The news was first reported on Tuesday by Reuters. It follows previous announcements the Biden transition team has made in recent weeks of other appointments, including longtime diplomat Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who will serve as US ambassador to the United Nations, and Denis McDonough, former White House chief of staff, to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Mr Biden has compared Mr Buttigieg to his late son, Beau, saying at a March event: "To me it's the highest compliment I can give any man or woman. And, like Beau, he has a backbone like a ramrod.

He added: "I promise you, over your lifetime, you're going to end up seeing a hell of a lot more of Pete than you are of me."

Mr Buttigieg is the former mayor of Indiana's fourth largest city, serving from 2012 to 2010. He also served a seven-month deployment as an intelligence officer in Afghanistan. With his presidential campaign, he became the first openly gay man to become — however briefly — a leading presidential candidate. He has been married to his husband, Chasten, since 2018.

LGBTQ rights groups immediately spoke out in praise of Biden's selection of Buttigieg.

"Pete's nomination is a new milestone in a decades-long effort to ensure LGBTQ people are represented throughout our government - and its impact will reverberate well-beyond the department he will lead," said Annise Parker, president and CEO of the LGBTQ Victory Institute. “It distances our nation from a troubled legacy of barring out LGBTQ people from government positions and moves us closer to the President-elect's vision of a government that reflects America.”

The Transportation Department helps oversee the nation's highway system, planes, trains and mass transit and is poised to play a key role early in the incoming administration.

Mr Biden has pledged to spend billions making major infrastructure improvements and on retrofitting initiatives that can help the US battle climate change. He also wants to immediately mandate mask-wearing on airplanes and public transportation systems to slow the spread of the coronavirus.

Infrastructure spending can be a bipartisan issue, and President Donald Trump spent years promising to push a major bill through Congress that never materialized. Instead his administration moved to soften carbon emissions standards that Mr Biden's team will likely work to undo as part of the broader commitment to slowing global warming.

The once most frequently mentioned early pick to head the Transportation Department, President Barack Obama's former chief of staff and ex-Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, sparked strong pushback from top progressive activists. 

Mr Emanuel, also a former congressman, helped oversee the Obama administration's distribution of tens of billions of dollars in transportation spending as part of a massive stimulus bill approved following the financial crisis — but now seems unlikely to take any position in Mr Biden's administration.

His chances faded after progressives and civil rights leaders were very critical of Mr Emanuel's handling of the high-profile police shooting death of Laquan McDonald, a Black teenager killed by a white officer, during his time as the mayor of Chicago.

Additional reporting by the Associated Press