- This administration, this President was scoffed at for suggesting that we could have anything major done on a bipartisan basis, only to get that bipartisan infrastructure law done.

So we're gonna continue working with Senators and their offices as there's a lot more good work to do.

[upbeat music] - Hello and welcome to "GZERO World."

I'm Ian Bremmer and today I, like any child who saw the 2005 movie "Madagascar," wish to inform you again and again and again that I like to move it, move it.

[animals cheering] ♪ I like to move it, move it ♪ ♪ I like to move it ♪ Why?

Because it's infrastructure week here on GZERO and I'm talking roads, I'm talking bridges, I'm talking tunnels.

And to join me is Mr. Infrastructure, US Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, and I have been told that he too likes to move it, move it.

Oh, yes, he does.

Okay, I'm done.

Promise.

And later, hot music and politics at Europe's biggest party.

That's right.

It's Eurovision time.

[crowd cheering] But first, a word from the folks who help us move it, move it.

No, they don't do that.

They help us keep the lights on.

- [Narrator] Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Prologis, and by... - At 6:05 PM on a sweltering August evening in 2007, rush hour traffic was crawling across Minneapolis's I-35 bridge, and then the bridge began to shake.

- [Caller] Bring everything you've got.

The whole bridge over the river fell down.

There's cars all over the place.

- [Dispatcher] We have construction workers, cars all over, and people in the water as well.

- [Ian] 13 people died.

140 more were injured when Minnesota's third busiest bridge collapsed, plunging vehicles 10 stories down into the rushing Mississippi, leaving one school bus with 63 children teetering against a guardrail.

An NTSB investigation later attributed the collapse to 300 tons of construction materials that had been placed on a 40-year-old design flaw in the bridge's original construction.

But while the flaw had gone undetected for decades, inspectors had rated the bridge in poor condition for 17 straight years, done nothing about it.

The accident shocked the nation as well as the freshman senator from Minnesota.

- A bridge in America just shouldn't fall down.

- The truth is that bridges in America fall down all the time.

In fact, since the 2007 Minneapolis disaster, at least 21 US bridges have partially or entirely collapsed.

A 2022 report found that 43,000 US bridges are "structurally deficient."

The report also found that those same bridges are crossed 168 million times a day.

At the current rate, it would take 30 years to fix all the country's structurally deficient bridges.

You feel lucky?

Globally, of course, the number of faulty bridges is much higher, but at least here in the United States, things may be starting to change.

On November 6th, 2021, Congress passed the Biden Administration's $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, bipartisan support, which includes $550 billion for America's roads, bridges, mass transit, rail, airports, and ports.

Secretary Pete Buttigieg has called it "the single largest dedicated bridge investment since the construction of the interstate highway system."

But as we all know, allocating the money is only half the battle.

Making sure it's spent correctly is where the rubber meets the road.

To talk bridges, tunnels, electric vehicles, and much more, I'm joined by the man himself, US Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg.

Secretary Pete Buttigieg, so glad to have you on the show.

- Well, thanks for having me on.

- So a lot of talk about it.

I thought I would start with sort of the issue du jour, du week, the debt limit crisis.

I've seen former President Trump say that he's fine with the default.

And I know one of the sectors that would be most impacted is transportation infrastructure.

So just wanted to give you a chance to opine on that.

- It's easy politically to go out there and say anything that isn't defense, any non-defense discretionary spending isn't that important and we ought to cut it until you look at what that actually means.

And transportation's a great example.

If you look at the House Republican budget framework that they voted through and passed on the floor, if that were actually to carry the day, that would mean that we would have to stop our progress hiring air traffic controllers at the very moment when I think most Americans realize we need more, not less.

In fact, there'd be no way to absorb those cuts without hundreds of air traffic control towers shutting down altogether.

On railroad safety, something that rightly has a lot of attention in the US right now, we would be in a situation where tens of thousands of miles of track fewer would be inspected every year for safety.

There would be cuts to our capacity to manage hazardous material, and obviously more generally, the impact on transportation at the very time when we're finally making the investments we've needed to make as a country would take us in the wrong direction with damaging economic as well as safety consequences.

So if you really want to slash everything that isn't the Pentagon, you gotta be ready to own those positions.

And I think it's very telling as we have gone out to talk to the American public about what those cuts would mean, that none of these Congressional Republicans who voted for those cuts have actually stepped forward to defend them and explain why air traffic control ought to be cut or why it's a good thing that you might have to wait a couple more hours in a security line at an airport because of the cuts to TSA.

These are real impacts that are gonna have a real effect on our everyday lives, not to mention on our economy.

- Now, I noticed that the first thing that you mentioned when I talked about potential default was air traffic control and summer season is upon us.

People are starting to travel in greater numbers and we've got 10% fewer air traffic controllers today than we had before the pandemic.

What does that mean, leaving aside any additional political challenges, in terms of people that are just planning on flying?

How are their experiences gonna be different in that environment?

- So the good news is after a very disruptive year last year in terms of the pace at which air travel demand return and the struggles that the airlines had catching up, this year, actually, so far, we've seen the performance quite strong.

Each month so far in 2023, the preliminary data show cancellation rates under 2%.

We actually haven't seen that happen every month this far into a year in many years.

So that's the good news.

But it is going to be a challenge if we can't hire the air traffic controllers we need.

Now, we got 1,500 hired this year or in the process of being hired, another 1,800 in the President's budget for next year.

And even now we are facing the effect of the hole that COVID blew in our training pipeline because it can take more than a year, often closer to two years, to get an air traffic controller qualified for any particular position.

But I do want to emphasize that issues like staffing and air traffic control are not the main cause, not even close to being the main cause of cancellations and delays.

We've been working with the airlines, pressing the airlines and they have delivered a lot of improvements with what's under their control.

And of course, we're continuing to work on what's under our control to deliver that smooth, safe travel experience that passengers want while also stepping up our consumer protection to support passengers when airlines aren't treating them the way they should.

So we'll always work with the airlines where appropriate, but we are also going to hold them accountable when they're not taking good care of passengers.

That's what the latest announcement launching a rule about compensating passengers in extreme delays and cancellations is all about.

We've also found that transparency goes a long way.

Just by putting up a dashboard on our website at flightrights.gov, that had a remarkable effect.

In a matter of days, it did what regulations could have taken years to deliver, which is going from none of the top 10 airlines to almost all of them making specific written enforceable commitments about things like taking care of meals and accommodation and ground transportation and rebooking if they're responsible for you getting stuck.

A lot of passengers even today don't know, for example, that an airline has to give you a cash refund if your flight gets canceled.

And often the airline's sort of opening bid will be, well, how would you like a few thousand miles?

And if a passenger doesn't know that that's the equivalent of 10 or 20 bucks, they might really be shorted compared to that cash refund that they are owed and deserve.

And that's also why on the back end, we are going through thousands of complaints, following up and launching enforcement actions where appropriate.

And all of this is about making sure that the passengers have a better experience.

Our number one priority with aviation is safety.

And we never take for granted the extraordinary safety record of US aviation, but close behind it is customer service and making sure that we stand with passengers and have their back.

- So on the back of that, talk about East Palestine in Ohio and this horrible crash.

How much more have we learned about the health implications for the community there?

- Well, this is something that there's gonna need to be sustained attention on for years.

The tests today, soil, air, and water, indicate that it is safe, but years from now you could see health effects.

And so we need to make sure and will as an administration that these residents are taken care of.

Norfolk Southern has to be accountable for the short-term and long-term consequences of their derailment.

And I should note that the EPA has been doing an enormous amount of work to hold them accountable.

And then on the transportation side, we're working not just to make sure that they're accountable for safety issues, but to make sure that the whole freight railroad sector does better.

Now, bipartisan legislation has advanced in the Senate that would give us more tools to do that with.

It would add teeth to our enforcement.

It would take time off of the long timeline that the railroads were planning on getting these stronger tank cars that would help prevent some of these hazardous material incidents from happening.

What we need to do now is make sure that the pressure and the attention is sustained because often when an incident like this falls out of the headlines, then you see a pattern of watering down or delaying rules in enforcement until the next terrible incident happens.

And we shouldn't allow it to go that way.

So I was very encouraged by this bipartisan legislation.

Obviously needs to move in the House too and get to the President's desk in order for us to be able to enforce it, but we're gonna continue to do everything we can with the powers that we already have while calling on Congress to help equip us with the ability to do more.

- So a couple questions, bigger picture.

You're joining me, I believe, from Detroit and a major conference that talks through US and Asian leadership, APEC.

And when I think about American policy over the last couple of years, industrial policy has been a big piece of it.

It's been investing in critical infrastructure in the United States, but it's also been nearshoring, reshoring, not necessarily a lot of talk about globalization.

How much is this a balancing act to ensure that we continue to have efficiency, broader global productivity growth?

How much are we potentially cutting off our nose to spite our face if we're thinking about everything in the United States?

- Well, look, I think two things are true at the same time in this administration.

And it starts with the top, with President Biden.

One is a very strong commitment to making things in America, to rebuilding America's industrial base, to rebuilding American manufacturing jobs.

And that's been a very successful policy so far with over 800,000 manufacturing jobs created.

You can see that here in the industrial Midwest in Detroit where I'm sitting, in northern Indiana where I grew up, and really across the region.

But a second thing that is of course also very much a hallmark of President Biden is international cooperation, relationships and renewing relationships that were put under enormous strain and pressure under the last administration.

Strong industrial policy does not have to mean isolation.

And America by America doesn't have to mean America alone.

Indeed, a lot of what you're seeing is not just nearshoring and onshoring, but also what Secretary Yellen memorably calls friendshoring, and this Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit is a great opportunity for us to talk with friends and then talk with economies that we have had more difficult relationships with about challenges that we all face.

Nobody benefits, whatever the geopolitics, nobody benefits from the destruction that comes by way of climate change.

There are a lot of supply chain issues that it makes all the sense in the world for us to engage with various economies around the world on.

And what's unique about this Asia-Pacific region, I think, is the diversity of players here.

We've got everybody from Canada.

Later after this interview, I'll be celebrating a binational EV corridor with my Canadian counterpart, all the way through to Chile and Australia and the East Asian economies that have so much at stake in the future of the Pacific region.

So this is absolutely the right time and the right place, I think, to sail right into the complexities of believing passionately in creating more jobs right here at home in the US and recognizing the importance of these international relationships to get mutually important goals met.

- Now, there has been underinvestment structurally of the United States, whether we're talking about semiconductors, we're talking about transition and critical minerals for EVs, whether we're talking about a lot of the core components of US infrastructure.

You've been very heavily focused on these issues for the last couple of years.

Give me a quick prioritization.

Where do you think the United States is most vulnerable because of that underinvestment?

- Well, we have to start by fixing what we have, our roads, our bridges, our airports, not exactly leading the world, and they need to be if we want our economy to continue leading among the world's economies.

And that's why the proportions of the President's infrastructure law are historic, so that we can take care of roads and bridges and trains and transit, ports and airports, everything it takes to get people and goods moving around safely.

And then there's what you just mentioned in terms of sourcing critical minerals and materials related to the EV supply chain.

This is hugely important and there's nowhere more symbolic of its importance than where I'm sitting in Detroit, where some of the most traditional and previously old school names in auto manufacturing are running into EVs just as quickly as these newer firms because it's clearly where the industry is going, and frankly, it's where the industry is going with or without us.

So we have to act to make sure that America leads the way.

- So you've given me solid minutes on infrastructure and transportation.

I don't want to go cable news on you, but I gotta ask you at least a few quick political questions if that's okay.

It looks like we're heading to two pretty geriatric candidates for 2024.

You are on the other end of that spectrum.

Should there be an age limit?

Should we think about one for running for the presidency?

- No.

Look, as the youngest member of the cabinet, what I see is around that cabinet table is that I have the honor of being part of an extraordinary and extraordinarily diverse team led by an extraordinary President, who has achieved more in two years and change than many would consider possible in eight years of service.

I mean, historic achievements, advancing our economy, creating jobs, contending with the pandemic, dealing with the biggest land war in Europe since the Truman administration, reinvigorating our industrial base, investing in semiconductors in energy here in the US, delivering an infrastructure investment that has escaped previous presidents and previous Congresses, just achievement after achievement, any one of which would be considered something that would define an era under normal presidencies.

And I think the measure of any administration is what it delivers.

And we're gonna keep pushing 'cause there's more to do, which is why the President's always pressing us in the administration and pressing the case publicly to finish the job.

- So respectfully, the results in the facilities of Senator Diane Feinstein have not quite been that.

Should she resign?

- Look, it's not my place to make those kinds of calls.

What I'll say is that we work with every senator from every state and from both parties to get stuff done.

And by the way, speaking of administration accomplishments, this administration, this president was scoffed at for suggesting that we could have anything major done on a bipartisan basis, only to get that bipartisan infrastructure law done.

So we're gonna continue working with senators and their offices as there's a lot more good work to do.

- Okay, so less than full-throated.

She should stick around on that one.

Okay, another one.

This is about you, so you can make a call.

You just, if I understand correctly, just changed your permanent address to Michigan.

And I'm wondering, that's where you're joining me from right now.

Does that have anything to do with the possible open Senate seat going forward?

- So there two major reasons for the move to Michigan.

Their names are Joseph and Penelope.

They're our twins, our son and our daughter.

And ever since they came on the scene, we've seen how important Chasten's Traverse City home has been and they're close to their grandparents.

As a matter of fact, right now with Chasten traveling on a book tour and me here in Detroit, they're thankfully in the loving hands of their grandparents right now.

It's been the right choice for our family and I'll always remember where I came from, but Michigan has embraced us warmly too and I'm glad to be here, and look, the last thing I'm thinking about right now is any job besides the one I've got.

I know that's probably what I'm supposed to say, but also should just consider-- - That's definitely what you're supposed to say.

I would tell you to say it.

- Yeah, but also like, look at what's on our plate.

Look at what the President has asked this department to deliver.

That's taken about 110% of my energy and attention and the other 120% belongs to our family and our kids.

- Last thing I wanted to ask you, you're the first cabinet secretary, I was shocked to learn this, that's ever taken parental leave.

Lessons from that for other senior government officials and private sector executives?

- Well, look, I'm glad I did it and I'm glad that I had the support of my boss in this administration to take care of my family.

Our circumstance was a little unusual, the circumstances of our adoption.

We got a phone call and the next day we were parents to newborn premature infant twins.

But whatever the circumstances are that allow you to expand your family and become a parent, you need to have that time, not just for connecting with your child, but just for adjusting your life and for supporting your spouse.

That was certainly a very important part of how Chasten and I were taking care of each other is having the time to do it.

And this is something that every American ought to have.

Even the most senior private sector and government officials will find that in a well-run organization, you should have the policy and the means to be able to step over to take care of your family when that is the right thing to do and return to the office ready to do your job with a whole new perspective.

- Secretary Pete Buttigieg, thanks so much for joining me on "GZERO World."

- Thanks for having me on.

Take care.

[electronic music] - And now break out your feather boas, your glitter makeup.

GZERO's Alex Kliment brings us this report about how Europe's annual spectacle of camp, kitsch, and pop music has a surprising political side.

[upbeat electronic music] - Where can you find banana-inspired wolves from Norway, Dubstep rapping astronauts from Montenegro, or Swiss ballads about vampires?

♪ Vampires are alive ♪ It's Eurovision, the over-the-top song contest that pits countries against each other in an annual spectacle of camp, kitsch, and catchy melodies.

[audience cheering] But for Ukrainians, whose entrants have won three times in the past 20 years, Eurovision has come to mean something much bigger.

[audience cheering] Here on the outskirts of Kyiv, a small group of Ukrainian fans broke curfew and braved possible Russian airstrikes to attend a secret watch party for the grand finale of Eurovision 2023.

- I love Eurovision.

Even in shelter, I will watch it.

And no one from Russia will change my Eurovision vibes.

[singing] - [Alex] Last year, just weeks after the Russian invasion, Ukraine's Kalush Orchestra won Eurovision with a landslide vote from the public.

The song "Stefania" became an instant symbol of Ukrainian resilience and an ode to mothers losing their children to war.

[singing] - The win of Kalush Orchestra last year was very important for us and for it was very emotional.

- [Alex] Eurovision's organizers say the event is apolitical.

That's why they refused to let Ukraine's President Zelensky address the contest this year.

But politics is built into Eurovision's DNA.

The contest was created in the 1950s to help unify post-war western Europe.

[singing] It began with seven countries, but has grown to include more than 50, including most of the former Soviet Bloc, which joined after 1989.

In its almost 70-year history, politics have often found a way in.

There was controversy, for example, when Israel joined in the 1970s.

In 2009, the Azerbaijani government detained 43 Azaris after they voted for the entry from rival Armenia.

In the first Eurovision held after Brexit, the UK received an almost statistically impossible zero points.

And today, Turkey's conservative government no longer participates at all because of Eurovision's association with LGBTQ culture.

But for some people, that kind of inclusivity is precisely the point.

- It's a culture of resistance, celebrating joy, celebrating authenticity, celebrating beauty, celebrating someone that's truly your own.

And I think people respond to that.

Everybody say, "Hi, Maxxxim."

- [Audience] Hi, Maxxxim.

- [Alex] Maxxxim is the national coordinator of Rusa, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group for Russian speakers in the United States.

They hosted a Eurovision watch party in New York with the theme "Support Ukraine."

- Any Ukrainians in the house?

They have amazing culture, they have amazing music, they have amazing history of persevering through music.

- [Alex] For Maxxxim, Eurovision is something that brings people together.

- [Maxxxim] We have a room full of Russians and Ukrainians sitting in a room, and I think this is one of the last few things that can actually bring people together.

- [Alex] Meanwhile, back in Kyiv, the Eurovision fan club cheered on Ukraine's entry, "Heart of Steel," an homage to the last defenders of the Azov steel plant in Mariupol, a Ukrainian port city destroyed by Russia last year.

- Defenders were defending that last piece of Mariupol and now they spread this message to the world.

- We hear the song "Heart of Steel" like lyrics.

Just lyrics of this song makes you try to do your best to stay stronger.

You know?

"Heart of Steel."

- [Alex] For fans like these, Ukraine's success in Eurovision is itself a way of preserving Ukrainian culture and reminding the world what's at stake in the war.

During the grand finale itself, Russia bombed the hometown of the Ukrainian band as they were performing.

- People are suffering here and Europe must not forget that in the 21st century, there is a war in the center of Europe, which is just crazy.

- [Alex] Although "Heart of Steel" ultimately lost out to Sweden's entry, "Tattoo," these Ukrainian fans are still optimistic about what comes next.

- [Fan] I hope next year, there will be the greatest winning party ever, Ukrainian winning party.

- [Alex] For GZERO World, I'm Alex Kliment.

[upbeat electronic music] - That's our show this week.

Come back next week and if you like what you see, you just want more Eurovision, of course you do, check us out at gzeromedia.com.

[upbeat music] [upbeat music continues] [upbeat music continues] - [Narrator] Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Prologis, and by... [closing music]