U.S. President-elect Joe Biden introduced Democratic primary rival Pete Buttigieg on Wednesday as his nominee for transportation secretary, calling the 38-year-old ex-mayor “a new voice, with new ideas determined to move past old politics.”

If confirmed, Buttigieg, a former city leader of South Bend, Indiana, would be the first openly gay person confirmed by the Senate to a Cabinet post.

Buttigieg also represents a second “first” as a millennial. Buttigieg is the youngest of Biden’s nominees thus far and the first person of his generation to be nominated for a Cabinet-level position. The average age of Biden nominees to date is 59.

“We need someone who knows how to work with state, local, and federal agencies,” Biden said of Buttigieg, who has served as a Navy reserve intelligence office.

“I’m honored that the President-elect has asked me to serve our nation as Secretary of Transportation. Innovation in transportation helped build my hometown, and it propels our country,” Buttigieg wrote on Twitter after the announcement.

“Now is the time to build back better through modern and sustainable infrastructure that creates millions of good-paying union jobs, revitalizes communities, and empowers all Americans to thrive.”

As transportation secretary, Buttigieg would be responsible for overseeing the development and implementation of U.S. transportation legislation and policy, with regard to national security and safety of transportation systems.

He’ll be tasked with putting in place Biden’s proposals to spend billions making major infrastructure improvements and on retrofitting initiatives that can help the United States fight climate change.

More immediately, Biden also wants to mandate mask-wearing on airplanes and public transportation systems to slow the spread of COVID-19.

Biden’s selection of Buttigieg for transportation secretary drew praise from LGBTQ rights groups. The LGBTQ Victory Institute, which aims to get more LGBTQ people into politics, called it “a new milestone in a decades-long effort” to have LGBTQ representation in the U.S. Government.

Buttigieg previously made history as the first openly gay presidential candidate early this year when he narrowly won the Iowa caucuses and placed second in the New Hampshire primary. He dropped out of the race March 1 and endorsed Biden the following day.

In the primary, Biden took a shining to Buttigieg, who he said reminded him of his late son Beau Biden, a former Delaware attorney general who had urged his father to make a third run for the White House. Beau died in 2015.

Despite the historic first Buttigieg is set to achieve, he won’t be the first openly gay person to serve as a Cabinet official. That distinction belongs to Richard Grenell, who was acting director of national intelligence (DNI) during the Trump administration before he resigned and became the face of LGBTQ outreach for the Trump campaign.

Grenell, however, never won Senate confirmation for the acting DNI job, even though the chamber approved him for his concurrent role as U.S. ambassador to Germany. Buttigieg, therefore, will have the distinction of being the first openly gay person confirmed by the Senate for a Cabinet-level position, provided he wins Senate confirmation.

Buttigieg, seen as a rising star in the Democratic party, released a US$1 trillion infrastructure plan during his campaign for president in January that included improvements to the country’s transportation infrastructure. Its detailed plans to give more power to local communities called for upgrades to roads and public transportation and also highlighted road safety with a national Vision Zero goal.

But Biden has his own ambitious infrastructure plan, which is a major priority in his “Build Back Better” campaign, focused on climate change and job creation in the wake of the pandemic.

In his remarks Wednesday, Buttigieg joked about his love for transportation while offering up some credentials for the position, saying he proposed to his husband at an airport terminal (“Don’t let anybody tell you that O’Hare isn’t romantic”).

“More than once as a college student I would convince a friend to travel nearly 1,000 miles [1,609 kilometers] back to Indiana with me on Amtrak. Though I know that in this administration, I will, at best, aspire to be the second-biggest train enthusiast around,” Buttigieg said, referring to Biden’s well-known affinity for Amtrak.

But Buttigieg also took a serious tone, recognizing that infrastructure has the power to bridge racial and economic disparities in America.

In November 2019 during the Abby Finkenauer Fish Fry in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Buttigieg said he was genuinely surprised U.S. President Donald Trump didn’t fulfill his campaign promise to take on infrastructure reform.

Buttigieg said as South Bend mayor he’d get a call when there’s a hole in the road, but would only get enough funding to redo every road “every 25 years or so.”

“So, we need federal leadership to build first-rate infrastructure in the United States of America,” Buttigieg said, “including US$100 billion to help build out local transit and transportation systems, because that helps our economies locally, including leadership on roads, bridges, and rail, which is a big part of our future, including those unsexy pieces of infrastructure like wastewater and I could spend a whole hour on wastewater but I promise not to.”

Buttigieg also said digital infrastructure was a big part of the plan and called for US$80 billion “to make sure that every household in America, either by wireless or by fiber, can get high-quality Internet access.”

A veteran of the U.S. Navy who is more commonly known as “Mayor Pete,” Buttigieg has been the mayor of South Bend since 2012, and is serving his final year in that position.

He was an intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve from 2009 to 2017. Before making a transition to public service, Buttigieg was a civilian contractor for the global consulting firm McKinsey & Company. He worked there between 2007 and 2010, after completing his studies at Oxford.

Buttigieg was 29 when he was first elected as mayor of South Bend in 2011. At the time, that made him the youngest mayor of a U.S. city with a population of at least 100,000 people.

In 2009 and 2013, Buttigieg was commissioned as a Navy intelligence officer while serving as mayor. He took a leave of absence to serve in Afghanistan in 2014 for a seven-month deployment.

Buttigieg came out publicly in a 2015 essay in the South Bend Tribune, less than two weeks before the national legalization of gay marriage. Buttigieg has said that he thought coming out would be a “career death sentence,” but after he publicly did, in the middle of his re-election campaign, he won 80 percent of the vote, more than he received when he was first elected.

Buttigieg and husband Chasten Glezman, a teacher who he met on the dating app Hinge, married in 2018 in South Bend. Right after getting married, the newlyweds attended a Gay Pride Week block party downtown before continuing on to their wedding reception.

Buttigieg was valedictorian of his high school class. As a senior at St. Joseph High School, he was also voted “Most Likely to Succeed” and “Most Likely to be President.”

Buttigieg plays piano and guitar, and has performed with the South Bend Symphony Orchestra, according to his official campaign profile. He’s also a polyglot, meaning he speaks multiple languages.

(SD-Agencies)