Vasquez, Haaland board the Buttigieg baggage train

Democrat U.S. Rep. Gabe Vasquez and gubernatorial nominee Deb Haaland welcomed Joe Biden’s former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg to Las Cruces on Sunday, tying their campaigns to one of the Biden administration’s highest-profile former Cabinet officials — whose four years overseeing the nation’s transportation system were marked by a series of major failures, safety controversies and federal watchdog warnings.

Hundreds of people attended the rally at Centennial High School, according to the Santa Fe New Mexican, where Buttigieg campaigned for both Democrats and praised his former Biden administration colleague Haaland and Vasquez.

Buttigieg told the crowd Vasquez had him “on speed dial” while he led the Department of Transportation, touting federal money directed toward projects in southern New Mexico.

Cunningham, Vasquez’s Republican challenger, responded by highlighting the political company Vasquez was keeping.

“Gabe Vasquez has spent four years telling southern New Mexico he is a moderate,” Cunningham said in a statement reported by the New Mexican. “Today he is on a stage with a woman who ran the Interior Department while Washington froze new oil and gas leasing and a man who wanted to decriminalize illegal border crossing. That is not an accident.”

Vasquez, meanwhile, used social media after the rally to argue his campaign is about “unity, respect, and putting New Mexico values FIRST.”

But Buttigieg’s appearance also revives scrutiny of the record he compiled as transportation secretary from 2021 through January 2025.

Nationwide FAA shutdown on Buttigieg’s watch

One of the most extraordinary breakdowns occurred in January 2023, when a failure of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Notice to Air Missions system forced officials to halt departures across the United States.

It was the first nationwide ground stop of that scale since Sept. 11, 2001.

Buttigieg later testified that contract personnel had unintentionally deleted files while attempting to synchronize the live NOTAM database with its backup. The FAA grounded departures for nearly two hours while the problem was addressed.

The outage ultimately exposed much deeper problems.

A subsequent Government Accountability Office review found that the FAA considered 51 of its 138 air-traffic-control systems “unsustainable,” including systems suffering from obsolete functionality and difficulty obtaining replacement parts. GAO found that 17 were particularly concerning and that some modernization projects remained six to 10 years away.

Air-traffic-controller shortages persisted

The FAA also struggled with chronic controller shortages during Buttigieg’s tenure.

By May 2024, major airlines were publicly pressing the government to address staffing deficiencies, with some critical facilities relying on mandatory overtime and the FAA easing flight requirements around New York because it did not have enough controllers.

The FAA did increase hiring — including 1,811 controllers in fiscal 2024, slightly above its target — but the shortage remained a significant operational problem. Later GAO analysis found that the controller workforce had declined by roughly 6% over a decade while flights using the system increased about 10%. The shortage had roots extending before Buttigieg’s tenure, including pandemic-era training disruptions, but it remained unresolved when he left office.

Watchdog: FAA’s Boeing oversight was ‘not effective’

A separate and particularly serious criticism came from the Transportation Department’s own inspector general.

In October 2024, DOT’s Office of Inspector General concluded that the FAA’s processes for overseeing Boeing 737 and 787 production were “not effective.”

The watchdog said Boeing had experienced repeated production problems and that FAA’s processes for identifying and resolving manufacturing deficiencies needed improvement.

The scrutiny intensified after an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9 lost a door plug in flight in January 2024.

The FAA subsequently grounded 171 MAX 9 aircraft, halted Boeing’s planned production expansion and increased inspectors at Boeing facilities.

The National Transportation Safety Board later concluded that Boeing’s inadequate training and oversight caused the incident — but it also found the FAA was ineffective in ensuring Boeing corrected known, repetitive manufacturing problems.

East Palestine response became political disaster

Buttigieg also faced fierce criticism following the Feb. 3, 2023 Norfolk Southern derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, where cars carrying hazardous chemicals left the tracks and residents raised concerns about contamination and health effects.

Buttigieg waited roughly three weeks before personally visiting the community.

He later acknowledged that he should have acted publicly sooner.

“I could have spoken sooner about how strongly I felt about this incident, and that’s a lesson learned for me,” Buttigieg told CBS at the time. He later similarly acknowledged that he should have visited sooner.

Transportation secretaries do not ordinarily travel immediately to every derailment, and federal transportation personnel were on the ground earlier. Still, Buttigieg’s delayed public response became one of the defining controversies of his Cabinet tenure.

Billions for EV chargers, sluggish deployment

Another signature Biden-era transportation initiative also suffered a slow rollout.

The 2021 infrastructure law authorized $7.5 billion for two major federal EV-charging programs, including the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program overseen by the Federal Highway Administration.

Yet the first NEVI-funded stations did not open until late 2023.

By April 2025 — several months after Buttigieg left office — GAO found that the NEVI and Charging and Fueling Infrastructure programs combined had produced just 384 publicly open chargers. GAO also concluded that DOT and the Joint Office responsible for the effort had failed to fully define performance goals for major portions of the initiative.

The $7.5 billion was never intended to be spent immediately and was authorized across several fiscal years, but even Congress expressed concern about the pace of deployment, according to GAO.

Hundreds of watchdog recommendations remained open

The problems were broader than individual headline-making episodes.

By April 2024, GAO reported that DOT had 212 open recommendations, including 20 designated as priority recommendations because addressing them could improve safety, government operations, transparency or the stewardship of federal money.

DOT’s own inspector general also identified aviation safety, air-traffic modernization, surface transportation safety, infrastructure management, grant stewardship, cybersecurity and fraud prevention among the department’s major management challenges during Buttigieg’s final full year in office.

Haaland and Vasquez are presenting Buttigieg as a successful former Cabinet colleague who helped steer federal money toward New Mexico. Their opponents have a markedly different record to point to: a nationwide FAA shutdown, persistent controller shortages, ineffective Boeing oversight, a painfully delayed East Palestine appearance, a sluggish multibillion-dollar EV-charger rollout and hundreds of outstanding federal watchdog recommendations.

As Buttigieg attempts to build his own national profile ahead of 2028, Vasquez and Haaland are making clear that they are comfortable putting his Biden-era record alongside their own on the 2026 campaign trail.