Biden to nominate Pete Buttigieg as transportation secretary

Geoff Bennett and Amanda Golden and Haley Talbot and Allan Smith

President-elect Joe Biden will nominate former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, his one-time Democratic primary rival, to lead the Department of Transportation, three sources told NBC News.

There has long been speculation that Buttigieg, 38, would join the Biden administration. The former mayor ended his presidential bid just before the pivotal Super Tuesday elections in early March and immediately endorsed the former vice president.

Buttigieg performed strongly in the first two primary contests, which took place in Iowa and New Hampshire.

The ex-mayor would lead an agency that will be key in carrying out the president-elect's efforts aimed at revitalizing U.S. infrastructure — an area where the Biden administration may find common ground with Republicans.

Buttigieg focused his campaign on passing the torch to leaders of a younger generation. He is so far the only presidential rival that Biden has tapped for a Cabinet position after having named Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., as his running mate.

Buttigieg was the first openly gay major party candidate to win delegates in a presidential primary, and he would be the first openly gay Cabinet secretary to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. President Donald Trump's former acting director of national intelligence, Ric Grenell, was the first openly gay leader of a Cabinet-level agency.

The former vice president has faced pressure from activists and progressive lawmakers to diversify his administration. Buttigieg would be Biden's first openly gay Cabinet pick, though he has also chosen several openly LGBT men and women to join his White House team.

Latest Stories

  • Trump retweets call to jail Georgia governor and secretary of state

    The president retweeted a message posted by attorney Lin Wood suggesting that he will soon prosecute Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger — both Republicans — for refusing to cave to his baseless claims of widespread voter fraud.

  • Pregnant woman has hands amputated and is thrown from back of truck by Mexican drug cartel for ‘being a thief’

    The grisly incident happened in the Central Mexican state of Guanajuato.

  • Turkey condemns 'unjust' U.S. sanctions, threatens response

    Turkey on Monday condemned U.S. sanctions over its purchase of Russian S-400 missile defences as a "grave mistake" and threatened to retaliate over a move it said would harm ties between the NATO allies. Washington imposed the long-anticipated sanctions on Turkey's top defence procurement and development body, its chairman and three other employees. Turkey's Foreign Ministry called the decision "inexplicable" given that Washington repeatedly rejected Ankara's offer to form a joint working group to allay U.S. concerns that the S-400s threatened NATO defences.

  • Georgia secretary of state slams Perdue and Loeffler for demanding voter data they already have

    Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger would like Republican Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler to re-evaluate their priorities.On Monday, the two senators facing re-election runoffs in January tried once again to discourage confidence in the upcoming election, demanding an updated list of registered voters before early voting began. But as Raffensperger, a Republican, pointed out in a Tuesday press release, Loeffler and Perdue already had the information they were looking for."Though I've told the Republican Party to stop focusing on me and instead direct their energies to winning the Senate runoffs, clearly they haven't listened," Raffensperger said in the release. He went on to call it "embarrassing" that Perdue and Loeffler not only don't know the information they want is publicly available, but also that it's in the hands of their campaigns as well. A National Republican Senatorial Committee representative confirmed the campaigns have the lists.> Early voting has already started but it’s not too late for them to call their offices and get their campaigns in order.> > — GA Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (@GaSecofState) December 15, 2020Raffensperger has refused to play into President Trump and other Republicans' false claims of widespread voter fraud and election manipulation amid the 2020 election, instead affirming President-elect Joe Biden's win there and receiving threats for doing so.More stories from theweek.com Joe Biden still doesn't get it Trump's election loss coping mechanism is straight out of The Simpsons FDA authorizes 1st over-the-counter, at-home COVID-19 test for emergency use

  • Trump signs executive order making Christmas Eve a federal holiday in 2020

    All federal employees will be excused from duty on 24 December

  • Half a million Muslims forced to pick cotton as scale of Chinese slave labour exposed

    China is forcing hundreds of thousands of Uighurs and other minorities to pick cotton by hand in the western region of Xinjiang, a key source of the world’s cotton, according to a report by a Washington-based think tank. Rights activists have estimated that Chinese authorities have detained more than one million Uighurs and other, mostly Muslim, minorities in detention camps in Xinjiang since 2017. Beijing denies that Uighurs’ rights are abused and says re-education centres provide vocational training to help people gain employment, and are necessary to curb extremism. Now, information from Chinese government documents and state media reports provides evidence that at least half a million people have been forced to pick cotton through a coercive state-mandated labour transfer and poverty alleviation scheme, the Center for Global Policy says. In 2018, three majority-Uighur areas within Xinjiang alone mobilised at least 570,000 people to pick cotton through the scheme, according to the think tank report published Monday. It estimates that the total number of people from ethnic minorities sent to pick cotton “likely exceeds that figure by several hundred thousand”.

  • Biden says he had a 'good conversation' with Mitch McConnell

    President-elect Joe Biden has now spoken with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) after the Republican leader acknowledged his election win for the first time.Biden announced on Tuesday that he had a "good conversation" with McConnell and thanked him for offering his congratulations following the outcome of the November election. McConnell acknowledged Biden as the president-elect earlier on Tuesday after the Electoral College affirmed his win more than a month following Election Day. "I told him although we disagree on a lot of things, there's things we can work together on," Biden said. "We've always been straight with one another. And we agreed we'd get together sooner than later, and I'm looking forward to working with him."This was the first conversation between Biden and McConnell to take place since the election, ABC News' Johnny Verhovek notes.Speaking on the Senate floor on Tuesday morning, McConnell said that following Tuesday's vote, "the Electoral College has spoken," and he congratulated both Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. Trump, however, has still not conceded the 2020 election.In addition to McConnell, Biden also spoke Tuesday with Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), who congratulated Biden soon after he was projected as the winner in November and has criticized Trump for not accepting his loss. > President-elect @JoeBiden: "I had a good conversation with Mitch McConnell today...we've always been straight with one another...we agreed we'd get together sooner than later." pic.twitter.com/LVlSgGQdLk> > -- CSPAN (@cspan) December 15, 2020More stories from theweek.com Joe Biden still doesn't get it Trump's election loss coping mechanism is straight out of The Simpsons FDA authorizes 1st over-the-counter, at-home COVID-19 test for emergency use

  • The US Presence in Poland Is a Pain in Russia's Neck

    The American presence on Polish soil plays a key role in safeguarding the West against the Kremlin's hostilities

  • Georgia man who lied to employer about having Covid pleads guilty

    The claim prompted the company to shut down the facility for cleaning, causing a loss of around $100,000, prosecutors said.

  • New coronavirus strain spreading in UK has key mutations, scientists say

    British scientists are trying to establish whether the rapid spread in southern England of a new variant of the virus that causes COVID-19 is linked to key mutations they have detected in the strain, they said on Tuesday. The mutations include changes to the important "spike" protein that the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus uses to infect human cells, a group of scientists tracking the genetics of the virus said, but it is not yet clear whether these are making it more infectious. "Efforts are under way to confirm whether or not any of these mutations are contributing to increased transmission," the scientists, from the COVID-19 Genomics UK (COG-UK) Consortium, said in a statement (https://bit.ly/3mhpTJX).

  • Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell calls Joe Biden 'president-elect', breaking with Trump

    The most senior Republican in the US Senate, Mitch McConnell, has congratulated Joe Biden on his election victory and called him the “president-elect” for the first time, breaking with Donald Trump. Mr McConnell, the Senate leader, made the acknowledgement on Tuesday morning, the day after the electoral college formalised Mr Biden’s win by voting him in as the next president. The move undercuts Mr Trump’s continued attempts to claim without evidence he was the real winner of the election and suggests appetite is waning on Capitol Hill for publicly backing the president's position. “As of this morning, our country has officially a president-elect and a vice president-elect,” Mr McConnell said on the Senate floor. He added later: “The electoral college has spoken. So today, I want to congratulate president-elect Joe Biden.” The remarks came as more Republican senators began to publicly acknowledge Mr Biden’s victory and say they would work with him in the preceding 24 hours.

  • Iran's president says country would rejoin nuclear deal within an hour of U.S. signing on

    Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Monday said if the United States returns to the Iran nuclear deal, his country will follow within an hour.The deal was made during the Obama administration in 2015, lifting sanctions on Tehran in exchange for Iran reducing its uranium stockpile and dismantling its centrifuges. Rouhani said he will not discuss any changes to the accord or restrictions on Iran's ballistic missile program, The Guardian reports. President Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018, and Rouhani made his comments on the same day the Trump administration sanctioned two Iranian intelligence officials for allegedly playing a role in the 2007 disappearance and presumed death of retired FBI agent Robert Levinson. President-elect Joe Biden has said he will rejoin the deal, believing it is one way to avert a nuclear crisis in the Middle East.More stories from theweek.com Joe Biden still doesn't get it Trump's election loss coping mechanism is straight out of The Simpsons FDA authorizes 1st over-the-counter, at-home COVID-19 test for emergency use

  • Newsom could face recall, as resistance to California governor is growing

    An effort to recall California Gov. Gavin Newsom is gaining momentum, partly fueled by outrage over the Democrat dining with friends at an opulent restaurant while telling residents to stay home.

  • Japan 'Twitter killer' Takahiro Shiraishi sentenced to death

    Takahiro Shiraishi was convicted of killing nine people he contacted on the social media platform.

  • Ghislaine Maxwell’s husband calls her ‘wonderful and loving ’ as they seek $28.5m bail package

    ‘I have never witnessed anything close to inappropriate with Ghislaine,’ spouse writes in letter

  • Biden taps former rival Pete Buttigieg for U.S. Transportation secretary -sources

    President-elect Joe Biden has tapped Pete Buttigieg to lead the U.S. Transportation Department, according to four people familiar with the matter, making him the first of Biden's Democratic rivals for the presidency to land a role in his Cabinet. The appointment of Buttigieg, 38, is another step in a meteoric political rise for the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who showed surprising strength as a presidential candidate. If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, he would run a sprawling federal agency that oversees the nation's airlines, highways and transit systems.

  • Trump's election loss coping mechanism is straight out of The Simpsons

    President Trump is reportedly getting close to admitting he lost the 2020 election. Just don't call it a loss.Trump thoroughly lost his re-election bid to President-elect Joe Biden, something the end of Trump's legal challenges and the Electoral College affirmed on Monday. And while Trump is getting close to at least tacitly admitting he's out of the White House, he'd rather frame it as a non-win, one source who talked to him recently told Axios. "If we don't win, I don't say 'lose.' I say 'I don't win,'" Trump reportedly put it to the source recently — a line that sounds like it could be right from The Simpsons.> Oh come on, this one is literally lifted straight from The Simpsons. pic.twitter.com/r6v9I3i3ia> > — Jeff Asher (@Crimealytics) December 15, 2020Despite his reframing, Trump is reportedly even so down about his loss that he's "reluctant to talk much about a 2024 run," Axios reports. Trump has repeatedly hinted at staging a comeback bid in the next election, though it's reportedly just a cry for attention as Trump stares down future irrelevance. As the source who spoke to Trump recently put it to Axios, "it's an acknowledgement of the end" of Trump's 2020 antics.More stories from theweek.com Joe Biden still doesn't get it FDA authorizes 1st over-the-counter, at-home COVID-19 test for emergency use Donald Trump's defeat is good. Why does it feel so bad?

  • Wisconsin man who stabbed 4 family members ordered committed

    A Wisconsin man who was obsessively concerned about the coronavirus pandemic has been ordered to spend the rest of his life in a mental health institution for stabbing four of his family members, two of them fatally. Adam Roth, 36, of Waukesha, was found not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect in the attack, which authorities said was linked to his concerns about coronavirus. In March, Roth and his wife, Dominique Roth, were in the kitchen eating when Adam began stabbing Dominique, according to a criminal complaint.

  • The Trump administration turned down more vaccine doses 'as recently as November,' former FDA commissioner says

    "There were multiple conversations with the US government about taking more supply in the second quarter," said Scott Gottlieb, a Pfizer board member.

  • Army Suspends Battalion Commander, Sergeant Major in Korea Amid Racism Allegations

    The Army has suspended a battalion commander and command sergeant major in South Korea while an investigation is being conducted into allegations of racism, bigotry and discrimination.