WASHINGTON – The House of Representatives Oversight Committee is probing the Department of Transportation’s response to a series of rail and aviation safety issues.
The committee’s Republicans sent a letter yesterday to Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg regarding train derailments and near-misses involving airlines. The letter asks DOT to provide documents related to “efforts to investigate and remediate these issues to protect the safety of all Americans.”
Committee Chairman Rep. James Comer said a number of unresolved safety recommendations made by the department’s inspector general “have eroded the public’s confidence in air and rail safety and necessitates thorough investigation.”
Rail safety has been in the spotlight since the Feb. 3 toxic derailment of a Norfolk Southern train in East Palestine, Ohio. The industry has come under scrutiny due to subsequent derailments, but the Rail Safety Act proposed in the Senate remains stuck in committee.
No doubt USDOT Secretary “Mayor Pete” (Buttigieg) will take this “rap” seriously once he is done figuring out how to give the country transit “Equity.”
Don’t the Republicans want less government oversight?
Light touch or no touch regulation are bipartisan. This is performance art, just like the gutted and stalled Rail Safety Act of 2023.
GREGG —- Our entire government (both parties) is, to use your term, performance art. We went through two years of heavy-handed, draconian response to COVID that didn’t save a single life. No one will ever know where the hundreds of billion of dollars of COVID relief (voted by both parties) ended up.