This week we’re joined by Dani Simons, currently of Alstom but formerly Assistant to the Secretary and Director of Public Affairs at U.S. DOT, to take a look back at how Biden Administration policies evolved from ideas to bills such as the IIJA and Inflation reduction act. We also discuss Buy America, the impacts of outside criticisms from different sides of the political spectrum, and the importance of storytelling.
Scroll down below the audio player for an edited excerpt of our conversation, or click here for an unedited, AI-generated transcript of the entire conversation.
Jeff Wood: I’m also wondering how you hear the commentary on the outside. And so I’m wondering what it feels like to be inside and getting bombarded with all of this, uh, "you’re missing this," or "you left out this," or "you should have added this," or "that’s too much of that" or whatever it may be in terms of the gallery that’s throwing tomatoes at you.
Dani Simons: Yeah. I mean, I think, the politically correct answer to that is, you know, you try to listen to as much as you can. You try to take it in, you try to not take it personally and you try to figure out where there’s themes and things that are getting repeated, and try to think about how you, you know, maybe address that and how you do that in a constructive way.
I will say just very honestly, and maybe not as politically correctly, I think that it is possible that progressives and people in progressive transportation didn’t always appreciate some of the wins as much as they could have and celebrate them. I think there’s a tendency to go to what’s wrong.
And I think that’s built on years and years of people not doing very much or doing the wrong thing, that there’s a lot of distrust and suspicion. And I think there’s a lot of feeling of, well, that’s what we’re here for in the progressive space around the left, we have to keep pushing because if we’re not pushing it, we’ll never get there.
I just remember, and again, social media is not real life, let’s all remind ourselves that, but I think on the day that we announced the first round of Reconnecting Community Awards, there was also some video that the Secretary [Pete Buttigieg] had put out about one of our international transportation policy initiatives, which is, like, a very small part of the department and a fairly small budget, but had to be sometimes lifted up because there are people that work on that and it is important for them, and instead of people coming out and sort of celebrating Reconnecting Communities, everyone was like, "Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like your international policy, why are you doing anything international? You know, we’re so far behind the world." And it’s like, you guys, we just launched the biggest, most progressive new piece of funding and program that the federal government had seen in at least eight years, probably much longer than that.
People didn’t take a moment to be like, let’s take 10 seconds to celebrate that. And so sometimes that would feel difficult because you are really in there fighting day in and day out around that. I also think that people, and I mean, this is partly a failure of the federal government to tell its own story. It’s partly because there are times when the federal government truly isn’t doing a lot. And it’s partly because people are busy and have a lot of other things to do in their lives. So they don’t think about this... People don’t have the clearest understanding of what the federal government can and cannot do, and of what is and isn’t possible. I always go back to something that we talked about when I was at New York City DOT under Janette Sadik-Khan and just this idea of, like, all we can do here is steer this tanker ship a few degrees. But if we can do that at this scale, it’s going to make a meaningful difference. That’s something that I would think about a lot in federal government. And I think with something that also sort of helped me, you know — some of those comments would come in and people would be saying like, "What about this? And what about that?" and, "There’s too much this and not enough that."
Jeff Wood: I’m sure I’ve said that a few times.
Dani Simons: A lot of that is very true, you know?
Jeff Wood: Yeah. But also it’s, like, the expectations versus reality of what comes out at the end versus what was promised at the beginning, right? You have these lofty goals and these big lists of things that you want to do, but then at the end, after all the horse trading and whatnot happens, you had $20 billion for Reconnecting Communities and you only end up with a billion dollars, so people are like, well, you only got $1 billion, so it’s very upsetting, even though it’s a program that is an amazing idea and something that can be built on in the future, if you get the right people in office, it’s just like one of those things that I feel like there’s the before and then the after, and the after sometimes is a little bit of a hangover.
Dani Simons: Yeah, and I think one of the things about Reconnecting that’s interesting is, like, once all the work put in to build that program and to kind of build the policies around that, and then the funding went from this vision of the $20 billion to the $1 billion a year. And I think what happened was that people started to think about, are there other pots of funding that can actually accomplish some of these same goals that we’re trying to do with Reconnecting? Can we encourage people that are coming out of the woodwork because now they’ve heard about this program called Reconnecting and they’re kind of surfacing all of this pent up desire across the country to do projects like this? Can we direct them to other streams of funding that their project might be qualified for and try to do that matchmaking and try to build the kind of technical capacity on the ground to be able to take federal money and put it to things like this?
And so it opened up opportunities in ways that I think weren’t clear to people at the beginning, and there’s a lot of Reconnecting projects that are happening now under the auspices of different pots of funding. So even if all the funding wasn’t in that one program, that one program helps become a front door to take in a lot of those projects and then you can figure out different ways to help those groups find the funding because it exists. And, honestly, some of that funding is with FHWA and is highway funding because you can use highway funding to build highways and you can also use highway funding to take down highways.
