by David Sirota, Rebecca Burns, Matthew Cunningham-Cook, Julia Rock and Andrew Perez at The Lever
Facing pressure from lawmakers in his own party after a spate of train derailments, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has now resorted to falsely suggesting that he does not have power to compel the rail industry to upgrade its safety equipment and procedures.
In a Twitter thread posted more than a week after Norfolk Southern’s fiery train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, Buttigieg indicated that he cannot reinstate an Obama-enacted, Trump-repealed law requiring some trains carrying hazardous materials to replace their Civil War-era braking systems with new Electronically Controlled Pneumatic (ECP) brake technology.
“We’re constrained by law on some areas of rail regulation (like the braking rule withdrawn by the Trump administration in 2018 because of a law passed by Congress in 2015),” Buttigieg wrote.
Buttigieg’s tweet refers to a law passed by Congress in 2015 — at the urging of the railroad industry — requiring the executive branch to conduct cost-benefit analysis of the ECP brake rule before enacting it.
Trump used that law to kill the braking rule, but the cost-benefit analysis his administration used to do so was subsequently discredited.
In response to questions from The Lever,…
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