DC Velocity - May 2010

thoughtleaders

Massachusetts Republican Scott
Brown to fill the late Edward M.
Kennedy’s Senate seat. Do you see
new language emerging from
Congress with the same carrot-and-
stick approach as cap and trade?
ANo. I think you may have legisla- tion that has carrots in it, but not
the sticks. The real inequity with cap
and trade was that about one-third of
revenues were going to come from
transportation, but not a dime of that
money would go to the Highway Trust
Fund. Cap and trade is nothing more
than a huge floating excise tax
increase. That said, I think Congress

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will continue to work on incentives to drive us toward greater energy independence.

QWhat advice are you giving your clients on how to manage through the current legislative and regulatory environment?

AThis is an administration with very few senior officials who have any experience in the private sector. And that’s across the board, not just at DOT. The business community has realized that pretty quickly. It is spending a lot of time and effort educating officials on the real-world impact of the policies they want to put in place. Look at the proposal to reopen the hours-of-service debate. DOT has said it will reopen the rulemaking, but it hasn’t put a proposal out there. The department has been listening to stakeholders to determine what the practical implications [of reopening the case] might be.

QDo you have a feel from your clients that they are concerned about what is coming out of DOT?

AAny time you have an activist admin- istration—and this one certainly is—and you are in the regulated community, you have to be concerned about this. But it was the same way in the Reagan administration. We were very active, and we had a lot of ideas. And the people we regulated were very outspoken about the real-world impact of those ideas.

I will say that the DOT today has an extraordinarily dedicated and talented group of career leaders. The department has a remarkable track record of holding on to really talented career civil servants at the senior level, because they love what they do. I think of people like (Rosalind) “Lindy” Knapp, who was deputy general counsel when I joined DOT in 1983 and is still in that role. These are the people who are the backbone of the department. They are the most talented cadre of senior civil servants that I know of in the entire federal government.

On the political level, the department’s leadership is also very impressive. Ray LaHood knows what he’s doing. He’s been involved in public policy issues his entire adult life. The bottom line is that DOT is well led at the political and career levels. ;