The goal of the original Progressive movement, which started in the 1890s and peaked in the 1910s, was to put experts in charge of government bureaucracies. That meant doctors should head health-care agencies, foresters should head forestry agencies, and engineers should head transportation agencies. The system actually worked fairly well, especially for agencies such as state forestry and highway departments that were funded mainly if not entirely out of user fees. The feedback from the user fees combined with the expertise to know what to do with that feedback led the production of tremendous resource values.
Today’s Progressives aren’t interested in experts. In fact, they often would rather have anyone but an expert head a government agency because they view the experts as people who have bought in to some world view that the Progressives don’t like.
Case in point: the director of the Colorado Department of Transportation (CDOT) is not an engineer, nor even a transportation planner, but a historian. Shoshana Lew, who has been in charge of CDOT since February, 2019, has a bachelor’s degree in history from Harvard and a master’s degree in history from Northwestern. Prior to working for CDOT, she spent two years as chief operating officer for the Rhode Island Department of Transportation.
Her real credential is not her education or job experience but the fact that her father was Secretary of the Treasury during the Obama administration. According to rumor, she received her job with CDOT after a personal appeal by Michelle Obama to Colorado governor Jared Polis who is, needless to say, a Democrat. He is also a resident of Boulder, known locally as “25 square miles surrounded by reality.”
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Both the governor and his transportation director believe that bike paths, transit, and high-speed rail are more important than roads. According to Polis, CDOT’s goal should be to “focus on reducing traffic,” not on accommodating traffic with new capacity. He and Lew have held a series of public meetings on transportation, which Lew calls “a bottom-up approach.” No, holding meetings with people who already agree with you so you can justify imposing congestion on people is very much a top-down approach. A bottom-up approach would be to see how people are actually traveling and then provide the means for them to do so.
They also want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by requiring the sale of more electric cars, which doesn’t make much sense in a state that gets most of its electricity from burning fossil fuels. But, hey, if you want something to make sense, you hire an engineer, not a historian.
Putting engineers in charge of engineering matters, foresters in charge of forestry, agriculturalist in charge of agriculture. GENIUS
Then it all went to shit when they put architects in charge of planning.
Shoshana Lew has no expertise in transportation whatsoever, and Jack Lew, her father, has no experience in economics whatsoever. They both, however, have something that is far more important in terms of getting corrupt sinecures. They are both Jewish.
This is very typical for that type of position. Even in academic the professional nepotism is prolific. Part of the problem with “peer review” in subjects like planning is that when everyone is subjected to the same irrationality there is little or no objectivity.
I remember when Elizabeth Dole was appointed Secretary of Transportation by Ronald Reagan. A Washington Post article, listing the qualifications of Reagan’s cabinet appointees, listed Dole’s as simply “Political Savvy”.
Carter’s Neil Golshmidt was…well, the Antiplanner can (and has) tell us all about him.
From all appearances, Clinton’s Rodney Slater was appointed solely to change the racial makeup of the DOT. Since qualifications didn’t matter anymore, professionalism and competence in DOT began a downward spiral, the deleterious impact of which can still be seen today.
Ray LaHood, Obama’s Secretary of Immobility (Thanks to the Antiplanner for that one!), was, by all appearances, appointed because of his blind, irrational obsession for high speed rail.
Elaine Chao is an amalgam of Dole and LaHood. She’s half of a power couple and she loves to give away taxpayer funds for boondoggles. “Everywhere I go I bring money, and I’m not going to disappoint today,” (https://apnews.com/article/f773dcc884ef4910a5a25754d896706f)
They all make me gag.
The last SECDOT with an engineering background was Reagan’s Andrew Card, the only DOT Secretary who left DOT a better place than he found it. He then went on to have a distinguished career in public service.