House Approves MTG’s Bill to Reduce Pete Buttigieg’s Salary to $1

Secretary of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg listens during a press briefing at th
AP Photo/Evan Vucci
Olivia Rondeau

The House has approved a bill to reduce Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s salary to just $1 after his repeated failures.

The measure, introduced by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), was passed by a voice vote Tuesday as an amendment to the 2024 Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act.

Greene took to X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, describing the measure as one to “fire” the former Democrat presidential candidate, in part for his purported misuse of taxpayer dollars.

“I’m proud to announce my amendment to FIRE Pete Buttigieg just PASSED the House. Pothole Pete staged fake bike rides to the White House and used private planes funded by taxpayers to receive awards for the way certain people have sex,” Greene wrote. “American taxpayers should not be on the hook for paying for his lavish trips or his salary.”

The bill, passed by the Republican-controlled House, does not technically fire Buttigieg, but would cut his salary to next-to-nothing, Fox News reports.

“Pete Buttigieg doesn’t serve the American people. It took him weeks to visit East Palestine after a toxic train derailment happened on his watch,” Greene added in a follow-up post.

“My amendment to cut his salary to $1 is paying him too much.”

Buttigieg has come under fire for several blunders ever since he took control of the Department of Transportation in 2021, including the “fake bike ride“ mentioned by Greene.

In a failed attempt to show his supposed eco-savviness, the secretary was caught on video unloading a bike from an SUV, then riding it to a meeting at the White House while the gas-guzzling vehicle tailed him.

Another of Buttigieg’s main failures has been the widespread cancellations and delays of commercial flights on multiple occasions, which looks particularly bad when he’s been seen using government-managed private jets on at least 18 occasions since taking office, according to Fox News.

Greene’s comment about the secretary taking a private jet to “receive awards for the way certain people have sex” was in reference to a September 2022 instance in which Buttigieg used a taxpayer-funded plane to attend a Canadian gay rights ceremony, where he received an award for his “contributions to the advancement of LGBTQ rights.”

The DOT secretary also faced backlash for his slow response to the February 3 train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, that led to vinyl chloride, a dangerous, colorless gas, harming the local environment.

Instead of rushing to the scene of the emergency or holding those who caused the derailment and subsequent chemical spill accountable, Buttigieg falsely placed the blame on former President Donald Trump in his first statement about the disaster, ten days after it took place.

Buttgieg finally went to East Palestine weeks after the derailment’s vinyl chloride spill had contaminated local waterways, following in the footsteps of Trump, who got there a day before him.

During a May 23 interview with NBC News on Hallie Jackson Now, Buttigieg defended his lackluster response, but said he would have gone to East Palestine sooner if he had known about the “amount of misinformation.”

“I was upholding the norm, which is that you stay out of the way of first responders and NTSB,” he said. “But I do think, had I known the amount of misinformation that would be directed at the people of East Palestine, we would have taken more steps to make sure that they got more accurate information sooner in the process.”

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