The summit is intended to convene various pieces of the aviation industry, including airlines, airports and associated unions, along with safety regulators, to try to identify and address any potential red flags that may be hiding in the data each airline must report.
Jennifer Homendy, the chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating all of the recent near-misses, said each one is complicated by the lack of cockpit voice recordings. Typically, these devices record on a two-hour loop.
“The six from this year all have one thing in common: The cockpit voice recorders were all overwritten,” Homendy said. She also noted that her agency has since 2018 recommended that planes be equipped with a cockpit voice recorder capable of storing at least 25 hours worth of audio — a standard that she said European regulators have had in place for more than a year.
Homendy said the Austin incident and a second incident in Burbank, Calif. were especially alarming instances of planes coming dangerously close to each other. In Burbank, where a Mesa Airlines flight was forced to go around a SkyWest flight as it was taking off, Homendy said the two planes came within 300 feet of each other.
“Too often we’ve seen the federal government and industry act after an incident, after lives are lost, once headlines are made,” Homendy said. “Our entire mission at the NTSB is to prevent that next accident.”
A POLITICO review of Federal Aviation Administration data shows that the first two months of 2023 showed a rise of near-collisions involving commercial planes across the country. During January and February, commercial jets experienced close calls at a higher rate than the previous five years combined.
Homendy said the NTSB is investigating six close calls at runways across the country since the start of the year. Additionally, the NTSB is investigating two wrong-way landings last year and two separate severe turbulence incidents on the same day in Hawaii last December, one incident where 36 people were hurt and another where a flight came within 800 feet of hitting the Pacific Ocean shortly after takeoff.
While all of those incidents remain under NTSB investigation, Homendy said that high turnover in the aviation industry since the pandemic, an increasingly congested airspace and the lack of adopting seven NTSB recommendations related to airport runways are all contributing factors to the troubling pattern of near collisions that contributed to the need for Wednesday’s summit.
“Today is not an academic exercise,” Nolen said. “We have to take these six near misses and treat them as if they have happened and that’s why we’re here today.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
DOT said in December that the 18 flights Fox News highlighted — to destinations that included Las Vegas, Montreal and Oklahoma — cost taxpayers just under $42,000. The audit was originally requested by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) who has since called for Buttigieg’s resignation over his handling of the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.
Any government official can use the fleet, if they can demonstrate to the satisfaction of the agency’s ethics department that the flights will be more cost-effective than flying commercial, or for security or scheduling reasons. FEMA officials and National Transportation Safety Board accident investigators are typically frequent users of the planes, and it is not unusual for top DOT and FAA officials, as well as the heads of other agencies, to use them when warranted.
In 2018, POLITICO reported that former DOT Secretary Elaine Chao took the same FAA-owned planes on seven trips, costing taxpayers an estimated $93,977, including a $68,892 trip to and around Europe for her and five staffers.
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And people living in East Palestine said they were unsure about many things — whether the water was safe to drink, whether to remain in their homes, how to explain their headaches and bloody noses. And what to think about the VIPs making appearances in their hometown.
“They come for an hour or so, and they leave,” said Nora Wright, an assistant director for area nursing facilities, describing the “publicity stunts” by visiting politicians. “They don’t find out how we feel.”
“I don’t trust the government,” said Joe Botinovch, a self-employed flower shop owner who voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 but is shopping for a different candidate now and likes Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. He, too, hasn’t enjoyed the sudden burst of attention from former presidents and presidential candidates.
“The only presidents I want to see are dead presidents in my wallet,” he said. “They’re using East Palestine like China and Russia and the U.S. are using Ukraine. It’s a proxy war.”
Buttigieg, who offered a public mea culpa for not speaking up about the derailment sooner, said he could tell how frustrated people here are.
“You can sense, when you talk to local leaders and local residents, that they’re getting pretty sick of the politics,” President Joe Biden’s Transportation secretary said in response to a question from POLITICO during a half-hour news conference near the accident site.
The politics showed no signs of leaving, though.
The Feb. 3 derailment by the 150-car Norfolk Southern train triggered a flaming wreck, spewed plumes of black smoke and left lingering worries about the safety of the town’s air, water and soil, along with fierce GOP criticism of how Buttigieg’s Department of Transportation has responded to the disaster. The Biden administration, in turn, has pointed to actions by the Trump-era DOT that weakened safety standards for trains carrying hazardous chemicals — although Buttigieg has expressed hope that Republicans will now embrace tougher regulations.
The unusually persistent glare of national attention has brought a trail of big-name and less-than-famous visitors to East Palestine.
Hannity’s producer, for example, was asking residents whether Buttigieg’s visit had made a difference — though none of them had witnessed it.
Giuliani, who was gathering social media content and audio for his Common Sense podcast, gaggled with local reporters, tooled around town with a crew of hangers-on and met with East Palestine Mayor Trent Conaway. (A Giuliani groupie handed a local two $100 Sparkle grocery gift cards.)
Conaway, a registered Republican, also met with Buttigieg. He said he and the DOT leader bonded over their shared experience as Midwestern mayors, and had a “productive meeting.”
Outside a Rite Aid, a TikTok and YouTube user from Columbus who gave his name only as Xkitzo was broadcasting live from the parking lot, with his phone ensconced on a tripod.
The environmental activist Erin Brockovich arrives for a town hall Friday.
None of this has ended the tide of rumors and conspiracy theories surrounding the derailment, Conaway said in an interview.
“There’s continuing misinformation,” the mayor said, calling the municipal water safe to drink. He also dismissed the persistent, unfounded rumor that a controlled burn of the train’s toxic cargo of vinyl chloride — one that produced a large plume and forced residents to evacuate — was unnecessary and reckless. (One local TV report on the incident produced a headline that went viral: “We basically nuked a town with chemicals.”)
“There were only two options,” Conway told POLITICO of the train’s payload. “It was either it blew up or we blew it up.”
Mistrust was not hard to find, though.
Wright, the assistant nursing director and a mother of six grown children, said she doesn’t feel safe in her childhood home, which is within a mile of the derailment site, so she is letting the bank take it.
“If you walk into my house right now, you can smell it,” she said, describing the sulfur-like odor that lingers from the controlled burn. Her chest hurts. She has a sore throat. “I try to not spend too much time here.”
Wright also won’t drink the water here, even though Environmental Protection Agency leader Michael Regan and Republican Gov. Mike DeWine drank from the taps earlier this week to instill public confidence in the quality of EPA testing.
Neither will Courtney Miller, a mother of two, who lives with the train tracks in her backyard. She rose to viral fame after throwing a rock into a stream behind her house, turning up an oily glisten, and appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox.
On Thursday, she posed with Giuliani and recorded content for his podcast as he visited her home, decorated with “God, Guns, and Trump” and “Fuck Biden — Not My President” banners.
Signs posted through East Palestine’s downtown also capture the divided mood.
“Closed until further notice,” said a construction-paper sign on the door of a knickknack boutique called Mama’s Attic. It added that after the derailment, “my family is trying to pick up the pieces.”
“We are East Palestine,” reads another sign in town. “Get ready for the greatest comeback in American history.”
Buttigieg, who published a 224-page book called “Trust” three years ago, offered some explanations Thursday for why it’s so absent here.
One reason, he said, is the “national ideological layer” that some people have added to the derailment’s aftermath. “And there’s no question that there have been enormous amounts of both information and misinformation injected into this situation, none of which is to the benefit of the community.”
East Palestine is solidly Trump country — in 2020, the former president won 72 percent of the vote in surrounding Columbiana County. The only thing more ubiquitous here than Trump signs are the workers in bright yellow vests who dot the village.
But on this too, not everyone agrees.
Amy Britain, a Democrat and a retired physical therapy assistant, pulled through the Rite Aid parking lot to pick up some donated bottled water. She was happy about Buttigieg’s visit but rolled her eyes at Trump’s, and at the national coverage implying that the former president is the only politician welcome in the village where she grew up.
“We’re a microcosm of what’s going on in the entire country,” she said.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Buttigieg has faced a barrage of criticism, mostly from conservatives, for what they perceive as a slow response to the derailment, which resulted in toxic chemicals being released into the air and ground. Several Republicans say Buttigieg should have traveled to the crash site sooner, and some have even called for him to be fired or resign.
Former President Donald Trump joined in the barrage on Tuesday, calling out Buttigieg, President Joe Biden and the EPA after touring the site of the crash, a visit intended to jump-start his slow-moving 2024 presidential campaign.
“Buttigieg should’ve been here already,” Trump told reporters as he handed out MAGA hats after speaking alongside Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) and Rep. Bill Johnson (R-Ohio). Trump also said Biden should “get over here.”
On Thursday, after meeting with the mayor, community members, DOT officials and first responders, including the fire chief in this deep-red village nestled in Columbiana County, Buttigieg indirectly addressed those comments in a wide-ranging 30-minute press conference. “And to any national political figure who has decided to get involved in the plight of East Palestine … I have a simple message, which is, I need your help,” Buttigieg said. “Because if you’re serious about this, there is more that we could do to prevent more communities from going through this.”
Asked by POLITICO whether his perceived political ambitions had shaped reaction to his handling of the derailment, Buttigieg said, “I’m here for the work and not for the politics.”
But politics have been driving the narrative for over a week, with no signs of stopping. On Thursday, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, the top Republican on the Senate committee in charge of rail safety, said Buttigieg is “desperate to salvage his credibility” and used a preliminary factual report issued earlier that morning by federal investigators to suggest that his policy solutions are “shallow” and designed to heap blame on Trump.
The pressure has tested the normally mild-mannered former Indiana mayor, who got into a Twitter spat with Florida Sen. Marco Rubio Tuesday after the Republican called for him to resign or be fired. Buttigieg took more veiled shots on Thursday, saying “anyone in Congress who cares about these issues, they are welcome to come to the table and work with us to get things done. So anybody who is interested in that, I’m going to hold them to that.”
The trip coincided with the release of the a preliminary report from National Transportation Safety Board, an independent agency, which found that the crew of the 150-car Norfolk Southern train received an alert about an axle overheating, and attempted to slow the train down before it derailed. The NTSB’s investigation will likely take 12 to 18 months before it determines what caused the derailment.
Despite the criticism, the White House has defended its response and the job Buttigieg has done, noting that officials from the EPA and the NTSB were on the ground within hours of the derailment. On Tuesday, EPA Administrator Michael Regan ordered Norfolk Southern to pay for the cleanup from the crash.
“The Norfolk Southern train derailment has upended the lives of East Palestine families, and EPA’s order will ensure the company is held accountable for jeopardizing the health and safety of this community,” Regan said in a statement Tuesday. “Let me be clear: Norfolk Southern will pay for cleaning up the mess they created and for the trauma they’ve inflicted on this community.”
On Thursday, Buttigieg promised the federal government would make sure that happened.
“We’re gonna be here, day in, day out, year in, year out, making our railroads safer and making sure Norfolk Southern meets its responsibilities. That is a promise, and one I take very, very seriously,” Buttigieg said.
In the meantime, politicians — and the country — should be “wrapping their arms around the people of East Palestine,” Buttigieg said, “not as a political football, not as an ideological flashpoint, not as a ‘gotcha moment,’ but as thousands of human beings whose lives got upended … through no fault of their own.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
“Pete Buttigieg has taken a lot of bullets for the president on this,” one senior Democrat said Wednesday, insisting on anonymity to talk about a crisis that the person was not authorized to discuss.
Still, Buttigieg acknowledged in a CBS News interview Tuesday that he “could have spoken sooner about how strongly I felt about this incident, and that’s a lesson learned for me.”
For Buttigieg, a former Indiana mayor and one of the Biden administration’s most avid political communicators, what began as a rail and ecological calamity has mushroomed in just 20 days into his most serious test yet as leader of the sprawling Department of Transportation.
Three people in Buttigieg’s orbit admit to being exasperated by the furor, saying nobody asked him about the derailment in any of the 23 media interviews he conducted during the first 10 days after the accident. Then critics lambasted him for not speaking sooner.
Since then, conservative media outlets have used images of the Feb. 3 wreck — including the flames, plumes of black smoke and piles of dead fish — to lambaste his oversight of rail safety. They’ve also criticized his failure to visit the crash site, a chorus of “Where’s Pete?” that didn’t let up even after he announced he would be visiting East Palestine on Thursday.
The “effort by Fox News and Republicans” to use the pain of the East Palestine community “as a political weapon is both enraging and demeaning,” the senior Democrat said.
Buttigieg first tweeted about the disaster on Feb. 13, when he said he continued to be “concerned about the impacts” to those living in the area. He pledged to use all “relevant authorities to ensure accountability and continue to support safety.”
The White House said Wednesday night that it’s standing behind Buttigieg, rejecting calls from some GOP lawmakers for him to resign or be fired. It also echoed Buttigieg’s criticisms of past Republican actions that rolled back Obama administration rail safety regulations.
“These are bad faith attacks from Republicans who have been in lockstep with the rail lobby to unravel safety protections,” White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said.
The Ohio derailment comes after a series of other transportation-related snarls that have happened on Buttigieg’s watch, including a threatened nationwide rail strike, airline scheduling meltdowns and a Federal Aviation Administration computer failure that grounded flights nationwide. These have brought him unsparing criticism from GOP lawmakers and conservative media outlets, which have portrayed him as overwhelmed by or detached from the job — and mocked his interest in issues such as racial justice and climate change.
Fox News’ prime-time coverage of the derailment on Tuesday included a Photoshopped image portraying him as a suit-wearing bicyclist grinning in front of the wreckage. Former President Donald Trump weighed in during a visit to East Palestine on Wednesday, telling reporters, “Buttigieg should’ve been here already.”
That criticism could just as easily be aimed at other Biden appointees, the senior Democrat who discussed the attacks on Buttigieg said. Those could even include Environmental Protection Agency chief Michael Regan, who first visited the disaster site last week — the first trip there by any of President Joe Biden’s Cabinet-level leaders.
Regan, whose agency is overseeing the cleanup of toxic chemicals in East Palestine, returned to the village Tuesday. There, he sipped tap water with Republican Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and Rep. Bill Johnson to reassure residents that it’s safe to drink. On Wednesday night, he appeared during a CNN town hall about the disaster.
Employees of both DOT and EPA were at the scene within hours after the derailment, as were crash investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board. The heads of DOT’s Federal Railroad Administration and the department’s hazardous materials agency visited East Palestine on Wednesday, though their trip was upstaged by Trump’s appearance.
Still, “there’s a plume, and there’s a chemical spill. If anyone should have been there right away, it’s Regan,” the senior Democrat said. “But he’s not a political target. And so what’s happened here is they’ve picked a political target. And they’ve just beaten that drum as often as they can, despite facts.”
Bates, the White House spokesperson, also called it misguided for Republicans to expect Buttigieg to personally rush to the site of a train wreck.
“It’s like them pretending they think the State Department takes point on rescuing people in the water during hurricanes instead of the Coast Guard,” Bates said. “Case in point, under the last administration EPA was also in the lead on similar derailments.”
Buttigieg’s critics include Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who has accused him of being “m.i.a. on the derailment” and urged Biden to fire him last week.
“For two years, Secretary Buttigieg downplayed and ignored crisis after crisis, while prioritizing topics of little relevance to our nation’s transportation system,” Rubio wrote.
During his visit to East Palestine on Thursday, Buttigieg plans to meet with community members, NTSB officials and DOT employees.
“During the initial response phase, I’ve followed the norm of staying out of the way of the independent NTSB,” he tweeted Wednesday. “Now that we’re into the policy phase, I’ll be visiting.”
The department separately announced a series of policy actions the department planned to take in response to the disaster as well as calls for railroads and Congress to make their own changes. “[W]e hope this sudden bipartisan support for rail safety will result in meaningful changes in Congress,” DOT said in a statement.
Buttigieg also sent a scathing letter to the CEO of Norfolk Southern, the railroad involved in the disaster, for what he called the “vigorous resistance by your industry to increased safety measures.”
Buttigieg’s supporters have accused Republicans of showing only newfound interest in rail safety, noting that Trump’s administration had shelved an Obama-era rule that would have required faster brakes on trains carrying highly flammable materials. (The rule would not have applied to the train that derailed in Ohio, NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy wrote on Twitter last week.) Trump’s DOT also ended regular rail safety audits of railroads and killed a pending rule requiring freight trains to have at least two crew members.
More than 1,000 train derailments happen in the U.S. during a given year, and Transportation secretaries don’t normally go to the scene. Rail safety veteran Bob Lauby said that in his 23 years at the NTSB and the Federal Railroad Administration, he remembers just one time when a secretary visited the site — and it was 30 years ago, when the deadliest incident in Amtrak’s history killed 47 people near Mobile, Ala.
But the East Palestine disaster has generated a much fiercer, longer-lasting backlash than usual.
A senior DOT official said department leaders were satisfied during the days after the derailment that the situation was in good hands, with a dozen staff members assisting the NTSB investigation, as well as officials from EPA and other government agencies.
Buttigieg was prepared to speak about the incident if asked, according to the DOT official — but for 10 days, no interviewer asked him.
Then on Feb. 13, “we started to see a large uptick in mentions on the secretary’s social media accounts, particularly on Twitter,” said a spokesperson, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe behind-the-scenes events. “That afternoon we began to see stories on television and get inquiries about the DOT and secretary’s role in this derailment.”
It has kept going since then.
On Tuesday, a Daily Caller reporter approached Buttigieg while he was out walking with his husband, Chasten, and asked him about the derailment. Buttigieg referred her “to about a dozen interviews I’ve given today” and suggested she contact his press office. The exchange generated even more headlines in conservative media.
A host of factors could explain why the Ohio wreck has stayed in the headlines long past the point when national media have lost interest in similar disasters, including those with equally striking footage of smoke and flames and equally valid fears of contamination.
For one thing, the derailment comes months after last year’s threatened rail strike, which put freight rail on the front pages given a work stoppage’s potential to kneecap the U.S. economy. An incident Feb. 8 in which police arrested a reporter covering a DeWine news conference in East Palestine also stoked more headlines about the derailment’s aftermath — despite conspiracy theories on social media accusing news organizations of covering up the disaster.
Beyond that, “anytime air and water are involved, communities feel extremely anxious and vulnerable, for good reason,” said former FRA Administrator Sarah Feinberg, who dealt with several high-profile derailments during the Obama era.
Relatedly, she said, “we are in an era of severe corporate and government distrust.” So when Norfolk Southern or EPA tell communities the air and water are safe, people don’t believe them.
That skepticism hasn’t kept Regan, the EPA chief, from getting the warm welcome from Republicans that has eluded Buttigieg. Those include DeWine and others who have met Regan during his two trips to East Palestine.
“Thank you, administrator, for this partnership,” DeWine told Regan at a news conference Tuesday.
Alex Guillén contributed to this report.
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While in the eastern Ohio community of about 5,000 people, Buttigieg will receive an update from the National Transportation Safety Board — the lead agency investigating the crash — on its probe, which could take as long as 18 months to complete. He is also expected to meet with DOT officials who arrived on the ground within hours of the derailment.
Buttigieg’s visit comes as Republicans such as Florida Sens. Rick Scott and Marco Rubio have sharply criticized his handling of the issue, including his slowness to visit the scene of the derailment.
It is exceedingly rare for a transportation secretary to visit the site of a train derailment, especially one that resulted in no fatalities — even though this crash has resulted in unusually heavy national media attention, partly driven by the televised image of the accident’s toxic black plume and residents’ anger over the safety of their air and water. About 1,000 train derailments occur each year, according to federal data.
“The secretary is going now that the EPA has said it is moving out of the emergency response phase and transitioning to the long-term remediation phase,” the person familiar with Buttigieg’s thinking told POLITICO.
The trip comes the day after former President Donald Trump was expected to meet with locals Wednesday and deliver cleaning supplies and pallets of bottled water.
“The Department of Transportation will continue to do its part by helping get to the bottom of what caused the derailment and implementing rail safety measures, and we hope this sudden bipartisan support for rail safety will result in meaningful changes in Congress,” DOT said in a statement Wednesday.
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An F-22 stealth fighter shot the balloon down off the coast of the Carolinas a week after the U.S. first started tracking it Jan. 28, POLITICO previously reported. The balloon crossed the continent in the succeeding days, from Alaska to Canadian airspace, then over Idaho and Montana to the Atlantic. The U.S. military is now attempting to recover the debris for intelligence purposes.
Even as Republicans continued to pile on criticism about the way the Biden administration handled the situation, Buttigieg pointed out that the mission was completed without any loss of American life or property. The Transportation secretary repeatedly characterized the balloon’s intrusion as unacceptable behavior from the Chinese government.
Pressed by host Jake Tapper about whether it could be assumed that the balloon gathered intelligence, Buttigieg said that was out of his purview.
“I’m sure there’s a similar presumption about what spy satellites do,” he said, pointing to China’s space program. He also declined to confirm exactly when the Biden administration first became aware of the balloon.
Republicans on Sunday continued to use Biden’s reaction to the balloon as evidence of the administration’s perceived weakness; they were happy to see the balloon shot down but argued it should have been done days earlier.
“What began as a spy balloon has become a trial balloon, testing President Biden’s strength and resolve, and unfortunately the President failed that test,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), a frequent China hawk, said Sunday on Fox’s “Fox News Sunday.” “And that’s dangerous for the American people.”
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” repeatedly called the deployment of the balloon a “deliberate” act from China, an attempt to show the U.S. was a declining superpower that can’t be counted on by its allies in the Pacific and elsewhere.
“I can assure you that if we fly a balloon over China, they’d shoot it down,” Rubio said. Speaking on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Rubio added that the U.S. had to consider the risks to civilians in shooting the balloon down, but that there should have been earlier opportunities to down it.
Some of the criticism took the form of colorful language.
Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, compared the takedown of the balloon over the Atlantic to “tackling the quarterback after the game is over.”
“They didn’t go and look at the Grand Canyon. They went and looked at our nuclear weapons sites,” Turner alleged.
Speaking on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures With Maria Bartiromo,” Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) was similarly descriptive.
“Letting a Chinese surveillance balloon lazily drift over America is like seeing a robber on your front porch and inviting him in, showing him where you keep your safe, where you keep your guns, where your children sleep at night, and then politely asking him to leave. It makes no sense,” said Gallagher, who is chair of the House Select Committee on China.
A senior defense official noted this week that it’s not the first time a Chinese spy balloon has entered U.S. air space, POLITICO previously reported. Such incidents occurred at least three times during President Donald Trump’s administration and once at the beginning of the Biden administration, but the flights were never for this duration.
While he was grateful for the military’s action taking down the balloon, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” the U.S. has challenges with China beyond this single incident.
“We have a real problem with China on a number of issues, from their human rights violations to their violations of international business law, to even the challenges we’ve had with them on overt spying,” he said.
Biden told the Pentagon earlier in the week to shoot down the balloon, but military advisers recommended they wait until it was over water, Biden told reporters this week.
China, which has denied the balloon was used for spying, has threatened repercussions over its downing.
One former CIA counterterrorism official said he thought the whole controversy had been absurdly overinflated.
Speaking on CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS,” Philip Mudd judged the crisis a “2” on a scale of 1 to 10 when it comes to national security issues.
“This says a lot more about the inability of Washington and Congress and the White House to talk about relatively insignificant national security issues than it does about intelligence,” he said. “Look, if the Chinese want to collect photos of America, you could get to Google Earth; you could get a Chinese secret satellite if they want to intercept communications. They could do it with satellites.”
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He noted that the decision on how long he’ll head up the Transportation Department is ultimately “above his pay grade” and that he serves “at the pleasure of the president for the time being,” as it says on the certificate on his wall. “Every political appointee accepts that,” he said.
Still, he said, he has no current plans to leave.
“I love this job and I feel like we’re right in the middle of the action,” he said. “I’m not planning on going anywhere because we’re smack in the middle of historic work.”
He said his job leading DOT is “taking 110 percent of my attention and energy” and that he thinks it’s “the best job in the federal government — even if it’s pretty demanding some days.”
“It’s a privilege to be doing the work,” he said. “That’s what I’m going to be doing.”
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