Former Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx joins Archon Fung and Stephen Richer.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy recently announced the federal government will reclaim management of Washington, D.C.’s Union Station, citing safety concerns, homelessness, and long-delayed repairs. He pledged new investment aligned with President Trump’s vision to revitalize the station and the city. Hours later, Deputy Secretary Steven Bradbury floated a similar move for Boston’s South Station.
Are these actions long-overdue investments in critical infrastructure—or signs of an expanding federal reach? This week, Former Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, now the Emma Bloomberg Professor of Public Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School, joins Archon Fung and Stephen Richer on Terms of Engagement to discuss.
Anthony Foxx is the Emma Bloomberg Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership. He previously served as the 17th U.S. Secretary of Transportation where he led the agency’s effort to advance new transportation technologies, promote public private partnerships, and address past inequities in transportation decision-making using executive authority. Among his initiatives at the Department of Transportation (DOT) were releasing the world’s first national guidance on integrating driverless vehicles into the transportation system, successfully advocating for long-term transportation funding on a bipartisan basis, launching the agency’s first Smart City Challenge, advancing commercial uses of unmanned aircraft systems, starting the Build America Center to advance public-private partnerships in U.S. infrastructure and updating departmental guidance under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for the first time in 40 years. Under his leadership, transportation fairness became a requirement for discretionary grant-making, and, having deployed more than $30 billion in grants over his tenure, new examples of more equitable, context-sensitive transportation projects in urban and rural areas are still being planned or are under construction today. Other initiatives to promote greater fairness included a national design challenge known as Every Place Counts and a national summit of ordinary Americans to share best practices on impacting the public input process in local and state transportation decision-making.
Prior to his tenure at the U.S. Department of Transportation, Anthony served as Mayor of Charlotte, the 54th and youngest in the history of the city.
Archon Fung: Hey, you're listening to Terms of Engagement. I'm Archon Fung, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation.
Stephen Richer: And I'm Stephen Richer, former elected Maricopa County recorder and now a senior practice fellow in American governance at the Ash Center at Harvard Kennedy School.
Archon Fung: We're back for our weekly series, and we're trying something new this week, as you can see.
Stephen Richer: Yeah, it's pretty fancy. It's pretty great.
Archon Fung: Beautiful studio on the campus of Harvard University.
Stephen Richer: And thanks to the continuing education folks for making this possible. We're going to be talking about trains today. And because we're going to be talking about trains and train stations in just a bit, we're going to be joined by former Department of Transportation Secretary Anthony Fox, who's now a professor here at the Harvard Kennedy School. He's going to join us in a few minutes. But tee us up. Why are we talking about trains? Why are we talking about train stations?
Archon Fung: Well, specifically, there have been recent federal moves to get more involved in train transportation in the United States. Union Station, as people know, is a central transportation hub in Washington, D.C., that first opened in 1907. It came under Department of Transportation ownership in the 1980s, but its management has been largely outsourced to private companies. It's a major Amtrak station. But on Wednesday of last week, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced the Department of Transportation's plan to take over the management of Union Station, bringing it back into the federal government. Of particular interest to those of us in Boston and Cambridge, hours later, Deputy Secretary Stephen Bradbury floated the idea of federal involvement and maybe a takeover of South Station in Boston, which is run by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, the MBTA.
Stephen Richer: So pause. So the context is there's this really big train station in Washington, D.C. that's just a stone's throw from the Capitol, and the federal government is going to play a larger role there? Is this what it sounds like?
Archon Fung: And they've, yeah, they've already announced that. And then they're thinking about maybe taking a larger role in South Station in Boston.
Stephen Richer: Okay. And so South Station in Boston is currently run by the Boston Metro Transit Authority or some acronym like that.
Archon Fung: MBTA, the Massachusetts Transportation Bay Authority, Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.
Stephen Richer: Okay, but as part of this debut of this rollout of this new Accela train, the department said something about maybe the federal government is going to get involved with the South Station here in Boston. And so for that reason, Archon and I figured that over this long weekend, over this Labor Day weekend, we would go out to South Station and we would ask people, what do they think about the station? What do they think about the federal government's involvement in the station? Is the station meeting their expectations? And so we collected some footage from that and I think we can roll that now.
Archon Fung: Yeah, we don't often leave Harvard Yard, but sometimes, this is a show about democracy, so we do like to talk to the people, and this is a great opportunity to do that. So please roll the reel.
Stephen Richer: And I'm Steven, and what's your first name?
Priscilla: Priscilla. Priscilla? OK, fantastic. Priscilla, how often do you come to the train station? Not often. Not often, but when you come here, how do you feel? Do you feel safe here?
Priscilla: Oh, yeah. Okay, you do feel safe? Oh, yeah, I do. I kind of wish that the terminals were a little cleaner.
Passenger One: Wish that it was a little cleaner here? I think maybe in safety, maybe not as sanitary as they could be. Okay. No, that's perfect.
Stephen Richer: So the federal government has said that it might look into playing more of a role in the management of South Station. Is that something you think would be a good thing, a bad thing, a whatever thing?
Passenger Two: Not this federal government, no. Not this one.
Stephen Richer: So even if they said we want to make it safer or cleaner or more timely?
Passenger Two: Yeah, you know, I think it's, I feel like with this administration, it's always kind of something you want to, what they say is not always what they mean. And you kind of want to look into the exact changes. I'm all for making it safer if people are feeling unsafe. But I think with this administration, I'm not so sure they're saying what they mean and what those changes actually will mean for the people here.
Stephen Richer: Do you feel safe in here? Generally. Okay. Have you ever had a less than perfectly safe incident? No. Have you ever seen anything like that?
Passenger Three: Last time I was here, yeah. It was kind of a guy who was annoying some of the bachelors for money or something like that.
Stephen Richer: Oh, wow. So just going around asking for money and sort of getting in their faces or something like that? Okay. What about if the National Guard came here? Is that something you'd support? Is that something you'd oppose?
Passenger Three: Yeah, I mean... God, why would they be, I guess why, you know, why would they be here? Okay. But I wasn't sure, this is a need for a National Guard meeting.
Passenger Four: I would not see that there's a problem here that's any worse than anywhere else in the U.S. Okay. They're looking at Democratic-run states and they're kind of trying to make out that Democrats are making a mess of running these places.
Stephen Richer: So the federal government has said that it's looking into playing a bigger role in South Station with respect to safety, with respect to cleanliness, with respect to timing of trains. Is that something that would be good, bad? You're not sure?
Passenger Five: No, I think it'd be a fantastic idea. To have the federal government come in and maybe do more in South Station? Yeah. Okay.
Passenger Six: Because I'm just here to do my daily business, which is just get on the train, maybe grab a drink and go home. I don't really want to have to deal with stepping over homeless people in the bathroom.
Stephen Richer: We're back. And that was our snippet. So that's how we spent our weekend. Hopefully you did something a little more, I don't know, vacation-y or celebratory of Labor Day. But we are now joined by the real professional. And that is Professor Anthony Foxx, who is... head of the Center for Public Leadership here at the Harvard Kennedy School, the former mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina, and importantly for this conversation, the former director of the Department of Transportation, the seventeenth director under President Obama. So welcome.
Anthony Foxx: Thank you. Glad to be here. So do the trains run on time in the United States? Do they now or did they then? They ran pretty well back in the day. But, you know, the interesting thing about this conversation is just that the federal government really functions more as a capital contributor to infrastructure across the country. It does very little operational work. It doesn't typically run things. Typically, the highway system, for example, is run by states with contributions by the federal government. The transit systems are run by cities with contributions from the federal government system. So it is interesting to see the administration trying to take an operational turn into operating train stations and things. I'm not sure where the money comes from. I'm not sure where the operational expertise comes from. But but hey, you know, it's a new day in America.
Archon Fung: When you were transportation secretary, did you ever look into a state or locality and think, oh, that train station is doing awful or that highway system is terrible. We have to get into a more operational role because the locals aren't doing what they need to do.
Anthony Foxx: I did have an experience with WMATA.
Stephen Richer: Where's that?
Anthony Foxx: That's the Washington, D.C. subway system.
Stephen Richer: Oh, okay. I'm a Westerner.
Anthony Foxx: It's all right. It's okay. West is cool, too. Actually, they were having a spate of safety incidents. Explosions in the train stations. There were people who lost their lives in various places. at various points in time. And I wasn't convinced that they were running a tight operation around safety. So we actually threatened to shut down WMATA. They, before we actually were able to execute on that, they shut themselves down for a safety stand down for a couple of days and proposed reforms to step up their safety approach. But that was one example where we almost got into an operational role.
Stephen Richer: So how unusual would this be? Because I don't think most people understand just how much of a departure from the norm that this may be.
So first, Union Station, to the extent that the federal government might take over directly the management of Union Station, which is a very large operation, has both the Metro and then it has, you know, Amtrak also coming through and it's right near the Capitol. Would that be very weird?
Anthony Foxx: So in a sense it's sort of sort of like my me taking over my glasses like the federal government actually owns union station they actually um outsource the operations of union station to a local non-profit partly because the federal government typically doesn't run things right the one thing the US government does run is their traffic control system yes that is the one thing in the USDOT that is operational in nature but otherwise not. So, um What's weird is that there's this argument of a takeover, but it's taking over something the government already owns, and it already outsourced the operational responsibility of leasing spaces and keeping up the maintenance and providing security and various things. So, just like you might own this building, but you're not going to oversee all aspects of the management and maintenance of the physical plant. So why would they want to do that in Union Station? That seems like... well more more burden more hassle yeah the argument would be um over the last let's say twenty years um some of the leases haven't been re-upped by some of the tenants um union station reopened back in the nineteen eighties um as a new refurbished center to fall into disrepair in the nineteen seventies um and it actually was a great place to go shopping and have restaurants and various things And over the last ten or fifteen years, I think it has actually gone down a little bit. So there's been an argument for changing the direction of where Union Station is going. I think public safety is always a concern. It's also an argument the administration is using for putting National Guard troops in Washington, D.C. Union Station has become a bit of a magnet for some types of crime. So there are reasonable arguments for doing more. whether the federal government is the best agent long term to operate Union Station, I think is a big open question.
Archon Fung: So one of the issues I wanted to get into in this discussion is I think there's two different there's a principal issue, right? Should the federal government be more involved in things like running train stations? And then there's a person issue. Should this administration be more involved in getting, and I think you heard on the video, a range of differences that people we talked to on the principle issue, a lot of people said of seem like we don't know what their politics were, but it seemed like, you know, with different politics saying there's things that don't work very well about, you don't have to step over homeless people. Maybe there are drug things going on that aren't great. We went in the daytime, we didn't go at night. We did not witness any of that. We did not witness any of that, to be clear. But so if you're running into that, some people seem quite open to the idea that maybe federal help would be good here at the operational level to kind of clean things up in that regard.
Anthony Foxx: I guess the question is on what issues like, you know, the pushing the National Guard to do more law enforcement activity is a is a huge first of all, it's a huge expense. And so the quick query, you know, how long the federal government can do this in an indeterminate amount of time. Secondly, you have the question of leasing space. Is the federal government better positioned to do that than a private sector organization? To be a landowner. Right, to be a landowner, a leasing agent, a real estate agent. Obviously, this president is a real estate developer. He sees himself as someone who does big things. Train stations are an attractive place to do that sort of thing. But I think he's going to find the federal government is there are a lot of antibodies to doing what he's trying to do with this operating function in train stations.
Stephen Richer: So what is the department's current role with respect to something like South Station, which unlike Union Station, the department doesn't own South Station, but it probably gives some funding?
Anthony Foxx: Capital support. That's the bread and butter of what the Federal Department of Transportation does is It won't generally pay for bus drivers or train operators, but it will pay for new train sets like the new Acela sets that have come online. It'll also support some of the capital improvements to the actual physical station. But in terms of having somebody come in, turn the lights on in the morning, someone to clean the place up, someone to provide public safety, those are operating responsibilities that the federal government typically is not funding.
Archon Fung: It's interesting the one of the people who really favored maybe more federal role in south station the uh we didn't show this part of the video but it was the guy with the hat with the american flag he actually worked for the post office so he actually works for a very operational part of the federal government maybe he could say okay well you know I like how the post office runs the us government runs out why can't it do that in south station or even union station.
Anthony Foxx: Well and the other part of the other well the postal service actually has authorities from congress to do what it does you know that that's the thing that's really interesting here is that you know I don't know where the budget's coming from to do some of this activity And you're seeing some of the contorted ways in which the administration is trying to sort of create an argument that there's a national emergency. So I have to bring the National Guard in to do this thing. And I just don't see how they're going to smoothly be able to operate without Congress giving the administration operational authority, funding, and responsibility to do that. Would this be a major legal problem if tomorrow, the Department of Transportation said, hey, hand over the keys. We're going to be unlocking the building in the morning, and we're going to be locking it up at night, and you're out.
Anthony Foxx: Bigger challenge in Boston than in Washington, D.C.
Stephen Richer: Which makes sense, right? So what about the politics of this? Why are they doing this? Yeah, what do you...
Archon Fung: I have a lot of hypotheses here.
Anthony Fox: What do you think is really going on?
Archon Fung: Okay, one idea, I think maybe Trump is the socialism as Nixon is the China, right? So China, you know, Nixon was the guy who was tough on China. He was the only person who was capable of establishing diplomatic relations. And Trump, as you said, he really likes to run things. He likes to be a good manager. So he's taken over stakes in Intel. He wants to run part of this university and some others. He wants to have a big say in law firms. And now it looks like he wants to run train stations, too. So I think he's opening up some space for government to become a much more have a much bigger role in operational matters that's somewhat of a departure from the capitally Democrat and capital R Republican consensus on smaller government and capitalism.
Stephen Richer: But not for ideological reasons. Because he's not an ideological person. person so there has to be sort of like do you accrue benefits from it is it the fact that a lot of people interact with train stations every single day I mean you can probably say how many thousands of people go through something like union station every single day is it just like a touch point or is it that they're.
Archon Fung: Maybe he thinks it can be better maybe he thinks it can be like mar-a-lago or trump power in manhattan.
Anthony Foxx: I have no doubt that in his mind he thinks it can be better What I wonder about is, is there some economic gain to be made here that we're not seeing?
Stephen Richer: Sorry, individually or from the or the government? or both.
Anthony Foxx: If you think about it, if you're a real estate developer, you love to have captured markets. And when you're in a train station or an airport or someplace like that.
Stephen Richer: You charge seven bucks for a Diet Coke.
Anthony Foxx: I would be watching very carefully to see if the federal government takes over these train stations, who's going to be the leasing agent for those spaces? Which businesses are going to get those contracts and who are the people behind those businesses?
Stephen Richer: So, I mean, that's usually the first motive of murder mysteries is like who stands to get benefit from the money. What about the sort of the context of train stations in history? Like train stations have always had this larger-than-life, I don't know, status within. And, you know, when we talk about some of the significant leaders of the twentieth century, for whatever reason, they all had a close nexus of trains. Trains have become highly politicized in the United States, usually with the left. talking more about the expansion of train networks on the right.
Archon Fung: And that's a principle much of the let myself include. I'd love to see more mass transit in the United States funded by the federal government or vice. I don't care. I just like to see more.
Stephen Richer: Why do trains seem to have this large significance in politics?
Anthony Foxx: Well, I mean, I think I think for several reasons, I know earlier, let's go back to the transcontinental railroad, which is, you know, a hundred and seven years ago.
Stephen Richer: Golden Spike was in Utah in what, like the eighteen nineties or something like that. Yeah.
Anthony Foxx: So part of it was an economic development play. You know, when you're able to create connectivity between points that were previously disconnected, now you have the ability for population centers to shift and you have the ability to build cities where you had towns before and so forth. And real estate has always been a big, big driver of particularly rail transportation. I think back to a development we helped with in Florida, the Brightline private sector investment in Florida between Miami and Orlando. um a real estate developer actually paid to put the train in place using some leverage from the federal government but the reason why was because that developer had control of the adjacent property so they could build housing units they could build retail units they could build commercial centers and that value was greater than the cost of actually building the train so I think a lot of times um the reason why it is such in the conversation in this country is because real estate developers going from local government all the way to the federal government always have a voice at the table because they are the ones contributing significantly to campaigns. But also, it is actually true that as our cities have been built out, real estate has played a huge role in, you know, sort of the proliferation of mass transit. The New York City subway system started with a real estate developer building the subway system. Initially, people thought it was crazy. But now you see in New York, it works pretty well. So I think there's a relationship between the economy and mobility that plays a role. Yeah.
Archon Fung: Do you think what's the partisan dimension of this it is interesting I mean DC is a blue place boston massachusetts is a very blue place is it just that there's more transit hubs in cities that are blue uh or is it that those transit hubs are underperforming in terms of safety and confidence and everything else. Would it be a good idea for the administration to go into some places where there are transit hubs in red places that may be underperforming?
Anthony Foxx: I've always been a big proponent in building more transit in more diverse parts of the country. North of the Mason-Dixon line, you see a lot more fixed rail transit, whether it's transit transit or whether it's FRA rail transit like Amtrak. If you go south of Washington, D.C., the rail lines are not electrified and therefore they run slower. So you're on diesel going into Virginia down across the south, going north of Washington, DC you're on electricity you can go at a hundred and twenty miles hundred thirty miles an hour um that has a profound effect on the degree to which people use it uh because if it's faster it's generally better, um and so I think we've made mistakes as a country in in in not putting more um rail transit in the south and across the southwest. As a result, you'll have people in Washington who'll say highways are for Republicans, transit and rail are for Democrats. And I think that is a view that is held by some, but obviously, people of both parties use all these different types of vehicles.
Stephen Richer: Let's accept the premise of President Trump and of Secretary Duffy. Let's just say we've got major problems with crime. We've got major problems with cleanliness at South Station and at Union Station. If you were tasked with that, what would you have done when you were secretary?
Anthony Foxx: Number one, I would have traded it as a safety issue. which is within the clear domain of the U.S. Department of Transportation. Secondly, I probably would have pulled in the local officials, the people who actually have primary responsibility for public safety within the city, within the train station. In the case of Union Station, again, which the federal government owns and which has developed a relationship with a nonprofit to run the station, you can also change the appointments on the board from the federal government think you can you can do things to sort of tighten up the the oversight of but it would mostly flow through the local government and local controls because again at least maybe it's changed in the almost ten years since I served, but we didn't have funding in the DOT for police officers. We did not have funding to hire leasing agents. I don't know where these resources are coming from. How would you enforce that? Otherwise, you lose some of your funding if you don't clean up your act?
Anthony Foxx: You can certainly say you can threaten. to remove the intermediary, the nonprofit that's running the train station. You could threaten, and that sometimes can shake people into into into following following in line. But I think the fundamental problem the federal government is going to have is this to fix Union Station up. And it's got some pretty, it's an aged train station. It's a beautiful one, but some estimates say eight billion dollars is going to be required to fix it. So it's also one of these things where if you break it, you bought it. Wow. Yes.
Archon Fung: So flipping a little bit, I think you're kind of the perfect person for this discussion because not only were you secretary of transportation, but you are also mayor of Charlotte, major city in North Carolina, major transit hub, beautiful airport. Been there many times myself. So when you were mayor, were there kinds of help that you would have appreciated from the Department of Transportation? Like, what would you have wanted them to do more of that they weren't doing to help you out as a local leader?
Anthony Foxx: So, interestingly, the help that I would have loved to have had would have been operational funding for our transit systems. Because of the fact that local governments are typically operating these systems by themselves, they have very little flexibility to do things like provide transit fee abatements for students or for elderly people or things like that. And there are many people who are transit dependent who need a break on the actual fees that are paid to to to use the transit systems. The federal government could provide more operating support. Hasn't really done it. They did it for a brief time during COVID. Before that, it had been back in the nineteen seventies, early eighties before the government provided that operating support. But that's a different type of support than what we're talking about here. That's support where the funding goes local. The locals use it. in a way that makes sense for them. What's happening now is an operational sort of overlay being placed on these train stations in theory and run by the federal government with very little local input. So I think a lot of people who watch this podcast and maybe a lot of people in our social circles, millions of people, millions of people are instinctually reluctant to, are scared of anything that this administration does. Is that founded here? Is it misplaced? Should people be apprehensive that President Trump and the Department of Transportation want to get involved more in Union Station and maybe South Station or is this not that big of a deal?
Anthony Foxx: I think Union Station is different than Boston South Station. The federal government already owns Union Station. It's not exactly a takeover. It's just a reclaiming of it. I think the questions I have are really more budgetary, but concerns like how is the federal government actually going to pay to do what it's claiming it wants to do? And secondly, is this a sort of an activity that this administration intends to do? Is it intended to carry forward beyond this administration? Have they thought about what happens if a president comes after this president and decides they don't want to be in an operational business without an act of Congress to do this? It's sort of an activity of this administration doesn't necessarily have staying power beyond that. And there's a lot of things that will be broken. on the way to doing what the administration wants to do that may or may not continue in the future. Does that make sense?
Archon Fung: It does. And looking forward, do you think that this talk about public infrastructure and trains will be limited just to these two cases maybe of Union Station and South Station? Or do you see more expansion of operational role happening? Politically, I think what the administration is doing is it's doing everything it can to position these blue cities as places that are not being run well. And the train stations are just another example of what I think they're trying to do. By the way, taking over the train stations at the same time, they want to cancel high-speed rail funding in California, which is also very interesting.
Stephen Richer: So this is an entry point into blue cities through the management of blue cities.
All right. Last question. Scale of one to ten. How nervous does this make you? South Station, let's say.
Archon Fung: Four, because, you know, some of my friends more on the left are associating with the National Guard issue and saying, well, all these protests, you know, it's an opportunity to control protests. Look, people are going to drive if they want to express political dissent and the train stations are set down. So I'm much more concerned about some of these National Guard issues and some of those other issues. But it is significant. I mean, I think the federal-local relationship should be cooperative and mutually assistive. And this doesn't feel like that. Yeah, I thought it felt pretty good.
Stephen Richer: But I, you know, could have used a little shine when we were out there on Monday. Maybe the federal government could do that. But a single person said it could be better. It could be better.
We're getting the wrap here, and we promise to never speak over thirty minutes. Thank you very much for being with us. We're going to be at it again next Tuesday at noon, as always. And then, as always, we are speaking as individuals, not on behalf of the Harvard Kennedy School or any entity at Harvard.
We want to thank Secretary Foxx for making some time for us.
Archon Fung: Terrific. Last point is, if the federal government does get into a greater operational role, We have a big, beautiful MPP program where we train lots of public managers who are eager to take a bigger operational role and run these leases and run the trains. So, Secretary Duffy, if you're looking for people to work for you, Harvard Kennedy School is your place.
Stephen Richer: Great. Love it. Thank you very much. Thank you.