Norm Mineta arrived a year ago as one of the most experienced US transportation secretaries in history. In the event, his wisdom and pragmatism have been badly needed
It takes only a few minutes to walk from the House of Representatives on Capitol Hill to the Department of Transportation (DoT). For Norman Mineta it is a journey over familiar territory. After 20 years in Congress, from 1975 to 1995, decades in which he rose to head the House Transportation Committee and its aviation panel, Mineta became secretary of transportation in January 2001. Accordingly, he brings with him an encyclopaedic knowledge of the issues and the way in which current crises evolve into long-term changes. As he reflects in his office overlooking the approach to Washington National Airport, Mineta recalls: "The very first committee hearing I ever held was on airport capacity - expansion of Chicago O'Hare. Capacity will have to be back on the national agenda before long."
The national agenda is one he knows and has helped shape. Now 70 and fresh from an artificial-hip operation, Mineta was hailed when he went to L'Enfant Plaza, as the DoT is often called after its street address in Washington. Finally, the department had someone who knew more "going into the job than most secretaries knew going out", as Senate Commerce Committee chairman Ernest Hollings put it.
But even with his earlier experience as secretary of the Department of Commerce in the last months of the departing Clinton Administration, Mineta has learned that cabinet secretaries operate in a different political climate - and attract more unwanted attention - than do members of Congress.
In March 2001 he said that did not think the air-traffic control system, which is run by the DoT's Federal Aviation Administration, would or could be made a non-profit user-fee based corporation, despite a commitment by the Bush Administration to move in that direction. He was immediately attacked, not just for parting with his president but, it was charged, for parting with his own previous statements.
In 1997, private citizen Mineta, as chairman of a national commission on civil aviation, had endorsed the panel's call for air traffic control to be given to a semi-private organisation run by a special board that sets performance standards. In other words, he had endorsed the concept he was now shooting down. His rationale for the about-face was that because such a move would be politically "dead on arrival" on Capitol Hill, he did not think it would be a wise use of political capital. Specifically, Mineta said he was not going to "spend time - or political bullets" on the issue.
On another occasion, Mineta publicly complained that the DoT has been limited in decisions on airline acquisitions and mergers. That authority went to the Department of Justice years ago, although DoT routinely files comments on decisions. Mineta now says: "Sure, we always arm-wrestle around the edges, but I think it's a healthy relationship. We always have a say. Whether [the antitrust division of Justice] listens to us or accepts what we have to say is another matter. They look at issues from the strictly legal criteria of antitrust activities and we are able to give them the benefit of an aviation perspective. I think we're much more knowledgeable about the airline business."
Far from being evidence of an ideological turnaround or flare-up of Democratic resentment of his new Republican employer, his outspokenness reflects his knowledge of the realities of Washington. It is a place in which tectonic changes such as restructuring a federal agency like air traffic control move, if they move at all, at glacial speeds. It is also a place in which commissions, panels and studies often issue recommendations that can - at best - be expected to make people think about considering it. His contribution to the administration is to gauge political realities, says a Washington lawyer who had worked for Mineta's committee.
A former Transportation Committee colleague says: "I think he sometimes forgets that he is the secretary and thinks he is still a powerful committee chairman who can say whatever comes to mind and have all his less senior colleagues hasten to agree." His remarks were, the former Congressional colleague says, simply the way Mineta explains reality, telling the new guy from Texas how things work on this side of the Potomac. That is something that he knows well. It is rare for a high official to "know the issues and to know how the sausage is made", says one veteran aviation attorney, referring to the old adage that one should never witness either laws or sausage being made.
Mineta himself makes the point that he took the job with the clear understanding that he would be a team player. He recalls that during President Bush's State of the Union address, which is made to all members of the cabinet, he joined standing ovations almost 60 times. "It was a great speech and I didn't want anyone to say that here was a Democrat not supporting his president even though by then my hip was killing me," he says. His hip was not operated on until this year because of the weight of duties.
Mineta says he joins the administration on many issues. He defends last year's $15 billion airline aid package and rejects European Commission (EC) charges that it was a subsidy or unfair support. "The $5 billion Congress gave to the airlines only reimbursed them for their actual, direct losses. It was not a subsidy. And what the airlines did afterwards in lowering fares was just smart business."
Bilateral discussions
Despite the current uncertainties in Europe over the fate of open skies agreements, Mineta says the USA will continue bilateral discussions A preliminary opinion from the European Court earlier this year seemed to support the EC's claim that open skies deals conflict with the single European air market and that Brussels should have final negotiating rights. He says that "we haven't really studied in depth" the court's opinion. "Until the EC is endowed with a fully mandated position, I think we will wait and see what the court is going to say," he adds. He upholds as a model the multilateral open skies deal that the USAstruck two years ago with Brunei, Chile, New Zealand and Singapore. Peru is also expected to join this month.
Mineta has doubts that any form of cabotage should be allowed as a bargaining chip in any bilateral negotiations. The Air Line Pilots Association, with which he has always had good relations, resists cabotage as a threat to job security. Mineta calls it "a red flag. I have very serious reservations about that slippery slope."
Although the Bush Administration has yet to formulate an official stance on lifting the 25% limit on foreign investment in US carriers, Mineta's thinking is clear. "I don't think that's the way to go. My thinking is not just based on labour relations but national security issues. There is a very real question of what happens when we need to call up aircraft for use in the Civil Reserve Air Fleet," he says.
Mineta holds out little real hope that any US-UK liberalisation will be achieved. That is despite the agency's recent tentative approval of antitrust immunity for an alliance between United Airlines and bmi british midland - a grant conditioned on a liberalised bilateral being consummated by early October.
Without 11 September, the momentum perhaps could have built to unblock the US-UK bilateral and open London Heathrow, but Mineta concedes that the crisis "shifted the focus to security". It could have swamped anyone's the agenda, especially with the creation of DoT's Transportation Security Administration with 60,000 employees, into an agency that would be as large as the NASA space agency and the departments of Education, Energy and Housing combined, but here he has stood his ground.
After Congress passed a security bill last autumn imposing January 2002 deadlines for screening or searching all bags for explosives, Mineta said it was unlikely that the deadline could be met. Although he won praise from the public, the remarks hurt him in Congress, the very institution he was closest to, and the fire came from both parties.
Sen Tom Daschle, the Senate Democratic leader, used Mineta's comment to assail the entire administration and Sen Kay Bailey Hutchison, a Texas Republican who worked on the bill, admonished: "You can't say one week after a bill has passed that you can't do it." Mineta himself makes it clear that he will obey Congress and was not showing defiance to the legislative will. It is not clear if the comments were off-handed candour or a calculated political move. But it reaffirmed Mineta's credibility with the aviation industry.
One security issue on which Mineta has butted heads publicly with the airlines and the press stems from an experience in his youth. He opposes any form of passenger screening or profiling that could be racially or ethnically discriminatory. Some conservatives have demanded his resignation over this stand, but friends of Mineta's explain that it reflects a traumatic experience when he was 10, at the beginning of the Second World War, when his family was relocated from their San Jose, California, home to a detention camp for Japanese living in the USA and Japanese-Americans. Years later, when discussing proposed reparations, Mineta cried. A former staffer says: "It is the only time I have ever seen him show that kind of emotion in public."
Mineta saves emotion for his staff and friends. "I have such great people here, people with so much integrity," Mineta says of his DoT team. High on this list is the department's second in command, deputy secretary Michael Jackson. The two men worked together at Lockheed Martin before Mineta became commerce secretary in the summer of 2000. Jackson plays a role in almost every major policy area in the agency and brings experience as chief of staff to former secretary of transportation Andy Card. Jackson was also a policy maker at the American Trucking Associations.
Some in Washington say that Jackson (and by extension Mineta) has spread himself too thinly. Dan Kasper, an LECG consultant, a former Civil Aeronautics Board director and a member of a 1993 commission that studied FAA reform, says: "A wise secretary makes good use of the deputy and that certainly hasn't always been the case" with some of Mineta's predecessors.
Joining his staff is noted aviation lawyer Jeff Shane, a former DoT and State Department international aviation official who is now back for another tour of duty at L'Enfant Plaza. An unrelated senatorial objection over Amtrak funding delayed Shane's required confirmation vote, so Mineta persuaded the White House to bypass Congress and get Shane into the post of associate deputy secretary of transportation.
Mineta says he still talks "every day" with the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Transportation Committee, Minnesota Republican Jim Oberstar, who in Mineta's absence has become the authority on aviation in Congress. Mineta would not accept the Bush Administration's offer to nominate him as secretary of transportation until he had spoken with Oberstar - and about 90 other friends and colleagues.
Driving force
If Mineta has broken ranks with the administration since, it has been subtler. He was, by all accounts, the driving force in getting Washington's National Airport reopened after a three-week post-attack shutdown that threatened to spark a rebellion among members of Congress, who favour its convenience to Capitol Hill.
Here, Mineta took on the Pentagon and intelligence establishment, who wanted permanent restrictions on the airport. He took the limelight of the response to the 11 September attacks, even though some have carped that Mineta overshadowed FAA administrator Jane Garvey by taking credit for the nation's first-ever grounding of all flights.
His political network spreads far beyond the airline industry. He is a demonstration of the truth that is behind the old clich‚ that "transportation is bipartisan". He learned this on the city council and as mayor of his native San Jose, where he began his political career as a road and bridge builder. His time on the Hill, while devoted to aviation, also gave him expertise on the vast US highway funding system, one of the largest spigots through which federal funds flow to states and localities. It has been said that if the nation's mayors elected the president, Mineta would have been in the White House years ago.
Behind the scenes, Mineta has also argued with some success within the cabinet for restoration of funding for aviation capacity and modernisation that Bush budget designers wanted to cut. Corbett says of Mineta: "He understands capacity. He understands the need to focus on what will be happening in a year or two. A novice secretary would have been overwhelmed by the security matters and not have been able to bring capacity back to the agenda, as Mineta has."
But Mineta may not have all the time he needs. It is considered common for cabinet members from the party other than the president's to leave office before election time so that the president in power can put in a loyalist to campaign and hand out grants that are politically beneficial. Some in Washington see Mineta as likely to leave office before the end of 2004. He does not talk about his plans, saying only "you just try to do the best job at what you're doing and stay focused on that". Mineta does have one regret. When he was a congressman, he was well known among rank-and-file airline pilots as a frequent jump-seat rider on his weekly flights home from Washington. Now, though, he notes wistfully, "they won't let me into the cockpit any more. It's all these new security rules."
Source: Airline Business
