Pete Buttigieg is widely admired as a first-class communicator. But many Democrats think he's lacking as an administrator — and are pointing to his time as President Biden's transportation secretary.

Why it matters: Several of Buttigieg's potential rivals for the 2028 Democratic nomination for president are quietly beginning to pick at his work in Biden's Cabinet as a vulnerability, rather than an asset.

• They argue that Buttigieg was at times unable to navigate the federal bureaucracy to get hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of infrastructure projects built or launched quickly enough, and that such failures contributed to Donald Trump returning to the White House.
• Buttigieg, a former mayor of South Bend, Ind., has little other governing experience to run on, so his tenure as transportation secretary would be critical to convincing voters he's up to being president, were he to run again.

By the numbers: In December 2021, Buttigieg cautioned that some projects in the bipartisan $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill Congress passed that year would take many years to complete.

• But he boasted that electric vehicle charging stations would be "sprouting up very quickly around the country," with a goal of 500,000 stations by 2030 aided by a $7.5 billion plan.
• Two years later in December 2023, zero chargers had been built with the infrastructure law funding. By March 2024, only seven charging stations funded under the new law were operational and just 25 were open by November 2024, with much of the money unspent.

The massive infrastructure law Biden signed in November 2021 gave Buttigieg's Transportation Department $551 billion to distribute to local governments, states and other organizations.

• By the end of the administration, the Transportation Department boasted that "more than 22,000 projects that received [DOT] funding are already completed or well on their way."
• But as of October 2024, almost 30% of the department's available money hadn't been awarded.
• Early in the Trump administration, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) wrote that as of April 2025, the Transportation Department "had yet to obligate almost $178 billion" in available funding from the infrastructure bill — "about 41% of the almost $438 billion authorized and appropriated" for fiscal years 2022 through 2025.
• The GAO also found that 82% of the funds' recipients had found the environmental review process by Buttigieg's Transportation Department moderately or very challenging.

Some Democrats also had concerns about Buttigieg's pace in updating the antiquated Federal Aviation Administration.

• In January 2023, Republican and Democratic members of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure wrote to Buttigieg with concerns that the FAA was not adequately managing their legacy systems that were causing flight delays and cancellations.
• "The failure to improve legacy systems is unacceptable, and the American people expect and deserve better," they wrote.

Jennifer Homendy, the Biden-appointed chair of the National Transportation Safety Board, said last month that systemic issues at the FAA were partly responsible for the catastrophic collision of a helicopter and plane over D.C. in early 2025 that killed 67 people.

• "We should be angry. This was 100% preventable," she said at a hearing in January about the crash. "We know over time concerns were raised repeatedly, went unheard, squashed — however you want to put it — stuck in red tape and bureaucracy of a very large organization."

What they're saying: Buttigieg declined to be interviewed.

• Last October on the right-leaning "All-In Podcast," he defended his stewardship over the EV charging station programs and called the criticisms a "red herring."
• "We made a couple of choices that we knew would mean that it would take longer but we were OK with that," he said, referring to decisions to make the chargers in America and to prioritize union labor.

Sean Manning, a Buttigieg spokesperson, told Axios: "Pete's proud of the record-level infrastructure improvement and passenger protection work that he led."

• "His experience at DOT reinforced his longstanding support for reforms to deal with the red tape and other obstacles that make it harder to build things in America," he added.

Between the lines: It wasn't just the Transportation Department. The Biden administration was slow or unable to implement much of its multitrillion-dollar agenda, which has led to self-reflection among party elites.

• In their bestselling 2025 book "Abundance," left-leaning authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson argue that Biden and Vice President Harris struggled to run on their record in 2024 because "few communities were yet seeing benefit from all this construction their policies were meant to spark." They cite the lack of EV stations as a clear example.

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a potential 2028 presidential candidate whose motto is "get sh*t done," recently bashed the Biden administration for announcing big projects and then not doing them.

• "The Biden-Harris administration didn't provide those specific tangible things that people could see or feel," Shapiro said last month on the "Raging Moderates" podcast.
• "Do you know how many people ... this many years later, have been connected to high-speed affordable internet thanks to President Biden's law in Pennsylvania?" he said. "Zero. Because the dollars were never driven out."

Ezra Klein's Abundance movement is getting some backup: A new political group is urging Democrats to embrace "pro-growth," deregulatory policies with an eye toward 2028, according to plans first shared with Axios.

Why it matters: Known as Next American Era, the group is the latest effort by moderate Democrats to shape national politics and expand their influence at a time when progressives in the party are making an aggressive push for more power.

• Former Illinois Rep. Cheri Bustos, ex-chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, will serve as president.
• The group describes itself as a "hub for center-left policy and advocacy." Bustos said it will air issue-focused ads during the midterm elections and the 2028 presidential campaign, but it won't endorse candidates.

Zoom out: Democrats have been locked in a heated debate over how to move forward since President Trump won a second term.

• Moderates such as Bustos have tried to nudge the party to the center, while progressives have criticized their vision as too friendly to big business and pushed for a tax-the-rich platform instead.
• Bustos argues that Democrats have been at their most successful when they've focused on bread-and-butter economic issues such as jobs — and that many Americans now believe the political system is driven too much by fringe voices in both parties.

Zoom in: She said cutting red tape, streamlining regulations and supporting workforce training are among the top policy goals of her group, which is structured as a 501(c)(4) political nonprofit.

• "We share many of the same principles as the Abundance movement, around lowering costs, around making it easier to build and to generate opportunity," Bustos said.
• Her group is also looking to counter recent population and job losses in blue states, which it blames in part on onerous permitting, licensing and zoning rules.
• Many Democrats are worried that the recent influx of voters to GOP-controlled states such as Texas and Florida could weaken their party when voting maps are redrawn after the 2030 Census.

Several center-left groups have popped up or expanded in the past 18 months, including the think tank Searchlight Institute, Majority Democrats and WelcomePAC.