Pete Buttigieg, a prospective 2028 Democratic presidential contender, told a convention of civic technology workers Friday that the Trump administration’s moves to tear down government institutions have unwittingly given Democrats a “clean slate” to develop more effective ways of delivering government if they win future elections.
“One thing that I’m trying to make sure of in this time of upheaval and rupture and pain is that we don’t wind up with a political agenda emerging, especially from my side, that gives in to the temptation to just say, ‘Well, one day, we’ll have a chance to put everything back to the way it was,” Buttigieg told more than 1,000 people attending the annual summit of Code for America at a South Loop hotel.
“Things are not going back to the way they used to be. That’s OK. I don’t like how we got here, but if you’re in this room, you’re probably the sort of person, or you work with the kinds of people in public service, who have long wished they had a clean sheet to do things on a different basis,” he said.
Buttigieg’s keynote speech came 13 years after he first appeared at the group’s annual meeting as the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, before he made an unsuccessful presidential run and then became secretary of transportation under President Joe Biden.
“I feel like I’m among my people,” Buttigieg, who became mayor at the age of 29 in 2012, said to the younger crowd. Though he has not formally declared a candidacy for president, Buttigieg has made frequent stops in critical 2028 states and before key Democratic demographic groups.
Buttigieg said tech workers in government could find that “this could be as consequential a time as the New Deal and the post-World War II era, when most of the institutions we’re now used to were set up.”
“When I talk about hope, it’s not because I have hope … that it would kind of reverse all this damage that’s been done and get back to some prior status quo. Even if that prior status quo was in some ways better than where we are now, it’s still unacceptable,” he said, never mentioning President Donald Trump by name. “If our political, social and economic arrangements were working, we wouldn’t be here. All of that is what led to all of this, right? And it follows that what we do next could be an opportunity.”
Buttigieg acknowledged that “some amount of repair” to governmental institutions is needed.
“But that’s not the project. The project is to build institutions that are actually going to work for us for the rest of our lives,” he said. “What gives me hope is the idea that for the generations now living, the reward we will get for the terrible price of living through all this upheaval is the obligation and the opportunity to actually come up with something that is better — not just better than now but better than before.”
Buttigieg, who was the first openly gay man to run competitively for a major party presidential nomination in 2020, said a reexamination of the U.S. Constitution, with potential new amendments, should be considered but that “people aren’t used to thinking in those big ways, taking big swings.”
“I’m an ideological moderate but I have become an institutional radical because I think we do need to ask, ‘Do we have the right number of Supreme Court justices on the Supreme Court? Do we have the right number of representatives in the House of Representatives? Do we have the right number of states in the United States?’ These are all fair-game questions.”
With the rapid development and use of artificial intelligence, or AI, a major topic of discussion at the convention, Buttigieg said, “It will either lead to even more absurd concentrations of wealth and power than we’ve already got, or it’ll lead to a shorter workweek and more money in your pocket.”
“Which of those futures we get is not fundamentally a technology question. It’s a policy choice, so that’s where I’m trying to push the political conversation,” he said. “You can be the absolute core of the project of figuring out how to take these AI tools and … solve incredibly important problems around affordability and poverty and access to healthcare and safety, all the things. But also, you will need to be at the forefront of figuring out how to guide something whose time has come through all of the barriers that stand between its potential and its reality.”
