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Today's guest on The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie is Pete Buttigieg, former secretary of transportation and already a leading, if undeclared, contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028. Buttigieg reflects on his time in government, his evolving views on federal power, and why he thinks DOGE was a good idea that was poorly executed. An outspoken critic of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under Donald Trump, Buttigieg says that the use of masked agents and martial tactics against nonviolent immigrants contributes to a loss of trust and confidence among the public. That trust can be restored, he argues, through transparency and restraint. "If you're here and you shouldn't be and you're dangerous, you've got to go," he says, "but it does not to follow from that that it's okay to see all of this abusive behavior coming from federal immigration troops…in our cities." Gillespie and Buttigieg debate the role of government, federal spending, subsidizing high-speed rail, and the rate of social progress, and they explore possible areas of overlap between Democrats and libertarians. 0:00–ICE accountability and immigration policy8:40–What can Democrats offer libertarian voters?11:05–The national debt and federal spending15:50–Automation and government efficiency21:23–The private sector versus public benefit26:31–Tariffs and free trade34:20–Democratic Party failures in 202441:35–Identity politics43:40–Responding to Kamala Harris' comments46:25–Perceptions of Millennial and Gen Z voters49:00–Republican messaging around trans people52:23–National service and shared identity Transcript This is an AI-generated, AI-edited transcript. Check all quotes against the audio for accuracy. Nick Gillespie: This is The Reason Interview with Nick Gillespie. Thanks for listening. Today I'm talking with former South Bend, Indiana, mayor and secretary of transportation, Pete Buttigieg, one of the most visible, nationally recognized Democrats. He's been making the rounds of colleges and podcasts and cable news shows over the past few months. He's going all over the country. My producer tells me that he's headed to New Hampshire soon, according to his mailing list. Which might be an indication that he's running for president or thinking about it. I'm talking with him today less because he's one of the most prominent Democrats in the country, and more because he's been reaching out to libertarians on issues recently such as holding ICE accountable. Pete Buttigieg, thanks for talking to Reason. Pete Buttigieg: Thanks a lot for having me on. Glad to be with you. So first up, are you running for president? I'm a long way from any kind of decision like that. But I do know that as somebody who has a level of national visibility and really cares about the issues going on in the country, that I should be speaking out, traveling, trying to reach different kinds of audiences, and that's what I'm doing. And listening, right? You should be listening. Yes, absolutely. As much listening. Well, let's talk a little bit about ICE because I think you recently, about a couple of weeks ago, you had a tweet. This was after Rénee Good and Alex Pretti were shot and killed by ICE agents. You tweeted, "If there was ever a moment for libertarians and conservatives to step up and join the rest of us, we're in it. Americans have to unite and stop this descent from a freedom-loving nation into the kind of place where masked, militarized government agents are sent to politically noncompliant areas to roam the streets, terrorize civilians, and deploy violence with impunity." To which I say, absolutely I would, for the record, Reason, which has been around since 1968, we don't have house editorials, but all of our writers opposed the PATRIOT Act and then the Homeland Security Act of 2002, which created DHS and ICE. What should we be doing in terms of removing illegal aliens who are in the country? Just as a kind of starting point? Well, look, I think there is a kind of common sense consensus among most Americans, left, right, and center, that if somebody is a danger to society, if somebody has a criminal record, then they need to be dealt with. They need to be deported and/or dealt with in our criminal justice system. And I don't think there's a ton of disagreement with that. And I think a lot of people who voted for this administration did so believing that they would prioritize the most dangerous, the people with the worst criminal records. After all, they said that they would. The challenge, of course, is we've seen something that's gone so far beyond that, where you have people who have been in this country, everything legal other than they don't have permission to be here. Everything else, paying taxes, often having work permits, doing what they're supposed to do, as well as people who are a hundred percent legal. People with some kind of asylum or refugee status. And even United States citizens, all being caught up in being on the abusive end, the business end, of this administration's immigration policy. So I think we can start with a reasonably consensus place that says that, "Look, if you're here and you shouldn't be and you're dangerous, you got to go." And not have it follow from that, that it's okay to see all of this abusive behavior coming from federal immigration troops, basically, agents in our cities. How much is it? It's stuff like the masking and the rush to hire thousands of new ICE agents. Clearly, the training couldn't have been as good as it was going to be beforehand. You've talked a lot about this. I certainly do in my writings, about a loss of trust and confidence in government institutions. People don't trust ICE; they don't trust the police. They certainly don't trust the government or the media or the church the way that they used to. How do you go about changing ICE quickly so that people are more comfortable actually helping it do its legitimate functions? Yeah, this breakdown of trust has obviously been going on for a long time. I think it's a huge problem. I wrote a whole book about it about 5 or 6 years ago now. And it's only become more serious since then. And I thought a lot about how trust, in particular between law enforcement and citizens, is earned, because of my time as mayor. Where I oversaw a police force, we had a lot of challenges with that police force and its relationship to the community. And part of where trust was earned was that people knew each other, the members of the community and the members of the police department. The policing worked best when people trusted those in uniform, they'll keep them safe, turned to them when they needed help, when they had information that could help solve a crime. Was South Bend a sanctuary city by any chance? We didn't have that kind of formal policy. We did believe that there was a distinction between what our police were supposed to be doing and what federal immigration were supposed to do. And that was important because I was very worried that if local residents thought that our police were out there conducting immigration raids, they were going to be less likely to talk to us when we needed their help to solve a crime, including a violent one. One of the arguments for a variety of sanctuary city policies is that it actually helps with local law enforcement substantially. But another thing is, I think it's inconceivable in at least any police department I've ever seen, that you would have your police officers at a community-level be unwilling to show their face. So that's a good starting point to think about. Shouldn't that community model have at least some relevance to what we expect from our federal law enforcement? Another way to put it is, if we're going to give you the power to use deadly force on American soil, potentially against citizen or non-citizen alike, there's some really basic things we're going to need from you in terms of, first of all, I think showing your face and identifying yourself and having a body camera, so there's a record of what you're doing. But also of course, more deeply, a level of accountability and a level of responsibility and a level of training, of course. How do you respond to people? Conservative critics will say, "Well, ICE is uniquely doxxed all the time. That people are following them home, that they're at a particular level of risk that no other type of law enforcement is." You hear this quite often. I think we should approach this in a fact-based way. So what I've seen in terms of people losing their lives and being physically harmed, is that happening much more frequently to people who are being abused by ICE than to members of ICE. But let me be clear, it is completely wrong to harm or dox anybody, including anybody doing their job as a federal employee or law enforcement. But we have ways of dealing with that, right? Part of what the FBI does is if there is a threat or a physical attack directed against anyone federal, from federal law enforcement to a member of the US Cabinet, the FBI should be dealing with that. But ICE has now been given more money than the FBI itself. And the question comes with, if you pump that much money and that much authority into a law enforcement agency that's supposed to have a very specific, relatively narrow mission, what are they going to do with it? So I think it's a real problem when this administration tries to make it sound like ICE is the victim, including trying to make it sound like they were the victim in cases where they killed somebody. And I think it shows you how removed from reality they are. But I also, I want to confess, as somebody who had many late-night arguments with conservative and libertarian friends over beers as a college student where they would invoke the idea of federal agents running amok through our streets. I never believed… Jackbooted thugs. Jackbooted thugs. Yeah. So I feel like in a way, I was right on one hand and they were right on one hand. I think they were right that that's more real than I ever could have imagined. I still think I had a point in what might lead us there. Which turned out to be the kind of administration we have. But that's precisely why I think people in my party ought to be reaching out to conservatives and especially to libertarians saying, "We're not going to agree on everything, but there's got to be some common cause here." Let's talk about those common causes a little bit. More broadly, Reason's motto is "Free Minds and Free Markets." We like civil liberties and economic liberties. Being able to run a business the way you want, watch the kind of culture that you want to watch, things like that. What's the Buttigieg agenda that will speak to libertarians who tend to be kind of politically—certainly in a partisan way—homeless. Often vote Republican, not my personal experience, but many of that. What do you have to offer libertarian voters who would definitely be enough to sway any kind of election that we're going to be seeing over the next couple of years? I think the core of what I have to say is that I am driven by a commitment to freedom, and I think as anyone libertarian views themselves as having that same core commitment. To me, there are three things, three categories of things, that the government has to do in order for us to be free. One, it has to provide basic services, because you're actually not free if you can't get clean, safe drinking water out of the tap or if you don't have national defense. Two, it has to constrain anybody who could make you unfree. This is traditionally the thing progressives are more interested in. Right? I would say that means if your boss can make you unfree, if your neighbor can make you unfree, if your cable company can make you unfree, there can be a role for government. But then the third part is, in order for you to be free, the third thing a government has to do is constrain itself. And this is the area that I think, honestly, it was conservatives and libertarians who paid more attention to, or talked about it more, for most of my lifetime in most of the kind of commentary spaces that are out there. But the now is a moment that I think all of us are alive to. So I guess what I have to offer is a politics where of course we're going to have a push-pull tug-of-war on exactly what it means to make good on those three things. Right. But the result should be that if we get government right, make it maybe more powerful in certain ways where I think it should have more power to deal with monopolies, for example, or with inequality, but also make government less powerful when it comes to surveillance and intimidation and some of the other things we're seeing on the streets of American cities right now that we would in fact enjoy more freedom as Americans. Yeah. Let's talk about some of the big-picture issues, which have to do with things like the national debt. Taxes get lowered incrementally, etc. But generally speaking, we are usually pulling in somewhere between about 15 and 19 percent of GDP as tax revenue. Spending has really skyrocketed from being close to that to now being in the 20, 25 percent range of GDP. I was watching a clip of you on a podcast recently, and you were talking about how like if there had been a legitimate Department of Government Efficiency, that would've been a good thing. How do we restrain spending where we're spending $6–7 trillion where 5, 6 years ago we were still spending under $5 trillion? Yeah, I mean, this is where I think there's a real tragedy in what DOGE did, not just because they were very, in my view, very destructive, but because they missed a chance to make real change that could have made government run more efficiently. And here too, even though my federal government experience was running a very large agency with a very large budget, my original instincts were fashioned when I was mayor of a city with a comparatively small budget, about $300 million. We did our budget in cash. I couldn't go print money. And if we wanted to do something more, we either had to do less of something else or to figure out a way to do it for less money. And there are certainly opportunities. I saw them myself. I saw, to take a very small example, our database for customer complaints about airlines running on 1980s technology that meant that the time, and therefore money, associated with running it for department staff was just overwhelmingly more than it had to be. You go from there all the way up to things that we know happen, certainly in the DOD. My time in Afghanistan, I saw a building that was built at enormous expense, never used and then tore down over the years. We know there are many examples like that. Now, I also think if we're going to talk about spending, which we should, we also have to talk about revenue. I think there is a happy medium, a reasonable place where giant corporations aren't paying zero. Where very wealthy people aren't paying less proportionately than school teachers and firefighters. That is not so heavy in tax that it stifles innovation and growth, but is enough that we're not looming this big debt. But what can be done to, as I was saying, tax revenue, and this is something… If you go back to the 1950s, even when the top marginal rate was in the '70s or '80s or even '90s, the revenue that's generated tends to be pretty stable because billionaires… Companies pass costs on to customers or employees. Billionaires, they're the ones wh…
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