Battle of the bulge masstransit driver#
Battle of the bulge masstransit free#

(And that’s only the official defense budget. Somewhere in the middle regions of Barack Obama’s Herculean to-do list is a task that’s defeated many of his predecessors: taming the runaway $534 billion Pentagon budget.

Battle of the bulge masstransit free#

Boyd’s opposition to their subsidies, and it took 15 years to incorporate the Maritime Administration into the department.Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters. Shipowners and maritime unions never forgot Mr. “No matter what you wanted to do or what change you suggested, the response was classically, ‘That’s not the way we do it here,’” he wrote in his memoir. He also found that unifying many agencies was a thicket.

“We’ve got a bucketful of money for highways and only a medicine dropperful for the rest,” Mr.

Battle of the bulge masstransit driver#

He plunged into airport modernization, air traffic control improvements, enforcement of auto safety standards and driver education.īut congressional appropriations dictated that 80 percent of his budget be earmarked for highways, including for Lady Bird Johnson’s highway beautification program, while airlines, railroads and mass transit got short shrift. Boyd, confirmed by the Senate without opposition as the first transportation secretary, picked both Democrats and Republicans as aides, insisting that transportation was nonpartisan. 15, 1966, and the department began operation on April 1, 1967. Boyd led a group that studied the problems, wrote a bill to create the Department of Transportation and shepherded it through Congress.

Americans spent 20 percent of their income on transportation. There were 35 agencies with related responsibilities. In 1966, Johnson revived a long-discussed idea of streamlining the nation’s fragmented transportation systems.

He made his case to shipowners, the Seafarers International Union and to Congress, but got nowhere. And I also know you’re going to get us both killed politically. “ ‘All right, you bastard,’ the president shot back. Those ships had served the United States during World War II and Korea, and they would be available in case of future need. I pointed out that American shipping companies owned hundreds of ships registered under flags of convenience. But I had gotten to know the president, and knew he would take my comments in stride. “Joe seemed shocked that I would address the president in such a tone. President,’ I said, ‘you are crazy as hell.’ If we got into another war without it, we would be totally helpless.’ ‘The merchant marine is our fourth arm of defense. “‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, Alan,’ Johnson said. Boyd, according to his memoir, got into a heated dispute with the president: Invited to the Oval Office to discuss his plan with Johnson and his chief domestic aide, Joseph A. Boyd soon resolved to end what he regarded as wasteful federal subsidies to American merchant ships. Boyd under secretary of commerce for transportation. His eyesight failing at the time, he had dictated the book into a recorder and completed it with his son’s help. 11 attacks, the Transportation Security Administration and the Coast Guard were transferred in 2003 to a new Department of Homeland Security. Lawrence Seaway and other transport entities. Boyd laid the foundations, the Department of Transportation’s $76.5 billion budget and 54,700 employees regulate aviation, railroads, mass transit, shipping, highways, pipelines, the St. The main holdout was the Maritime Administration, which was not brought into the fold until 1981.Ī half-century after Mr. Boyd won relatively high marks for a two-year effort to merge dozens of transportation-related federal agencies into a cabinet-level department with 95,000 employees and a more than $5 billion budget. He died at Aegis at Ravenna, a retirement home, his son, Mark, said.ĭespite resistance from bureaucrats and maritime unions, and having to work with underfunded mass transit systems, Mr. Johnson in 1966 to integrate the nation’s sprawling networks of planes, trains, ships and highways into a new superagency, died on Sunday in Seattle. Boyd, the first United States secretary of transportation, who was named by President Lyndon B.