Pete Buttigieg explains: How the debt limit impacts transportation

Pete Buttigieg explains: How the debt limit impacts transportation | GZERO Media

Failure to raise the debt limit could be catastrophic for the US – and global – economy.

But a deal to lift the cap could also end up causing pain to many Americans. For example, the $4 trillion in spending cuts proposed by House Republicans would significantly disrupt US travel, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told Ian Bremmer on GZERO World. Republicans who voted to slash the budget should have to explain to the American people why they “might have to wait a couple more hours in a security line at an airport because of the cuts to TSA,” Buttigieg argues. "These are real impacts that are going to have a real effect on our everyday lives, not to mention on our economy."

Watch the interview in the upcoming episode of GZERO World, airing on US public television nationwide. Check local listings.

More from GZERO Media

A robot waiter, serving drinks at the Vivatech technology startups and innovation fair, in Paris, on May 24, 2024.

  • Magali Cohen / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect

Imagine sitting down at a restaurant, speaking your order into your menu, and immediately watching a robot arrive with your food. Imagine the food being made quickly, precisely — and without a human involved, because the entire restaurant is fully roboticized.

- YouTube

Forget the fancy cars, futuristic gadgets, and martinis “shaken, not stirred.” In his book "Sell Like a Spy: The Art of Persuasion from the World of Espionage", Jeremy Hurewitz tells GZERO's Tony Maciulis that intelligence officers are a lot more like therapists than James Bond-style action heroes.

ZOHRAN MAMDANI, Rama Duwaji, MIRA NAIR, MAMOOD MAMDANI during an election night event at The Brooklyn Paramount Theater in the Brooklyn borough of New York, US, on Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2025.
(Photo by Neil Constantine/NurPhoto)

Last Tuesday, a self-identified democratic socialist who ran on making New York affordable for the 99% won the city’s mayoral race in a landslide, defeating former Governor Andrew Cuomo. And the reactions have been predictably hysterical.

A fruit and vegetable stall is lit by small lamps during a blackout in a residential neighborhood in Kyiv, Ukraine, on November 6, 2025, after massive Russian attacks on Ukraine's energy infrastructure in October.
(Photo by Maxym Marusenko/NurPhoto)

As a fourth winter of war approaches, Russia is destroying Ukraine’s energy grid faster than it can be rebuilt.