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Pete Buttigieg: “That was ARPA dollars.”

Featuring: Pete Buttigieg, Democratic | Former Secretary of Transportation, Former Mayor of South Bend | National

Deans Forum - A Conversation with Pete Buttigieg: "Leadership, Innovation and the Next Generation"

Published January 28, 2026 | Video Starts at 18:12

And halfway through the run, I said, you know, wait a minute. I don't remember this being in our parks Bond. How did James pay for this? And Joe said, oh, That was ARPA dollars. I was a member of the administration with, with, with my federal security detail in tow, and I didn't even know that, that, that we had funded that. (18:12–18:14)

CLAIM

Asserts that the coal line trail project in South Bend was funded by ARPA dollars.

This is an excerpt from a raw transcript. The assertions have not been audited or verified. Tap the video to view the source footage and understand the context.

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Pete Buttigieg

“The data centers are $10 billion projects.”
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“At the time that the Security Council was set up, something like 90% of people in China were rural peasants.”
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“Today, people living in China, for the most part, enjoy superior technology in transportation and certain other sectors to people living in…”
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“South Bend was a billion dollar mandate from the EPA to change the way that the sewer system emptied into the river.”
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“The interconnection between the life of the university and the city has become extraordinary.”
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“The world [children are] coming into will obviously be so radically transformed.”
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“We seem to have less access to the truth now than we did 20 years ago.”
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“The most important questions about how AI will unfold...are fundamentally policy questions.”
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“We have decisions to make, whether it's public policy about the economy and who gets to benefit from the enormous wealth that is being…”
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“Educational institutions will of course have to develop policies that will support the building of tools that we need to do on our own.”
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“There's no more reason to expect automatically that [AI] will make us worse at thinking than it is to assume that the advent of the…”
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“We've had the benefit of about a 100 year period in which any question of fact could mostly be settled...if somebody...could produce a…”
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“That's no longer available to us, or it's in the process of, we're in the process of losing it.”
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“Few places are more vulnerable to it [AI], but I think also a few places have more value that they might be able to unlock from it than…”
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“The GM facility alone, that's three or $4 billion.”
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“I met with electrical worker apprentices in classes with more than 200 people at a time.”
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“It used to be maybe a dozen union electrical workers in an apprentice class, if you were lucky.”
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“We invested in this community both in ways that were very much associated with the administration, like EVs and newer clean tech industry.”
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“When I took office, our per capita income, I think, was 17,000 or $18,000 per person.”
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“Unemployment was double digits.”
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“Newsweek said we were one of America's 10 dying cities.”
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“Universities are under attack not because they are liberal, but because they are independent.”
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“The moment that we become the kind of country where your ability to get a job or your eligibility to get cancer research funding or your…”
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“The example set by the Republican members of the State assembly is so powerful and important because they were pushed to do something that…”
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“What every firm, every university and every politician has discovered if they tried to play the game of this administration in order to…”
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“The rules-based international order has always been one in which the rules were bent.”
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“We have some institutions that are designed to be robust enough that they last for centuries, like the US Constitution.”
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“Most of the biggest changes, transformations, upheavals in human history were driven by young people.”
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“If you want to testify in Congress, you have to be invited or subpoenaed.”
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“If you want to speak in front of the elected officials making decisions in the South Bend Common Council, you show up on a Monday night.”
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“When I see a five year old child used as bait in Texas in an immigration race, trade to get a hold of his parents who, from what I…”
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“An American citizen is being dragged out on a cold Minnesota day in his underwear by troops.”
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“Political Instagram or TikTok or whatever it's going to be, which by the way, has overtaken actual media journalism, is how a lot of people…”
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“By doing [this], it could save hundreds of millions of dollars, which meant thousands of dollars per family in their water rates in a low…”
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“We faced this here during the first Trump administration before it ever came to the level that we're dealing with right now.”
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“Now two years later, they're backtracking, some of them writing off billions of dollars of value that was effectively just wiped out by the…”
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“Our administration... believed not only that there was an environmental benefit to electric vehicles, but that there was a strategic benefit…”
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“If you're an automaker, you intend to do your product planning on about a four year cycle.”
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“We're supposed to be a country that has less vulnerability to policy whiplash than other systems.”
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“The filibuster... should be done away with.”
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“Government in general at the federal level has become so unresponsive to people, to what people actually think, that you get these lurches.”
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“The way we elect members of Congress is not set in the Constitution.”
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“The electoral college is a problem.”
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“I think a constitutional amendment to get money out of politics is appropriate.”
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“Most Americans want [a constitutional amendment to get money out of politics].”
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