The latest victim of Trump’s obsession with management of the efficiency is the guy who made the trains work in time. Stephen Gardner, the Director General of Amtrak, who has held the post since 2022, abruptly announced that he would resign from his role on Wednesday following Donald Trump and Elon Musk by placing the train company in the crosses for possible privatization.
In a a StatementGardner said, “I retire as CEO to ensure that Amtrak continues to enjoy the full trust and confidence of this administration.” Before playing the highest role at the company, he served as Amtrak’s chief operating and business officer beginning in 2009 and as the president of the organization beginning in 2020. And while he was hanging in the C-suite for some time, Gardner has some sufficiently solid credentials as a train. He previously served as manager and operator for the Maine Central Railroad, and he founded a punk band named Chesswho took his name from the defunct Chesapeake and Ohio Railway.
Even so (or because of that), Gardner found himself between a rock and a hard place with the new management. Trump’s path for Amtrak is not new – new tried Cut federal funding for the company in half During his first administration – but this time is a sharper turn. Billions of dollars of support for the railroad captured Trump’s federal financial freezing earlier this year, and secretary of Transport Department Sean Duffy pressed Amtrak End Programs on diversity, equality, and inclusion and orders return to office orders for employees or lose federal support.
Even when Gardner tried along with most of the Trump’s demands management, it seemed inevitable that he and the company would continue to receive a significant scrutiny. Earlier this month, Elon Musk suggested that Amtrak and the US Postal Service be privatized. He called Amtrak “a kind of embarrassment” and said in a conference, “If you come from another country, please do not use our national railway. It can leave you with a very bad impression of America.”
Amtrak dates from a year with Record ridingfacilitated in no small part of ongoing expansion of available routes that are part of a plan to serve An additional 40 million people with rail service in the coming years.
Now, maybe privatizing the company would expand that. Let’s check out how Musk’s boring company acted with its efforts to offer high -speed, massive transitional solutions … it seems that the company has spent more than Seven years building 2.4 miles of a proposed 68-mile network in Las Vegas, all done with Minimum overview or intervention by regulators. And that’s the best showing of the company! That does not even affect the mass of projects that the boring company has promised only delay or direct abandonment Because they have proven too expensive to continue. Say what you want about Amtrak, but it doesn’t look so bad by comparison.
