Foxx, a former mayor of Charlotte, was sworn in as the 17th U.S. Secretary of Transportation after receiving a 100-0 confirmation vote and entered an agency under distress. Congress had not approved a long-term surface transportation bill in more than a decade. The entire government faced sequestration funding and, within six months, was shut down entirely for 16 days. Rather than scale back the agency’s ambitions, Foxx plowed forward and, as a result, had one of the most consequential runs in the history of the Department.

Foxx developed the Obama Administration’s first surface transportation bill and worked on a bipartisan basis to get its congressional incarnation, the FAST Act, passed. He consolidated the Department’s innovative financing programs and accelerated permitting policies into a new Build America Bureau and put a new executive director in place before my departure. He embraced technology by pushing forward new rules governing the commercial use of drones, blueprinted the most comprehensive national policy on autonomous vehicles in the world, and launched the Department’s first, and the Administration’s most successful, Smart City Challenge, engaging more than 70 cities to develop their own strategies to incorporate new technologies into their transportation networks. He placed nearly $30 billion in discretionary federal grants around the country, giving rise to a national pipeline of projects now poised to seek innovative financing, including the NY-NJ Gateway Project, Chicago Union Station, Florida East Coast High Speed Rail, and Texas Central Railway.

​Foxx currently commutes between Chevy Chase, Maryland and New York City but still calls North Carolina home.