Peter Paul Montgomery Buttigieg ( BOO-tij-əj; born January 19, 1982) is an American politician and former naval officer who served as the 19th United States secretary of transportation from 2021 to 2025. A member of the Democratic Party, he previously served as the 32nd mayor of South Bend, Indiana, from 2012 to 2020.
Buttigieg is a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Oxford, attending the latter on a Rhodes Scholarship. In 2007, he began three years of work at the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company. From 2009 to 2017, he was an intelligence officer in the United States Navy Reserve, attaining the rank of lieutenant. He was mobilized and deployed to the war in Afghanistan for seven months in 2014. Afterwards, he worked on the political campaigns of Democrats Jill Long Thompson, Joe Donnelly, and John Kerry, and was the unsuccessful Democratic nominee for Indiana state treasurer in 2010. In 2011, he was elected mayor of South Bend. In 2015, Buttigieg was re-elected, coming out as gay earlier that year. He married Chasten Glezman, a schoolteacher and writer, in June 2018. Buttigieg declined to seek a third term as mayor.
In April 2019, Buttigieg announced a 2020 presidential campaign, making him the first openly gay man to launch a Democratic presidential campaign. During the Democratic Party primaries, he gained significant momentum in mid-2019 after several town hall meetings and television debates. Buttigieg narrowly won the Iowa caucuses while placing second in the popular vote, and placed a close second in the New Hampshire primary. By winning Iowa, he became the first openly gay candidate to win a presidential primary or caucus. Buttigieg dropped out of the race on March 1, 2020, and endorsed Joe Biden the following day.
After Biden won the 2020 presidential election, he named Buttigieg as his nominee for Secretary of Transportation in December 2020. His nomination was confirmed on February 2, 2021, by a vote of 86–13, making him the first openly gay Cabinet secretary in U.S. history. Nominated at age 38, he was also the youngest Cabinet member in the Biden administration and the youngest person ever to serve as Secretary of Transportation. After Biden withdrew his re-election campaign in 2024, Buttigieg was considered as a potential running mate for Kamala Harris, though he was ultimately not selected.
Pete Buttigieg was born on January 19, 1982, in South Bend, Indiana, to Jennifer "Anne" Montgomery and Joseph Anthony Buttigieg II. He is an only child. His parents met and married while employed as faculty at New Mexico State University. His father was born in Ħamrun, Malta, and emigrated to the United States to pursue his doctorate. Buttigieg's father embarked on a career as a professor of English at the University of Notre Dame near South Bend. Buttigieg's mother also taught at the University of Notre Dame for 29 years. His father, a translator of Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks and the editor of a three-volume English edition, influenced his son's decision to study literature in college.
Buttigieg was valedictorian of the class of 2000 at St. Joseph High School in South Bend. That year, he won first prize in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum's Profiles in Courage essay contest. He traveled to Boston where he accepted the award and met Caroline Kennedy and other members of the Kennedy family. The subject of his essay was the integrity and political courage of then U.S. representative Bernie Sanders of Vermont, one of only two independent politicians in Congress.
In 2000, Buttigieg was one of two students chosen to be a delegate from Indiana to the United States Senate Youth Program, an annual scholarship competition sponsored jointly by the U.S. Senate and the Hearst Foundations.
In his last high-school year, Buttigieg was named the school valedictorian, voted senior class president and chosen Most Likely to be U.S. President.
After graduating from high school, Buttigieg attended Harvard College, where he majored in history and literature. He became president of the Student Advisory Committee of the Harvard Institute of Politics and worked on the institute's annual study of youth attitudes on politics. His undergraduate thesis, The Quiet American's Errand into the Wilderness, examined the influence of Puritanism on U.S. foreign policy as reflected in Graham Greene's novel The Quiet American. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 2004, and was elected a member of Phi Beta Kappa.
Buttigieg was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at the University of Oxford. In 2007, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree with first-class honours in philosophy, politics, and economics after studying at Pembroke College, Oxford. At Oxford, he was an editor of the Oxford International Review, and was a co-founder and member of the Democratic Renaissance Project, an informal debate and discussion group of approximately a dozen Oxford students.
Before graduating from college, Buttigieg was an investigative intern at WMAQ-TV, Chicago's NBC News affiliate. He also interned for Democrat Jill Long Thompson during her unsuccessful 2002 congressional bid.
After college, Buttigieg worked on John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign as a policy and research specialist for several months in Arizona and New Mexico. From 2004 to 2005, Buttigieg was conference director of the Cohen Group. In 2006, he lent assistance to Joe Donnelly's successful congressional campaign.
After earning his Oxford degree, in 2007, Buttigieg became a consultant at the Chicago office of McKinsey & Company, where he worked on energy, retail, economic development, and logistics for three years. His clients at McKinsey included the health insurer Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan; electronics retailer Best Buy; Canadian supermarket chain Loblaws; two nonprofit environmentalist groups, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Energy Foundation; and several U.S. government agencies, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Energy Department, Defense Department, and Postal Service. He took a leave of absence from McKinsey in 2008 to become research director for Jill Long Thompson's unsuccessful campaign for Indiana governor. His work at McKinsey included trips to Iraq and Afghanistan, which he rarely discusses. Buttigieg left McKinsey in 2010 in order to focus full-time on his campaign for Indiana state treasurer.
Buttigieg has been involved with the Truman National Security Project since 2005 and serves as a fellow with expertise in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He was named to the organization's board of advisors in 2014.
Buttigieg joined the U.S. Navy Reserve through the direct commission officer (DCO) program and was sworn in as an ensign in naval intelligence in September 2009. He took a seven-month leave during his mayoral term to deploy to Afghanistan in 2014. While there, Buttigieg was part of a unit assigned to identify and disrupt terrorist finance networks. Part of this was done at Bagram Air Base, but he was also an armed driver for his commander on more than 100 trips into Kabul, where he was tasked with watching out for ambushes and explosive devices along the roads and ensuring that the vehicle was guarded. Buttigieg has jokingly referred to this role as "military Uber". Also, while deployed in Afghanistan, Buttigieg was assigned to the Afghan Threat Finance Cell, a counterterrorism unit that targeted Taliban insurgency financing. Buttigieg was awarded the Joint Service Commendation Medal. He left the U.S. Navy Reserve in 2017.
Indiana state treasurer election
Buttigieg was the Democratic nominee for state treasurer of Indiana in 2010. He received 37.5 percent of the vote, losing to Republican incumbent Richard Mourdock. Much of Buttigieg's campaign had focused on criticizing Mourdock for investing state pension funds in Chrysler junk bonds, and for having subsequently filed a lawsuit against Chrysler's bankruptcy restructuring, which Buttigieg argued imperiled Chrysler jobs in the state of Indiana.