Gloria Shepherd must feel like she has whiplash.
The executive director of the Federal Highway Administration, a career federal bureaucrat who signed off on the government's approval of congestion pricing last year, is about to become a household name in New York City thanks to her boss's decision last week to scrap that very same federal approval — and the MTA's decision to sue her agency and her in federal court minutes later.
And yet, this is what she signed up for, colleagues and friends told Streetsblog.
"People at the Federal Highway Administration are committed public servants, working nights and weekends for the American people, regardless who the president is," said a former staffer at the highest level of the U.S. DOT during the Biden administration who declined to give their name in the current climate of reprisal. "There are 58,000 people who work there, and all but very few are public servants as opposed to political appointees. They are used to transitions.
"It's true that now they are facing a particularly challenging set of circumstances," the source said, using diplomacy to describe the frenetic pace of change under President Trump. "But they are used to this."
Another former FHWA official said Shepherd, a New Yorker who has been with the agency for 25 years, understands, but won't get caught up in, the mendacity of the decision by President Trump and U.S. DOT Secretary Sean Duffy to throw out her agency's work and its research by reversing the federal approval of congestion pricing.
"The argument [put forth by Duffy] is specious and is being used to take down a lot of people's really good work, but career staffers don't get upset because they do a lot of things that see the light of day and then are later pulled back, as well as plenty of good work that never sees the light of day to begin with," said Andrew Wishnia, who was the first-ever head of climate policy in the U.S. Department of Transportation under Secretary Pete Buttigieg after working in the White House and both houses of Congress. (That job appears to no longer exist.)
He described officials like Shepherd in the way one understands how baseball pitchers must learn to shake off a bad loss so that they can come back the next day and fight again.
"They're true civil servants who just do what's requested of them," he said.
Sure, but they're also human beings, added a third person who worked with Shepherd and requested anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about her.
"Gloria Shepherd is a best-in-class career professional," said this former New York City DOT official who dealt with FHWA during the congestion pricing debate. "But can you imagine how disheartened she and her team are? They were so proud of having done this extremely rigorous process and getting it over the finish line only to have the president undo all of it as part of an ideological war on New York that's masquerading as policy."
This official also pointed out that the federal approval granted by FHWA to the MTA to implement congestion pricing is exactly where the career professionals do the non-political work of government.
"It's an authorization tool for state and local innovation," the former official said. "It is not even meant to be a place where a president carries out policy, such as on a discretionary grant."
The Trump administration has not nominated anyone to replace Shepherd, which is somewhat strange, given that her long history with the FHWA culminated wth President Biden naming her executive director, the first woman, and the first Black woman, to hold the position. She helped carry out the spending allocated by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which the current president is trying to undo.
Whatever her colleagues say, it certainly can't feel good to have her name on the MTA's lawsuit against her own agency — a lawsuit by a transit agency with which FHWA was fully cooperating just a few months ago. Now she's not only dealing with that reality, but being atop an entire agency filled with professionals whose work was just thrown out by the new president and "a DOT Secretary who comes to the government from Fox News and 'The Real World,'" said a third person who knows Shepherd.
"It's really disheartening for folks to see thoughtful and substantive analysis be pushed aside for a political win on TV," said the insider.
Disheartening, but she's a pro, Wishnia said.
"I know Gloria very well and I'm guessing that she knew what she was getting into," he said. "As the executive director for the Federal Highway Administration, she is also the chief engineer to the United States federal government, so by law, she will get named to lawsuits and she knows that. She might not have known that she was going to end up in this lawsuit, but she knows that that position has [legal] exposure."
The FHWA did not respond to questions for this story and denied Streetsblog's interview request.
