The Tartan

Since interviewing Pete Buttigieg a year ago, I now see similarities in the rhetoric.

In Jan. 2024, I spoke with then-Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg, when he came to visit Carnegie Mellon. Current Editor-in-Chief Arden Ryan and I had a spirited conversation with him about electric cars, transportation safety, and reindustrialization. You can read a transcript of our coverage of his visit last year. I have finally gotten around to reflecting on this conversation. 

For the past year, I have been mulling over his answer to my final question from our interview. To paraphrase, I asked him: Why should we be excited for the tech industry to move into cities like Pittsburgh? Especially considering the negative impacts of the steel industry’s departure, should we not be concerned? I asked this because his tech-optimistic ideas about innovation, progress, and the return of American industry being the key to our nation’s continued prosperity are the topics of many such talks at this school. I heard it from Rebecca Fannin, author of “Silicon Heartland: Transforming The Midwest from Rust Belt to Tech Belt,” when she came to speak about her book; I hear it from the Carnegie Mellon Institute of Strategy and Technology (CMIST) in their ongoing “Scientists and Strategists Speaker Series.”

Obviously, the people of Carnegie Mellon are going to say that our school’s innovation is key to America’s future; but for someone in the actual, real government to echo this sentiment was fascinating to me. I wanted to ask him: is this really the best path forward?

In the ‘80s and ‘90s, steel companies didn’t flinch at leaving thousands unemployed. Pittsburgh bore the brunt of this deindustrialization, as did cities like Detroit, Dayton, and Cleveland with their own industries. The loss of jobs was so severe that this part of America is now called the “Rust Belt.”

So really, why trust industry again? Why should we keep putting faith into job creators when the jobs they create are only a by-product of their real goal, profit? We saw what happened when steel left, so why should we let computing, autonomous manufacturing, and robotics take up the mantle? Just because they’re new doesn’t mean they’re different.

“I don’t think the answer is to give up on industry,” Buttigieg told me. “I think the answer is to stay … one step ahead of the times.”

Like a shark that must always swim, the United States must remain one step ahead of the ever-pursuing “times” which threaten to corrode our economy like so much rust. 

“That’s part of what’s exciting about a place like Pittsburgh — or for that matter, a place like where I grew up [South Bend, Indiana]. Instead of just being a factory town with the university in it, you could have an industrial center where the life of the community and the economy is plugged into the research and the studies that take place. That also keeps things ahead of the curve.”

You’ve heard this already. This is not new. Technology is the future, and the future belongs to those who build it: the innovators, the dreamers, the Carnegies, the Mellons, and the Universities. This is why you’re at this school, maybe. I have been excited about building spaceships and robots ever since I had the pinch strength to pry apart two LEGOs. This is my jam.

But in the months that followed my conversation with Buttigieg, I thought deeply about this. “One step ahead of the times” is not a great motto, and I believe following it will lead us down a dangerous path. Let me tell you a story to explain why.

A history professor, a policy professor, a state government official, and a number-cruncher for the federal government walk into a bar. What lecture series are they a part of?

The answer would be “Deeper Conversations,” a lecture series created by Carnegie Mellon president Farnham Jahanian to thread the needle of placating both the pro-Palestine and pro-Israel alumni after he realized that university presidents were going to be under a microscope regarding their free speech policy in 2024. The lectures began explicitly as a forum to discuss the war between Israel and Hamas, and now has progressed into other topics.

The lectures are, like, fine. I’ve attended a couple. Some made me angry, and some I found interesting. I reckon that’s about the best they can do, given their impossible duty.

On March 20, 2025, I attended a Deeper Conversation titled “History of the Role of Government: Expansions, Reductions and Shaping the Nation.” The first speaker was Karl Maschino, a Carnegie Mellon alumnus with the expansive title, “Distinguished Service Professor of Public Policy and Management, Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy, Alumnus and former Chief Financial and Administrative Officer and Co-Chief Risk Officer of the U.S. Government Accountability Office.”

Before I get into a summary, I want to make it clear that Maschino is not my enemy. This isn’t a takedown of how horrible and one-sided their presentations were. In fact, I found the conversation enlightening. Deeper, even.

Maschino talked about the history of the U.S. federal budget, how and why the debt is the size it is, and the future of the American economy. It was interesting. We have generated an unbelievable amount of debt: $36 trillion dollars, roughly double what it was when I graduated the eighth grade.

Not to pull the whippersnapper card, but this makes me a little angry. I will have to live with this debt for longer than the people who incurred it. Though in spite of my anger, it seems that I am not free to desist from this work, so I’d like to know how to solve this problem.

So I, being a curious and concerned citizen, scanned the provided QR and submitted a simple question: “Will the U.S. ever pay off its debt? If so, what will that require of us?” Maschino read this off to his panel, which consisted of three Carnegie Mellon professors, one of whom has worked in the Pennsylvania state legislature. These people don’t hold the levers of federal power, but they certainly should be thinking about how to tackle this monumental issue. Maybe just a spitball or two. Right?

But I heard crickets. Nobody wanted to take up the question. After a tense chuckle swept the audience, Maschino shouldered the task of answering.

“I do think that if you think about the debt in terms of GDP like in that one slide, that helps to understand it a little better.” He is referring to the chart of national debt as a percentage of GDP, which properly contextualizes the rise in debt over the last 50 years. The rise appears less meteoric when properly adjusted, but in 2025 it is still about as high as it’s ever been. 

“I think focusing on our economy is an important part of at least maintaining a level of debt that is somewhat manageable. And I think part of the answer to that is actually Carnegie Mellon. It’s the science and research that universities like Carnegie Mellon do, but it’s also the creative side. It’s really one end of the campus to another, the creativity, science and technology, it’s business, it’s public policy, it’s investing in our future to be able to create the strongest economy possible to keep interest rates down to be the place where the world invests their money. As long as we can continue to maintain that, and continue to focus on that, we’ll be able to manage the debt. Paying it off is not really, something I can really comment on, um, I don’t know. Any comments on that?”

Again, no one chose to speak up.

The audience laughed, briefly considering the precarity and unsustainability of our national project, before the speaker moved to the next question.

“As long as we can continue to maintain that.” As long as we have the strongest possible economy, as long as we have the best technology, as long as our universities continue cranking out profitable machines, as long as we hold the world’s pocketbooks and trust, we should be in the black in no time. And then we have to do that forever.

Why on earth would I put my faith into this philosophy?

Maschino stumbled onto his own version of one step ahead: “as long as we can continue to maintain that.” As long as we trust the universities, trust technology, and trust America’s ability to remain globally dominant. As long as we can continue to maintain that, even though history suggests that we have never maintained that. Boom after bust after boom, our debt has done nothing but grow. If you stop swimming your gills stop working. It’s a Ponzi scheme, and all we need is a constant supply of fresh marks. Our government swallowed a continent, then the Pacific and the Atlantic, then the Middle East, and now we just need to push a little farther and we should be able to pay off the debt it took to get here.  

I don’t want to be an alarmist, but my empire is defaulting on its debts, and I just watched a panel of scholars and policymakers shrug their shoulders on the matter. I can only conclude that this is not a bug of the system, it’s a feature. We wouldn’t have gotten here without debt, and we’re not getting out unless we severely scale back the ambitions of the American government. “A restructuring of the architecture of American society” seems in order.

This conclusion paragraph may seem meager and disappointing. I cannot provide you with a satisfactory call to action because my current post-grad plans are to become jobless. If only I had the right job, or the right words, maybe I would have the ethos to convince you that a “restructuring” is necessary; but I do not. I am deeply afraid of what will happen to my country during my lifetime. I have faith in neither the institution I spent four years at, nor in any of the politicians who flatter my ego by saying that I’m part of the solution by going to a school named after Andrew Carnegie. I don’t think the answer to this fear is to store canned beans in a bunker, but neither do I think the answer is to get a job with Uncle Sam and to trust that Social Security will still exist when my knees start to hurt. The answer is somewhere in the middle, I reckon. I’m hopeful that a middle exists, and I’m hopeful that I’m not the only person who has arrived at this conclusion.