The latest victim of the Trump administration’s obsession with the appearance of efficiency is the guy who made the trains run on time. Stephen Gardner, the Chief Executive Officer of Amtrak who held the post since 2022, abruptly announced that he would be stepping down from his role Wednesday in the wake of Donald Trump and Elon Musk placing the train company in the crosshairs for potential privatization.
In a statement, Gardner said, “I am stepping down as CEO to ensure that Amtrak continues to enjoy the full faith and confidence of this administration.” Prior to taking the top role at the firm, he served as Amtrak’s chief operating and commercial officer starting in 2009 and as the organization’s president starting in 2020. And while he’s been hanging in the C-suite for a while now, Gardner has some pretty solid credentials as a train lover. He previously served as a conductor and operations manager for the Maine Central Railroad, and he founded a punk band called Chessie, which took its name from the defunct Chesapeake and Ohio Railway.
Despite this (or because of it), Gardner found himself between a rock and a hard place with the new administration. Trump’s ire for Amtrak isn’t new—new tried to cut federal funding for the company in half during his first administration—but it’s taken a sharper turn this time around. Billions of dollars of support for the railway got caught in Trump’s federal funding freeze earlier this year, and Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has been pressing Amtrak to end diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and mandate return-to-office orders for employees or lose out on federal support.
Even as Gardner has tried to go along with as much of the Trump administration’s demands as possible, it seemed inevitable that he and the company would continue to receive significant scrutiny. Earlier this month, Elon Musk suggested that Amtrak and the United States Postal Service should be privatized. He called Amtrak “kind of embarrassing” and said at a conference, “If you’re coming from another country, please don’t use our national rail. It can leave you with a very bad impression of America.”
Amtrak is coming off a year with record ridership, facilitated in no small part by 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, perhaps privatizing the company would expand that. Let’s check on how Musk’s Boring Company has been doing with its efforts to offer high-speed, mass transit solutions…it appears the company has spent more than seven years building 2.4 miles of a proposed 68-mile network in Las Vegas, all done with minimal oversight or intervention from regulators. And that’s the company’s best showing! That doesn’t even touch on the multitude of projects that the Boring Company has promised only to delay or straight-up abandon because they proved too costly to continue. Say what you will about Amtrak, but it doesn’t look so bad by comparison.
