In a surprise move that perhaps is not so surprising, Stephen Gardner on March 19 announced that he would be stepping down as Amtrak CEO to ensure that “America’s Railroad continues to enjoy the full faith and confidence of this Administration.” His successor has not yet been publicly announced.
“I am so proud of what the Amtrak team has accomplished to bring passenger rail service to more people and places across the country over these past 16 years, and I thank the Board for their trust and support,” he said in a statement. “We did a lot together to make Amtrak safer, more modern and a better travel experience for all our customers. From my start as an Amtrak intern back in the 1990s to ending as CEO, it has been my honor and privilege to lead this great American company, and I wish Amtrak every success. See you on the rails.”
The Board, too, released a statement on the leadership transition, saying that “[a]s Stephen departs today, we thank him for his 16 years of service to Amtrak. We will build on his accomplishments and wish him every success. We look forward to working with [POTUS 47] and Secretary Duffy as we build the world-class passenger rail system this country deserves.”
Gardner was appointed CEO in 2022, succeeding William J. Flynn and following service as President since 2020. Previously, he was Executive Vice President/Chief Operating and Commercial Officer (May 2019-November 2020) and held several other executive positions in policy development, infrastructure investment, technology planning, and marketing. Railway Age readers named Gardner one of 10 Influential Leaders in 2022.
Gardner is a lifelong Democrat and skilled political operative who joined Amtrak in 2009 following a stint on Capitol Hill developing rail and transportation policy for the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation and for Senator Tom Carper (D-Del.) and others. Early in his transportation career, he held various positions with Guilford Rail System (which transitioned to Pan Am Railways and now CSX) and the Buckingham Branch Railroad in Virginia. He is widely recognized as the principal author of PRIIA (Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008). By 2017, he had garnered enough experience to be appointed to Amtrak’s top spot, but “there was no way he’d get the job as long as there was a Republican in the White House, and as long as Elaine Chao was Secretary of Transportation,” one Capitol Hill transportation insider said at the time of his appointment as Amtrak President. “When Democrat Joe Biden, a staunch Amtrak supporter and long-time Amtrak customer, became President-elect, that set the wheels in motion to give Stephen Gardner the throttle. It’s not surprising that the Amtrak Board didn’t wait until Inauguration Day.”
Railway Age Capitol Hill Contributing Editor Frank N. Wilner, author of “Amtrak: Past, Present, Future,” and who wrote for Railway Age a profile of Gardner in February, comments:
“Few Amtrak presidents in the passenger railroad’s more than half-century of existence match Gardner’s devotion to the brand and its employees. Self-described as a political liberal—he previously held senior Democratic Senate staff positions—Gardner becomes another casualty of an Administration whose biases are so undisguised and repulsive that a French member of the European Parliament called for the United States to return the Statue of Liberty to France.
“Most telling is Gardner’s farewell comment that he is departing to ensure Amtrak ‘continues to enjoy the full faith and confidence of the Administration.’ One doesn’t require a Little Orphan Annie decoder ring (cue up iconic movie, ‘Christmas Story’) to translate: Gardner was not going to be a fellow traveler with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy in the muck and ignominy of eviscerating Amtrak under the superintendency of POTUS 47’s unelected First Pal. Sadly playing a leading role in this debacle is an Amtrak Board of Directors displaying all the backbone of a banana. Gardner already was deeply wounded by the Administration’s successful demand that Amtrak’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) program—a model for the public and private sector and largely crafted by Amtrak’s former General Counsel Eldie Acheson—was rubber-stamp ended by Amtrak’s Board.”
“Gardner’s departure comes as [POTUS 47] and U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy send shock waves through transit agencies with threats to pull federal funding from major projects if they don’t comply with new regulations and mandates,” Bloomberg News reporter Sri Taylor reported. “The White House is currently trying to stop New York City’s congestion pricing plan, and Duffy recently launched a review of California’s high-speed rail project … [Amtrak] has been the focus of lawmaker scrutiny for its spotty transit service. Former President Joe Biden pledged billions to the Northeast Corridor—operated primarily by Amtrak—to fund infrastructure repairs and ease service problems that have plagued the system. [POTUS 47] and House Republicans, on the other hand, have proposed to slice Amtrak’s federal subsidy by as much as half during his first term. Elon Musk, [POTUS 47’s] right-hand man and the de-facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency, has mused about the privatization of Amtrak, claiming that the railroad’s service pales in comparison to the high-speed rail systems in other countries.”
Contributing Editor David Peter Alan: “It Could Be Grim”
In a relatively rare step, Railway Age has reported the departure of Stephen Gardner from Amtrak per curiam rather than with an individual reporter’s or commentator’s byline. I used the term that the Supreme Court uses when issuing opinion that are not attributed to an author but to the Court as a whole. Having reviewed the article and stating my agreement with what it expressed, I hereby concur.
Gardner’s departure does not come as a surprise. He is a Democrat who got his start as a Congressional staffer, a capacity in which he was serving when I first met him about 15 years ago, when I was doing Days on the Hill as an advocate for Amtrak and for better transit. Now that Republicans control the government, Democrats are being forced out. That happens at transit agencies, too. Amtrak and state-level transit agencies should enjoy some degree of independence from politics in Washington or in the state capitals because they are created by statute and have their own corporate structures and Boards of Directors, but that’s not the way it works. They are permanently caught up in politics, as if they were direct government agencies.
Gardner’s departure was abrupt, with Amtrak issuing only brief statements by Gardner and the Board, with typical boilerplate language that usually accompanies events such as this one. There was no mention of a successor, or even a report that that Amtrak will have an interim head until a longer-term successor is found. We don’t know yet who will take over. Still, it seems likely that someone in the Administration forced Gardner out (even though he purportedly “resigned”) without the luxury of a smooth transition at Amtrak. That cannot bode well for Amtrak, or its riders and other supporters.
In the Passenger Rail Outlook that appeared in the January issue of Railway Age, I made grim predictions about Amtrak, in light of the change of Administration. As we have reported, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy voted to kill Amtrak funding when he was in Congress, is now attacking the California High-Speed Rail project, and has issued an order to kill the Congestion Pricing plan in New York City, specifically objecting to the plan as a means to help support the the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority capital program. The MTA is fighting Duffy’s directive in court.
While advocates for the riders have criticized Gardner for allegedly neglecting and even cutting Amtrak’s skeletal long-distance network, setting up a structure for state-supported trains and corridors that is unlikely to work in practice, and not even keeping the Northeast Corridor in a state of good repair (advocates outside the region say that “NEC” stands for “Nothing Else Counts”), Gardner’s successor could accelerate these purported initiatives. An Amtrak leadership cadre that many believe wants to get rid of the long-distance trains running today could accomplish that objective by working with others in Congress, political positions elsewhere, and corporate boardrooms who want to get rid of passenger trains. I made grim predictions in the article I wrote in January. Could they come to pass even sooner than I predicted then? Time will tell, and we will probably know soon.
There has been some talk of “privatization” lately. AmeriStarRail and RAILNet-21 have made proposals for the NEC, and AmeriStarRail has made some for a few long-distance trains. It is too soon to tell how far those proposals will go, but we know that Amtrak was founded in 1971 to allow the freight railroads to get rid of their passenger trains and no longer pay the costs of operating them.
There will be more news to report about Amtrak. Warning: It could be grim.
