John Porcari |
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Wikipedia: John Porcari
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Biography
The following section is an excerpt from Wikipedia's John Porcari page on 2 August 2020, text available via the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
John Davis Porcari served as United States Deputy Secretary of Transportation. He was nominated by the Obama administration in April 2009 and confirmed by the Senate on May 21, 2009. Porcari resigned his position as the department's second in command on December 27, 2013.
Serving as Deputy to Secretaries Ray LaHood and Anthony Foxx, Porcari was instrumental in implementing Department programs, including over $3 billion in Transportation Investment Generating Economic Recovery (TIGER) grants (originating from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009) and USDOT's stringent Buy America Act provisions, in place to ensure transportation projects are built by American workers using domestic materials. In addition to serving as operations officer over USDOT's more than 55,000 employees, Deputy Secretary Porcari oversaw resolution on an array of programs and issues, including the vehicle return/rebate program Cash-for-Clunkers, Toyota's recall of 2.3 million vehicles due to unexpected acceleration, and implementation of the Congressional transportation legislation Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century (MAP-21).
As Deputy Secretary, Porcari has testified before Congress on multiple occasions, including seven hearings since January 2012 alone, on matters involving project delivery, the Next Generation Air Transportation System, drawdown from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, aviation and global positioning system coordination, and rebuilding in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.
Following the mantra "there are no Republican potholes or Democratic potholes," Porcari is well respected by congressional members on both sides of the aisle. Internally at the department, Porcari has been instrumental in raising employee morale and elevating professional standards. In 2008, USDOT ranked last on the Partnership for Public Service’s Best Places to Work in Federal Government, and by his last week of service, the department rose to 8th. Additionally, not one of the Agency's subcomponents was listed among the study's rankings in 2009; in 2013 the Department’s Surface Transportation Board maintained its first-place ranking among small agencies, and the Department’s Federal Highway Administration climbed to fifth place among the 300 subcomponent agencies, improving on its ninth-place ranking in 2012.
Porcari's signature achievements at USDOT included implementation of President Obama's Executive Order 13604, an Administration effort to expedite project permitting, while delivering quality environmental outcomes. Under efforts like this, major infrastructure projects such as replacement of the Tappan Zee Bridge, realized significant permit process savings, reducing permit time from several years to just over 12 months. As a result, the project broke ground in December 2013. Porcari also led the department's work on major projects, including the $1.7 billion transformation of the James Farley Post Office adjacent to Penn Station in midtown Manhattan to enhance transportation and develop mixed-use real estate and the construction of the planned $3.5 billion New International Trade Crossing (NITC) bridge to connect Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, a major trade corridor that carries almost a quarter of the land trade between the United States and Canada. Porcari left behind improved relationships with cities, and augmented the department calculus to identify and deliver better projects, based on merit.
Porcari served as the president of Advisory Services at WSP USA until July 2020.