Hard-Driving Transportation Secretary : Skinner Aims High, Keeps a Low Profile

Transportation Secretary Samuel K. Skinner, one of the Bush Administration’s most visible Cabinet members, knows what he wants: worldwide airport security, additional air traffic controllers and a national transportation policy.

And he knows what he does not want: a reputation for overshadowing President Bush--a reputation he knows could result from his role as Administration point man on a range of high-profile issues, including the Eastern Airlines strike, the oil spill in Alaska and international efforts to combat terrorism.

In a recent interview, Skinner said he gets his “marching orders” from Bush and from White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu. He added: “When I need them to get involved, they get involved.”

He said that Bush is more of a “knowledge-on” President than a “hands-on” one. “(Bush) says what he wants to say. There’s a time when the President should articulate a position and there’s a time when the secretary should. I think he’s drawn the proper balance.”

Skinner himself does a lot of articulating. One day on his schedule last week showed a 7:45 a.m. breakfast with a House subcommittee, congressional testimony on an Administration proposal to create a $500-million oil spill cleanup fund, three media interviews, a White House meeting, a speech, another meeting and a reception downtown.

Through it all, he consistently hammers on the idea of a transportation policy that he calls a “strategic plan for transportation in this country in the 21st Century.” Skinner has commissioned a task force that, by the end of the year, will answer questions such as where will airports be built, how will rail transportation fit in with air travel and how can highways and bridges be repaired.

“We’re going to have to find more money to build America’s infrastructure,” he said during the interview. “I think the federal government is going to have to face it. And it’s my job to make sure that I identify the problem, give the options and then let the Administration and Congress decide.”

Coming from a free-enterprise, private-sector Republican Administration, such words surprise some transportation experts. “That smacks of more government involvement,” said Clifford Winston, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “It sounds quite contradictory (to Republican philosophy) to me.”

Skinner, former chairman of the board of the Regional Transportation Authority of Northeastern Illinois and Bush’s campaign director for that state in the 1988 presidential contest, said that he has “no political agenda. When (Bush) wants me to leave or I think it’s time to leave, I’ll go.”

His aides say that Skinner, who has crisscrossed the country since his Senate confirmation on Jan. 31, simply has seen the glaring transportation problems firsthand and has set out to determine how the 102,000 employees of his $26-billion-a-year agency can solve them. “He’s a cut-to-the-chase kind of guy,” said Al Maruggi, a department spokesman.

The secretary conceded there will be “tough budget wars,” but declared: “We’re going to make our case, and we’re going to get the priorities established.”

Skinner, who recently returned from meetings on terrorism with his counterparts in five European countries, said he expects a complete program of anti-terrorism measures--including bomb detectors and sharing of intelligence--to be operating fully “in a couple of years.”

At one point in the interview, to demonstrate that more air traffic controllers are needed, he bounded from behind the desk in his spacious 10th-floor office at the Transportation Department and dashed over to a computer. On the screen, in any U.S. air space he displayed, were myriad little plane symbols.

Indicating the crowded sky on the computer screen, Skinner said he wants to expand the current contingent of 16,500 controllers to 22,500 in the next several years, but he ruled out hiring back any of the 11,400 controllers President Ronald Reagan fired for striking in 1981.

As did his Republican predecessors, Skinner favors eliminating the federal subsidy to Amtrak--almost $600 million this fiscal year--an idea the Democratic-controlled Congress has repeatedly rejected.

Skinner said it is unlikely that portable radios or computers will be barred from airplanes, as was considered after the explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland last December was traced to a bomb disguised as a radio-cassette player. He said that, since his consultations with the Europeans, “It looks like the consensus is developing in all the countries not to ban them, but to isolate them and inspect them.”