Shailen P. Bhatt was officially sworn in by Pete Buttigieg, U.S. secretary of transportation, on January 13, 2023, to serve as head of the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA). This inaugural ceremony made Bhatt the 21st administrator of FHWA and the first person of Indian descent to step into that leadership position.
The previous month, Bhatt was confirmed unanimously by voice vote in the U.S. Senate as FHWA administrator. This vote had been preceded by testimony that he gave to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works on September 14, 2022.
“There are many challenges we face as a nation with our transportation system,” Bhatt noted during this testimony. “The Interstate system that helped America emerge triumphant in the last century requires investment and innovation so we keep our competitive advantage for the 21st century.” Bhatt further stated, “We are stronger as a nation when we remove barriers so that everyone can share in the prosperity.” In his testimony, Bhatt also highlighted other key issues such as working to increase traffic safety nationwide and addressing the climate crisis.
Bhatt, who graduated summa cum laude from Western Kentucky University with a bachelor of arts degree in economics in 2001, has brought to his role as FHWA administrator a considerable amount of transportation experience at both the federal and state levels of government and also in the private sector.
Bhatt was deputy executive director at the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet from 2005 to 2008, for example, and then served as FHWA’s associate administrator for policy and government affairs until 2011. He went on to serve as secretary of the Delaware Department of Transportation between 2011 and 2014. Bhatt then became executive director of the Colorado Department of Transportation. In 2017, he was named president and chief executive officer of the Intelligent Transportation Society of America. Bhatt assumed the role of senior vice president of global transportation innovation and alternative delivery at the multinational infrastructure consulting firm AECOM in 2021 and remained in this role until his appointment as FHWA administrator late the following year.
As the head of FHWA, Bhatt has continued to focus on the quality-of-life transportation priorities that have defined his career. At the 2024 Washington Briefing held by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO), for instance, he underscored the potential benefits of technology in further reducing highway fatalities.
“There is no aspect of your life that has not been changed by technology by now; it has changed how we shop, eat, consume media, work, and of course travel from one place to another,” Bhatt said to those attending this conference in Washington, D.C. “Now we are getting data off of vehicles so we can really delve into crash causation, which also means getting details on near-misses as well as why a crash did not happen. . . . All of the predictive analytics are out there — and it will make a night and day difference in how we operate our [transportation] systems versus 10 years ago.”
Photo Credit: Public Domain
For more information on Shailen P. Bhatt, please check out Administrator | FHWA (dot.gov) and AASHTO Journal – Senate Confirms Shailen Bhatt as FHWA Administrator (transportation.org)
Transportation History 
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