Pete Buttigieg’s Department of Transportation paid SKDK $50,000 for “media training”
The Biden administration doled out taxpayer-funded contracts to senior White House adviser Anita Dunn’s consulting firm to facilitate media training for former transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg and other senior officials, according to federal spending data reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. Some of the payments came around the same time Dunn left the White House to rejoin the firm—and publicly downplayed ethics concerns over the arrangement.
Federal agencies awarded Dunn’s firm, SKDK (formerly SKDKnickerbocker), more than $500,000 in contracts during the Biden administration, the data show. That includes a $50,000 contract in July 2021 to facilitate “media training” for then-transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg as he embarked on a nationwide tour to promote former president Joe Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. One month after the Transportation Department awarded the contract to SKDK, in August 2021, Dunn relinquished her position as Biden’s senior communications adviser to once again lead the firm.
As a “special government employee,” Dunn was exempt from filing financial disclosures to the public. Her brief stint at the White House during the first year of the Biden administration raised concerns among ethics experts that she could have used her influence with the president to steer business to SKDK, the New York Times reported.
SKDK provided media training to Buttigieg and other Transportation Department administrators and officials as part of the contract, a department spokesperson told the Free Beacon. The contract expired in July 2022, by which time Dunn had again left the firm to serve a second stint in the White House as Biden’s senior communications adviser. Dunn left her White House gig in August 2024 to serve as a senior adviser to Future Forward, a Democratic super PAC that spent nearly $560 million propping up former vice president Kamala Harris’s failed presidential bid.
The Transportation Department awarded the contract to Dunn’s firm as Buttigieg blanketed the airwaves during the early stages of the Biden administration and established himself as an omnipresent member of the former president’s cabinet.
Buttigieg logged countless appearances on television news programs in 2021 promoting Biden’s agenda, leading the press to speculate that the former small-town mayor could be the octogenarian’s successor in 2024 or 2028. But Buttigieg saw his star fall following a series of transportation scandals under his watch, including the toxic train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, widespread airline cancellations during the 2022 holiday season, and his ill-timed overseas vacation in August 2022 during tense negotiations with rail worker unions threatening catastrophic strikes.
The revelation that the Transportation Department used taxpayer funds to pay for “media training” comes as Elon Musk and his team at the Department of Government Efficiency aim to slash $1 trillion from the federal deficit by removing waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal bureaucracy and eliminating DEI programs and other liberal initiatives.
Buttigieg, who has moved to Michigan and is reportedly “taking a serious look” at running for the Senate seat that will be vacated by Sen. Gary Peters (D., Mich.) in 2026, has seen a resurgence in relevance for his attempts to connect DOGE’s efforts to a series of airline incidents in recent weeks, including the deadly helicopter collision with a passenger plane in Washington, D.C., in January that killed 67 people. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy rebuked his predecessor on Tuesday, saying Buttigieg failed to upgrade the department’s ancient air traffic control systems and did not address the air traffic controller shortages during his four years leading the department.
The Transportation Department did not return a request for comment.
SKDK also brought in $18,000 for “executive media training” and “hearing preparation training” from the Department of Education in April and June 2021 under then-secretary Miguel Cardona, federal spending records show. The Department of Education did not return a request for comment.
The Smithsonian Institution also awarded SKDK two federal contracts in 2022 totaling $440,000 to provide “strategic communications services” for the institute’s African American Women’s History Museum.
SKDK did not return a request for comment.
SKDK wasn’t the only prominent Democratic communications consulting firm to receive taxpayer dollars from the Biden administration. The Education Department awarded $132,000 to Precision Strategies, a consulting firm founded in 2013 by former Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter, in 2024 for public relations and communications services, according to USA Spending.
