Under pressure from the White House, Amtrak's CEO announced Wednesday he was leaving the top spot at the railroad, reports the Hill. "I am stepping down as CEO to ensure that Amtrak continues to enjoy the full faith and confidence of this administration," Stephen Gardner, who worked at Amtrak for 16 years, said in a statement. According to Reuters, it wasn't an amenable decision: The outlet reports that Gardner was "forced" out of the CEO post, which he'd held since 2022, by the White House. A White House official tells the outlet that Gardner was, indeed, asked to step down.
Amtrak had attracted the notice of Elon Musk and DOGE, with the Tesla/SpaceX CEO earlier mulling over what it would mean to shut down some federal agencies for good. "I think logically we should privatize anything that can reasonably be privatized," Musk said at a Morgan Stanley conference earlier this month, per Newsweek. "I think we should privatize the post office and Amtrak, for example. ... We should privatize everything we possibly can."
CNN notes that Amtrak "is a federally chartered corporation, which means the federal government is its majority stockholder." The railway's board of directors, which includes Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, is appointed by the president and receives confirmation from the US Senate. Amtrak has pushed back on the narrative that its financial performance warrants the service being privatized. "Amtrak is sometimes criticized because it is not profitable," it said in a white paper earlier this year. "That criticism is based upon a false premise and ignores the facts."
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On Wednesday, the railroad said it looked forward to working with Duffy and the Trump administration "as we build the world-class passenger rail system this country deserves," per CNN. Duffy, for his part, said he hoped Amtrak would prioritize making improvements in DC. "It's time for Amtrak leadership to clean up Union Station," he said, referring to the transit hub there. "Commuters and travelers need to feel safe in our capital." (More Amtrak stories.)
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