Polly Trottenberg
Trottenberg takes up her new duties on August 1, 2025.
From April 2021 until January 2025, Trottenberg served as the Deputy Secretary of the US Department of Transportation, making her the chief operating officer of a 57,000-person federal agency, where she helped oversee hundreds of billions of dollars of new investments in roads, bridges, transit, passenger and freight rail, airports and ports. Trottenberg also served in 2023 as the Acting Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, the federal government’s largest and most complex 24/7 operational agency, with 44,000 employees and hundreds of facilities across the US and overseas. Prior to USDOT, Trottenberg served for seven years as New York City’s Transportation Commissioner, steering the 5,800-person agency through an era of growth and innovation, as well as the challenges of COVID. She led the City’s Vision Zero initiative, the first in the US, a comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and data-driven effort to reduce roadway fatalities. NYCDOT operates one of the US’s largest urban transportation systems, with 6,000 miles of roads, nearly 800 bridges, the nation’s largest traffic operation and parking system, the Staten Island Ferry, and extensive bicycle, pedestrian, and public plaza infrastructure. Between 2009 and 2014, she served first as Assistant Secretary and later Undersecretary of Transportation Policy at the USDOT. She previously spent 12 years on Capitol Hill, which was preceded by two years at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
Trottenberg received her BA in history from Barnard College, Columbia University, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and her MPP from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.
