By AJ Dellinger Published March 19, 2025 | Comments (0) | Amtrak CEO Stephen Gardner speaks into a microphone with a strip of track and an Amtrak train in the background Drew Angerer/Getty Images The latest victim of the Trump administrations obsession with the appearance of efficiency is the guy who made the trains run on time. Stephen Gardner, the Chief Executive Officer of Amtrak who held the post since 2022, abruptly announced that he would be stepping down from his role Wednesday in the wake of Donald Trump and Elon Musk placing the train company in the crosshairs for potential privatization. In a statement, Gardner said, I am stepping down as CEO to ensure that Amtrak continues to enjoy the full faith and confidence of this administration. Prior to taking the top role at the firm, he served as Amtraks chief operating and commercial officer starting in 2009 and as the organizations president starting in 2020. And while hes been hanging in the C-suite for a while now, Gardner has some pretty solid credentials as a train lover. He previously served as a conductor and operations manager for the Maine Central Railroad, and he founded a punk band called Chessie, which took its name from the defunct Chesapeake and Ohio Railway. Despite this (or because of it), Gardner found himself between a rock and a hard place with the new administration. Trumps ire for Amtrak isnt newnew tried to cut federal funding for the company in half during his first administrationbut its taken a sharper turn this time around. Billions of dollars of support for the railway got caught in Trumps federal funding freeze earlier this year, and Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has been pressing Amtrak to end diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and mandate return-to-office orders for employees or lose out on federal support. Even as Gardner has tried to go along with as much of the Trump administrations demands as possible, it seemed inevitable that he and the company would continue to receive significant scrutiny. Earlier this month, Elon Musk suggested that Amtrak and the United States Postal Service should be privatized. He called Amtrak kind of embarrassing and said at a conference, If youre coming from another country, please dont use our national rail. It can leave you with a very bad impression of America. Amtrak is coming off a year with record ridership, facilitated in no small part by ongoing expansion of available routes that are part of a plan to serve an additional 40 million people with rail service in the coming years.Now, perhaps privatizing the company would expand that. Lets check on how Musks Boring Company has been doing with its efforts to offer high-speed, mass transit solutionsit appears the company has spent more than seven years building 2.4 miles of a proposed 68-mile network in Las Vegas, all done with minimal oversight or intervention from regulators. And thats the companys best showing! That doesnt even touch on the multitude of projects that the Boring Company has promised only to delay or straight-up abandon because they proved too costly to continue. Say what you will about Amtrak, but it doesnt look so bad by comparison.Daily NewsletterYou May Also Like By Matt Novak Published March 19, 2025 By AJ Dellinger Published March 19, 2025 By Thomas Maxwell Published March 19, 2025 By Ed Cara Published March 19, 2025 By Matthew Gault Published March 19, 2025 By Matt Novak Published March 19, 2025