Jane F. Garvey is an American former government transportation and public works official, now a business executive, and the chairman of Meridiam North America.
[1] Garvey (née Famiano) -- daughter of an Air Force colonel—was born in Brooklyn, New York on February 2, 1944, but was raised primarily in western Massachusetts, near Amherst College.
From teaching, she made what she later described in a 2000 interview as "the biggest quantum leap" of her career: becoming an associate commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Public Works, which she described as "quintessentially a male agency".
Michael Dukakis to oversee the start of the controversial but deeply consequential "Big Dig"—Boston's "Central Artery" underground-highway project, the nation's costliest highway program—a program which the New York Times later described as part of her political "baggage".
[2][13][8][17][18] On the morning of the attacks—shortly after the hijacked planes were learned to have struck their targets—Garvey echoed approval of her subordinates' decision to order all 4,000 aircraft over the United States to land immediately at the nearest airport.
The order was quickly underscored by her superior, U.S. Secretary of Transportation Norm Mineta, who was with Vice President Dick Cheney in a bunker under the White House.
"[23] Garvey generally escaped criticism for the agency's failure to anticipate and prevent the attacks, and received some praise for helping to guide the aviation industry through the radically disruptive aftermath.
The initial decline in air travel, following the 9/11 events took pressure off the flight-delay issues, but they began to re-emerge as airline traffic gradually rebounded, and were a growing problem by the end of her term.
[32][33] To demonstrate publicly that the skies were safe, Garvey rode in a jet, aloft at midnight (Universal Coordinated Time) as the millennium changed.
[25][18] In 2000–2001, the Clinton White House issued an order through its Office of Management and Budget (OMB) ordering federal agencies to stop using persistent web-browser "cookies"—controversial software data tags quietly planted on the computers of visitors to federal websites, like notes, to gather and store information about the visitors on their computers, where it could be read by a government website on subsequent visits.
[34][35][36] In January, 2001, when Democratic president Clinton was succeeded by the Republican president George W. Bush, the Washington Post noted that Garvey was in a peculiar political predicament—because of the new law (of which she was the first beneficiary) which had made the FAA Administrator position a five-year non-removable appointment, legally immune from the normal ouster of officials when the White House changed political parties (a Congressional change in the 1996 FAA reauthorization law).
[39] In August, 2005, Garvey was named Vice President of corporate communications for Convergys, a provider of business, human resources, and customer-support services.
[41] In early 2015, she became executive director for the infrastructure advisory group of JP Morgan Securities, which arranged private buyouts of various public highways and other assets.
She was among a small group of candidates mentioned for the post of United States Secretary of Transportation in the Obama administration,[42][43][44] though the eventual choice was congressman Ray LaHood.
[1] She lives in Amherst, with her husband, Robert J. Garvey, who was the sheriff of Hampshire County, Massachusetts for 32 years, being appointed by Governor Michael Dukakis in 1984 and retiring in February 2016.