Ray LaHood becomes the latest member of President Obama's cabinet to say they are leaving as the president begins his second term.

LaHood announced today he will leave his post as secretary of the Department of Transportation once a successor is confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

"As I look back on the past four years, I am proud of what we have accomplished together in so many important areas," LaHood said in a statement.

The former Illinois congressman was one of two Republicans President Obama appointed to cabinet secretary positions at the beginning of his first term. (Bob Gates at Defense was the other). Obama has nominated Chuck Hagel, a former Republican senator from Nebraska, to take over at Defense. He's expected to be confirmed.

LaHood's replacement was not immediately clear.

As he exits, LaHood touted accomplishments, including the stimulus, fuel-efficiency standards, high-speed rail, as well as initiatives on distracted driving, combatinng pilot fatigue, and highway safety.

Here's his full statement:

“I have let President Obama know that I will not serve a second term as Secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation.  It has been an honor and a privilege to lead the Department, and I am grateful to President Obama for giving me such an extraordinary opportunity.  I plan to stay on until my successor is confirmed to ensure a smooth transition for the Department and all the important work we still have to do. 

As I look back on the past four years, I am proud of what we have accomplished together in so many important areas.  But what I am most proud of is the DOT team. You exemplify the best of public service, and I truly appreciate all that you have done to make America better, to make your communities better, and to make DOT better.

Our achievements are significant.  We have put safety front and center with the Distracted Driving Initiative and a rule to combat pilot fatigue that was decades in the making.  We have made great progress in improving the safety of our transit systems, pipelines, and highways, and in reducing roadway fatalities to historic lows.  We have strengthened consumer protections with new regulations on buses, trucks, and airlines. 

We helped jumpstart the economy and put our fellow Americans back to work with $48 billion in transportation funding from the American Recovery and Investment Act of 2009, and awarded over $2.7 billion in TIGER grants to 130 transportation projects across the Nation.  We have made unprecedented investments in our nation’s ports.  And we have put aviation on a sounder footing with the FAA reauthorization, and secured funding in the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act to help States build and repair their roads, bridges and transit systems. 

And to further secure our future, we have taken transportation into the 21st century with CAFE Standards, NextGen, and our investments in passenger and High-Speed Rail.  What’s more, we have provided the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy with the funding and leadership it needs to prepare a new generation of midshipmen to meet our country’s rapidly-evolving defense and maritime transportation needs. 

Closer to home, we also have made great strides.  In December, the DOT was recognized as the most improved agency in the entire Federal government in the 2012 “Best Places to Work” rankings published by the Partnership of Public Service.  Even more impressive, DOT was ranked 9th out of the 19 largest agencies in the government. 
Each of these remarkable accomplishments is a tribute your hard work, creativity, commitment to excellence, and most of all, your dedication to our country.  DOT is fortunate to have such an extraordinary group of public servants.  I look forward to continuing to work with all of you as the selection and confirmation process of the next transportation secretary moves forward.  Now is not the time to let up - we still have a number of critical safety goals to accomplish and still more work to do on the implementation of MAP-21.   

I’ve told President Obama, and I’ve told many of you, that this is the best job I’ve ever had.  I’m grateful to have the opportunity to work with all of you and I’m confident that DOT will continue to achieve great things in the future. 

Thank you, and God bless you."

Two and a half months after Hurricane Sandy ravaged the Northeast coast, the political fight over federal spending to assist the recovery efforts continues in Congress.

In the end, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut will almost certainly get more than $60 billion in federal aid to help them recover and rebuild.

But efforts by some House members even as late as Monday night to add unrelated funds to the Sandy emergency aid bill provided an object lesson in why such emergency bills are perfect vehicles for adding more spending.

The House on Tuesday will be voting on both a larger Sandy bill, costing $33.7 billion, offered by Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, R- N.J., a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, and a smaller one, costing $17 billion, offered by Appropriations Committee chairman Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Ky.

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If the House were to pass both those bills and if one adds the $9.7 billion that the House OK’d on Jan. 4 in additional borrowing authority for the National Flood Insurance Program, the total aid, at least for now, would be $60.4 billion.

At Monday night’s hearing of the House Rules Committee that considered 92 amendments to the bill, Rogers explained that his version was “Sandy only. We tried to rifle-shot money to this immediate catastrophe…. We kept everything out of my bill except Sandy.”

Rogers reminded committee members that tens of billions of federal dollars have already been spent on helping people hurt by Sandy. “So far FEMA has been able to award states a total of $3.1 billion for the immediate needs that have been taking place while we were scouring the numbers (in the big Sandy relief bill),” he reported. “For example, New York has received $2.1 billion and New Jersey almost $900 million, Connecticut $38 million.”

Among the differences between Frelinghuysen’s bigger bill and Rogers’s smaller one: Frelinghuysen would provide more funding for the operations of federal agencies in the Sandy-affected states – even if the agency is not directly engaged in helping people or businesses hit by the storm. For instance, Frelinghuysen’s bill would provide $50 million to the National Park Service’s Historic Preservation Fund for “expenses related to the consequences of Hurricane Sandy” and another $10 million for Sandy-related building and construction expenses for the federal prison system. Rogers’s bill does not include this funding.

Some House Republicans are still balking at the sheer size of the bills and at the near certainty that some money won’t be going directly to victims or towns hit by the storm.

J. Scott Applewhite / AP

House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio, walks to a strategy session with GOP members, on Capitol Hill, Friday, Jan. 4, 2013, at the start of the first full day of business for the new 113th Congress.

Rules Committee member Rep. Rob Woodall, R- Ga., said Monday night, “If we have an urgent need, let’s agree on that number we can agree on and let’s get it out the door with haste, but if we have a giant need, then let’s give it the slow and thoughtful scrutiny that we owe folks back home.”

He noted that a $60 billion bill for Sandy – to be given just a few days of debate -- would be larger than the normal appropriations bills for the State Department or the Homeland Security Department on which Congress deliberates for months.

Disaster relief bills are massive, have emotional appeal, and aren’t subject to as much scrutiny as spending bills that go through the normal Appropriations Committee process.

This bill has particular momentum since House Speaker John Boehner was so harshly criticized by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and House members from the Northeast for not allowing a vote on a Sandy relief bill on New Years’ Eve.

And the bigger the emergency, the better the opportunity to add more money. Last June’s wildfires in Colorado and the 2011 tsunami in Japan both occurred months before Sandy and hundreds or even thousands of miles away from Sandy, but emergency bills are an opportunity to get aboard a moving train and get money for disasters in one’s own district.

For example:
• Rep. Cory Gardner, R- Colo. and other Colorado members proposed $125 million for watershed protection and flood mitigation around the nation, including about $20 million for areas in Colorado burned by last summer’s wildfires. This watershed protection money was in the Sandy bill that the Senate passed last month.
• Rep. Rick Larsen, D- Wash. proposed an amendment to allow the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration greater leeway over the $290 million in Sandy marine debris cleanup funds so that Pacific Coast states could get some of that money to cope with their own marine debris from the March 2011 Japanese tsunami.
“Just last month, an entire Japanese dock washed up on the Washington state coast,” Larsen said in a statement. “Our state and local governments do not have the resources to deal with this problem, which can cost as much as $4,300 per ton of debris that comes ashore.”

Ultimately the Rules Committee did not allow those two amendments to proceed to the House floor for Tuesday’s debate. It did allow a few amendments to try to offset the cost of the Sandy aid.

For example the House will consider a proposal by Rep. Mick Mulvaney, R- S.C. to offset $17 billion in Sandy funding by a 1.63 percent across-the-board cut in non-Sandy discretionary funding.

“I’ve lived through a hurricane myself; I’ve had my office destroyed by a flood; I think this (emergency aid) is a proper function of the government….I just want to try to find a way to pay for it,” Mulvaney told the Rules Committee. “This is important; there is no question. Is it important enough to borrow money from China to do it, especially when we’re already borrowing money from China to do so many other things?”

Pool / Getty Images

President Barack Obama returns to the White House on August 29, 2012 in Washington, D.C. Obama continued to campaign for his re-election on the second and last day of his college tour through Iowa and Virginia.

President Obama will visit Louisiana on Monday to meet with officials and view the damage from Hurricane Isaac, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney announced Friday.

Carney said the president will go to assess the impact of the hurricane, which has since been downgraded to a tropical storm, and make sure “that unmet needs are being met and that the federal response led by FEMA is helping.”

Obama will stop in Louisiana after beginning his day in Toledo, Ohio where he’ll hold a campaign event.

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He was scheduled to campaign in Cleveland after his event in Toledo but Carney said changes to the campaign schedule were still pending.

Obama’s Republican opponent in the presidential race, Mitt Romney, is visiting the storm-stricken parts of the state today. 

On the campaign trail in Colorado Thursday President Obama assailed Mitt Romney for opposing the tax break for wind energy production, saying the presumptive nominee would put tens of thousands of jobs at risk by letting them expire.

“At a moment when homegrown energy, renewable energy, is creating new jobs in states like Colorado and Iowa, my opponent wants to end tax credits for wind energy producers,” Obama said.

“Think about what that would mean for a community like Pueblo. The wind industry supports about 5,000 jobs across this state. Without those tax credits, 37,000 American jobs, including potentially hundreds of jobs right here, would be at risk.”

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Wind energy now supplies about 4 percent of U.S. electricity, up from 1.3 percent in 2008.

A spokesman for Romney's Iowa campaign said last week that Romney “will allow the wind credit to expire, end the stimulus boondoggles, and create a level playing field on which all sources of energy can compete on their merits."

Romney’s stance on the wind energy tax break puts him at odds with Republican senators such as Jerry Moran of Kansas and Chuck Grassley of Iowa. It was Grassley who pushed for the wind tax credit when it was created in 1992.

But Romney won applause from one GOP House member, Rep. Mike Pompeo of Kansas, who has proposed a bill to abolish all energy tax breaks. “The Solyndra scandal has demonstrated that taxpayers must no longer be forced to subsidize these industries,” Pompeo said last week. “When the government bets on these energy technologies, it typically selects the most unaffordable energy leading to unnecessarily higher energy prices for all Americans.”

Solyndra, a California solar-panel manufacturing firm that got a $535 million federal loan guarantee, filed for bankruptcy last year. Energy Secretary Steven Chu has acknowledged that the $535 million isn’t likely to be recovered.

Beyond the campaign rhetoric and the question of whether Romney’s anti-wind tax credit stance will hurt him in two wind-energy loving battleground states (Colorado and Iowa), there’s a serious economic debate here.

It hinges on the classic question: what activities and industries, if any, should the government require taxpayers to subsidize? Is it ever possible to have a “level playing field” so that consumers can choose the energy source that’s most cost effective?

And when Congress creates and preserves tax breaks for favored industries, does it also perpetuate the entrenched culture of lobbyists and special interests seeking favors from Congress?

In this case, every few years the wind energy industry and its lobbyists must urge Congress to give the tax break another lease on life before it expires. Lobbyist filings show that the American Wind Energy Association spent $1.1 million in the first half of this year on lobbying Congress.

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The group has hired lobbyists such as Juleanna Glover of the Ashcroft Group, former Louisiana Republican Rep. Jim McCrery of Capitol Counsel, and Elmendorf Ryan’s Steve Elmendorf, an aide to Dick Gephardt when he was House Democratic leader.

A pragmatist would say there’s nothing new here: the wind industry is just getting in on a subsidy game that other energy industries have played for decades.

As a Congressional Budget Office report noted in March, “Tax preferences for energy were first established in 1916, and until 2005 they were primarily intended to stimulate domestic production of oil and natural gas. Beginning in 2006, the cost of energy-related tax preferences grew substantially, and an increasing share was aimed at encouraging energy efficiency and energy produced from renewable sources, such as wind and the sun….”

That CBO report said energy-related tax breaks cost $20 billion in 2011 and 68 percent of them went to renewable energy, while only 15 percent went to fossil fuels.

Under current law, for a wind facility that starts operating by the end of this year, the owners can claim a 2.2 cent tax credit for each kilowatt hour of electricity produced. The tax credit is good for a 10-year period.

In a bill approved by the Senate Finance Committee last week, the wind production tax credit was extended through 2013 but it was also modified in a significant way, said energy industry consultant and blogger Geoffrey Styles.

The Finance Committee bill would make wind energy facilities eligible for the tax preference if the construction of such facilities or property begins before Jan. 1, 2014. “This will sweep in many more projects,” said Styles. “It has the effect of being much more than a one-year extension” since as long as a project gets started – not completed -- before Jan. 1, 2014, it would be eligible for the tax break.

According to the staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, the proposal would cost $12 billion in lost revenue over ten years.

Energy economist William Pizer, who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Environment and Energy at the Treasury Department from 2008 to 2011 and now teaches at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, said the tax break is less than ideal energy policy for a variety of reasons.

One is the inefficiency of a subsidy compared to higher tax on more polluting energy sources such as coal and oil. And he said frequently some of the benefit of the tax-break flows to “tax equity partners” who are brought in to join with the actual wind energy project company.

And noting that the wind energy credit has expired three times since 1992 (with Congress ultimately reviving it each time), he said, “The boom-and-bust cycle has been problematic for the industry.”

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When analysts at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center in Washington looked at the wind and other renewable energy tax breaks that were part of the 2009 stimulus bill, they said, “In general, these subsidies are less cost-effective than price increases” which Congress could impose through higher taxes on fuels such as coal.

The Tax Policy Center added that, “Such subsidies are very hard to remove once they have outlived their usefulness, since they develop powerful constituencies.”

In a blog post last week, Styles noted that during the 20 years in which the renewable energy production tax credit “has been escalating annually with inflation -- from 1.5¢ per kilowatt-hour (kWh) to the present level of 2.2 ¢/kWh -- the cost of wind turbines and (the cost of) their output has fallen significantly.” During that same period, wind energy capacity in the United States grew by 30 times.

So, Styles said, “in effect, we're subsidizing today's relatively mature onshore wind technology by a larger proportion than we did when it was in its infancy. That makes no sense, especially in the current environment.”

One factor which might call into question the competitiveness of wind energy in the marketplace is the new abundance of domestically produced natural gas in the United States.

But Ellen Carey, a spokeswoman for the American Wind Energy Association said, “One of the reasons the U.S. is able to enjoy this new abundant source of low priced natural gas was the multi-decade government support of the Section 29 production tax credit for unconventional gas. The production tax credit for wind energy ensures we build a diverse and stable portfolio of energy and do not over rely on a single energy source which exposes us to potential volatility.”