Michael Rutherford
Assistant Secretary of the Office of Multimodal Freight Infrastructure and Policy
Michael Rutherford is the first Assistant Secretary of the Office of Multimodal Freight Infrastructure and Policy at the U.S. Department of Transportation. He has over two decades of private-sector experience in transportation and consumer good where he developed a deep appreciation for the significance of supply chains, from upstream sourcing to final distribution. Through these experiences Rutherford became familiar with the opportunities and challenges of multimodal connectivity. While working at the railroad, he often engaged supply chain partners to speed goods to market – from trucks and barges to ports and transloading facilities.
Previously he served at CSX, a Class I Railroad in the eastern U.S. During his tenure he managed a wide range of commodities and markets including aggregates, agriculture, automotive, chemicals, intermodal, fertilizers, forest products, metals, municipal waste and more. He participated in various of strategic initiatives such as launching the UMAX interline container program in conjunction with Union Pacific, championing 50-foot boxcar reinvestments and assisting customers during the roll-out of Precision Scheduled Railroading (PSR). He chaired the CSX Intermodal Technology Steering Committee and the Rail Sub-Committee for the National Defense Transportation Association (NDTA), working in close coordination with U.S. TRANSCOM. He was also a member of the Board for the Indiana Rail Road Company. Prior to that he worked in consumer goods at Johnson & Johnson and Adidas in Europe.
Rutherford earned a Bachelor of Science in International Finance & Commerce at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, where he graduated as a Krogh Scholar. He later earned a Master of International Economics & Management at SDA Bocconi in Milan, Italy. A native of Florida, he met his wife in Rome, whom he then married in 2003. His daughter is now a freshman and Undergraduate Research Scholar at the University of Florida; his son is in the seventh grade at a local Catholic school.