“IN PHIL WE TRUST” sure seems like it will remain the Healey administration’s unofficial motto for the foreseeable future. 

It was almost a year ago, in her annual State of the Commonwealth address, that Gov. Maura Healey made that declaration while boasting about the strides made in fixing the long beleaguered MBTA under Phil Eng, the man she brought on as general manager to run the system. 

This fall, Healey doubled down on her faith in Eng, tapping him to serve simultaneously as interim transportation secretary while retaining his GM job. All indications suggest he could continue to hold both roles for an extended period.  

The clearest sign of that may be what hasn’t happened: Eight weeks after his appointment, the governor’s office has not even started to search for a permanent secretary. Eng himself has begun signaling an openness to staying in the Cabinet for a longer stretch. Meanwhile, most of those watching developments across the state’s transportation policy landscape appear perfectly content with the setup, even while acknowledging that it’s put a lot of work on the shoulders of one man. 

“If anybody can do this, it’s him,” said Kate Dineen, president of the business-backed group A Better City, voicing a sentiment that seems to be widely shared. 

Healey asked Eng to take on the second role in mid-October, naming him interim transportation secretary after the abrupt resignation of Monica Tibbits-Nutt. She also named longtime highway administrator Jonathan Gulliver as transportation undersecretary, and, like Eng, asked him to do that new job in addition to his existing one. 

At the time, officials were coy about how long Eng would wear two hats. Healey said she was “taking it day by day.” 

Nearly two months later, little has changed. Healey’s office told CommonWealth Beacon that the administration has not started to search for a permanent transportation secretary, and the governor isn’t putting any specifics on when that will change. 

One transportation watchdog, with an eye on Healey’s 2026 reelection run, thinks Eng could continue to work both jobs for nearly all of next year. 

“I expect that Phil will serve in both roles through the election. He’s the safest pair of hands in transportation,” said Brian Kane, executive director of the MBTA Advisory Board, which represents cities and towns that help fund the T. “I think from [the governor’s] perspective, with an election coming up, they just want to make sure everything is steady.” 

For his part, Eng is open to remaining secretary however long Healey wants. 

“If it means staying interim for a longer period of time, indefinitely, I’m fine with that,” Eng told CommonWealth Beacon in an interview wedged in between a Massachusetts Department of Transportation board meeting and a bill-signing event with the governor. “If it means an opportunity to discuss a permanent role, I’m fine with that as well.” 

He just has one condition: Eng wants to keep his job at the T, even if he were to drop the “interim” title from the transportation secretary role. 

“We have a lot more to do there,” he said. “We’ve made a lot of headway, and I want to see that through.” 

He’s not earning any more money for the added responsibility managing the sprawling entity responsible for highways, the Registry of Motor Vehicles, aeronautics, and more. Eng continues to be paid only for the job of MBTA general manager, which at $546,684 last year made him one of the best-compensated employees in the state’s massive public sector. 

(Transportation secretaries are typically paid at a far lower rate than T chiefs. Tibbits-Nutt made $196,249 last year, according to state payroll data.) 

It’s not as if Eng was itching for another project before the secretary job opened. For the prior two and a half years, he’d been working one of the most demanding roles in the state. The T itself once advertised the general manager job as requiring work “up to twenty-four (24) hours per day, seven (7) days per week,” as the State House News Service reported. 

Take it from Rich Davey, who worked as MBTA general manager and then transportation secretary — but never both jobs at the same time — under Gov. Deval Patrick. 

Davey, who now leads the Massachusetts Port Authority, recalled one particularly grueling stretch early in his tenure atop the T. He had been fighting a head cold, and so after a full day of work, he took NyQuill and turned in early for the night. 

Then he got a call that a major power outage at Downtown Crossing had shut down the Red and Orange lines, and that trains might not resume running by the following morning’s rush hour. 

“From there, even with the NyQuill, I don’t think I slept for almost 48 straight hours as we were working through those problems,” Davey said. “You don’t want those days, but those do come up.” 

Eng has unquestionably overseen a slew of accomplishments. A repair blitz eradicated most of the slow zones that had plagued riders for years. The 16-year wait for anti-collision technology on the Green Line is almost over. Last year was the first since 2009 in which the T had collective bargaining agreements in place with all 28 of its worker unions at once. 

But the MBTA is still the oldest public transit system in the country, a superlative that shows in much of its track, signal, and vehicle infrastructure. The last official calculation in 2023 estimated the cost of fixing everything that was not in a state of good repair to be $24.5 billion. And the system shows its age regularly —  just last week, Red Line commuters faced a sudden shift to shuttle buses for a few hours due to a “track problem.”With all of those problems to solve, plus everything else transportation-related now on his plate, Eng continues to earn glowing praise from most power players in and around Beacon Hill for his no-nonsense, confident approach to improvements, his accessible, communicative demeanor,  and the sense that tangible progress is finally visible. 

Tom McGee, who chairs the MBTA’s board of directors and also sits on the MassDOT board of directors, said Eng’s “work speaks for itself.” Rep. James Arciero, the House’s point person on transportation, described Eng’s tenure as “positive from the floorboards up.” And Sen. Brendan Crighton, Arciero’s counterpart in the Senate, said Eng has remained just as communicative with lawmakers as he was when he held only one job. 

“He’s one of the few people that answers every time I call,” Crighton said. “His entire team has been just as accessible. Nothing really has changed, other than a bigger scope of issues.” 

Meanwhile, the deification of Eng rolls along, with the divine subtext of “in Phil we trust” last week made explicit. Bill Bernardino, vice president of the Boston Carmen’s Union Local 589 that represents thousands of T workers, took to the microphone at a bill-signing and dubbed Eng “a gift from God,” as MASSterList noted.There have been a handful of rumblings, though, about the longer-term wisdom of asking Eng to work two immensely demanding jobs, no matter how good his reviews are. The editorial board of The Boston Globe called it a “bad idea.” Kane said he does not have any doubts about the quality of Eng’s work, but worries he will be pulled in too many directions. 

The job of MBTA general manager and state transportation secretary, he said, are separate and distinct because the T and MassDOT are “two large and complex organizations doing two different things.” 

“If the Legislature wanted one super transportation chief, they would have put that structure in place,” Kane said. “That’s not the structure we have.” 

Though it’s hard to imagine feeling this way about responsibilities that have been piled on top of what can be a 24/7 job, Eng says he’s actually enjoying the additional work. 

Before his more well-known tenure stewarding the New York City Transit system and leading the Long Island Rail Road, Eng spent decades in the New York state Department of Transportation, starting as a junior engineer and working his way up to key roles on projects such as construction of the Mario M. Cuomo Bridge. 

The interim secretary job, he said, has given him a chance to brush off some of those non-transit skills. 

“All the experience you learn over the course of 40-plus years in public transportation is stored away in this mind of mine,” Eng said. “It allows me to actually go back to different experiences, both in a dense, urban setting like New York City, but also in the rural upstate parts of New York.” 

Several insiders pointed to that mix of state-level transportation work and public transit expertise as a key asset. 

Dineen, the leader of A Better City, recalled meeting Eng in the 2010s when they both worked in the administration of New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. At the time, she said, Eng was “the governor’s go-to project manager for the big roads and bridges projects that were super important and high profile.” 

“He’s gotten a lot of, I think, rightful accolades about the work he’s done to get the MBTA system back on track,” Dineen said. “From my perspective, really knowing Phil as first a roads and bridges expert, knowing that side of the infrastructure, I think he’s perhaps uniquely qualified to wear both of these hats at this time.” 

Another mitigating factor several people identified is the stable of qualified deputies at work. Gulliver regularly earns praise from transportation policy wonks, and multiple officials pointed specifically to MBTA chief engineer Sam Zhou and chief operating officer Ryan Coholan as key figures in recent successes. 

With enough capable hands taking care of the day-to-day demands in both the transportation department and MBTA, insiders said, Eng’s balancing act becomes a little bit easier. 

Davey credited Eng for his style of setting goals, then trusting employees to achieve them without micromanagement. 

“If he didn’t have a good team around him at either MassDOT or the T, I think he’d be cooked, but because he’s got a really strong leadership team, he can do both jobs,” Davey said. 

Davey said he had already been in regular contact with Eng, but didn’t feel much of a need to offer “been there, done that” suggestions about what it’s like to step up from MBTA general manager to transportation secretary. 

Eng, he said, is the kind of person who would consider any sound advice but does not actually need much of it. 

“He worked for Andrew Cuomo, for God’s sake, and got promoted,” Davey said of the famously hot-headed former New York governor. “You’re talking about someone who has seen some tough projects and some tough leadership.”