Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg found himself back in the headlines this week, but not because of politics or transportation policy. Instead, he shared a deeply personal account of an encounter with Child Protective Services that he says began with a false anonymous report and temporarily separated him from his adopted children.
Writing on his Substack, Buttigieg described what he called one of the most distressing experiences of his life after CPS workers and a law enforcement officer arrived at his home to investigate allegations made by an anonymous caller.
According to Buttigieg, officials informed him that a forensic interview had been scheduled for his 4-year-old twins and that, while the investigation was underway, he was not permitted to be alone with the children.
When his husband returned home with the twins, the family decided the children would stay with their grandparents until the interviews had been completed.
“The twenty-four hours until they returned are among the darkest hours of my life,” Buttigieg wrote.
He described struggling to process the situation.
“I tried to get my head around the idea that I had been accused of something so serious that I couldn’t be alone around my own children, and had consented to have them interviewed by strangers, without my knowing where the accusation had come from or even what it contained.”
During his own interview with investigators, Buttigieg said he finally learned the basis for the allegations.
According to his account, an anonymous caller had contacted Child Protective Services claiming to have spoken with a woman who allegedly met Buttigieg at a conference in Alabama several years earlier. The caller reportedly claimed the woman said Buttigieg had confessed to committing violent crimes and that his children remained at risk.
Buttigieg said he told investigators he had never attended the conference or even been in the town where the alleged conversation supposedly occurred.
He also wrote that CPS informed him the children’s forensic interviews raised no concerns about their safety.
Although Buttigieg described the ordeal as emotionally devastating, much of his criticism was directed toward the individual who made the report rather than the officials who investigated it.
“The police officer, the CPS professional, and the forensic interviewers who spoke to my children were just following procedure and doing their jobs—admirable jobs that must be incredibly difficult every day, protecting the most vulnerable children from the most horrible threats,” he wrote.
He added that filing a knowingly false report should remain a criminal offense because such actions harm both innocent people and the child-protection system itself.
“To be clear, making a false report of this kind is a crime,” Buttigieg wrote. “That’s as it should be, both to protect the innocent from false accusations, and to preserve the integrity of a process designed to protect children from harm.”
His account has also prompted debate over how child welfare agencies handle anonymous allegations.
David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, questioned whether investigators should have treated the report as credible enough to trigger such an extensive response.
Writing on X, Bier argued that an anonymous allegation based on an alleged conversation with another unidentified individual at what Buttigieg says was a nonexistent event appeared, on its face, to lack credibility. He questioned whether government officials should have subjected Buttigieg and his family to such an investigation before more thoroughly evaluating the claim.
“Just following procedures”? Why is he not upset with the government? “An anonymous caller said he told an anonymous woman at a fictitious event that he was violent” is not a credible report. Why wouldn’t you be as furious at the officials who took this obvious hoax seriously? https://t.co/m8TAYu7ppP pic.twitter.com/myGL95d1H7
— David J. Bier (@David_J_Bier) June 28, 2026
