Sean Duffy is too busy decorating to fix air safety crisis
In lieu of solving the ever-present issues at the Federal Aviation Administration, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has shifted his focus to more pressing matters, like interior decorating.
Duffy took time out of his Thursday afternoon to publicly announce that he’s moving a painting of Jesus up a few floors at the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy.
“We are moving Jesus out of the basement!” he exclaimed in a video posted on X.
Reveling in the strange victory, Duffy told the camera that he worked with the school to move the painting back to a “place of prominence” after being stored in the basement.
While some may be cheering about Duffy’s redecorating project, those stranded in airports waiting for the Trump administration to come up with a solution to the ongoing air safety crisis might be less enthused.
Late last month, Newark Liberty International Airport faced multiple operational meltdowns that caused air traffic controllers to briefly lose radar images and communication with all aircrafts. And on Monday, Denver had a similarly terrifying outage, with air traffic controllers losing communication for 90 seconds.
While travelers are praying for safe landings—or simply hoping that their flights depart in the first place—Duffy was called out for rerouting his own family away from airports experiencing outages.
On Wednesday, Duffy defended his decision to move his wife from a flight departing Newark to another leaving LaGuardia Airport in New York.
“With all the delays at Newark—my wife had to do an event and she was in the city of New York, and so I did—I moved her from Newark to LaGuardia not for safety but because I needed her flight to fly. She had to get there,” he said during a House Appropriations Committee hearing.
But as Duffy faces the obvious failings of his own department, he seems to be following in the footsteps of his boss: refusing to take any accountability.
Rather than admitting that the Trump administration’s slashing of the FAA has created a massive air traffic controller shortage, Duffy is pointing the finger elsewhere.
“The infrastructure bill under Joe Biden, $1.2 trillion,” Duffy told Fox News host Martha MacCallum last week. “They sent only $5 billion to fix air traffic control. And of the $5 billion, Pete Buttigieg spent less than $1 billion to fix this problem. Instead, he was focused on racist roads and changing the name of ‘cockpit’ to ‘flight deck’ or ‘air man’ to ‘aeronaut.’ Stupid stuff.”
Stupid stuff, indeed.