Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy went on Fox News to blame President Joe Biden and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg for aviation safety issues that have worsened under Donald Trump’s bumbling administration.
“The infrastructure bill under Joe Biden, $1.2 trillion,” Duffy told Fox News host Martha MacCallum. “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,” he babbled.
That’s some choice spin from a guy who joined 179 other Republican House members in voting to defund the Federal Aviation Administration in 2019. Yes, the FAA is the agency tasked with keeping airplanes from crashing.
As recently as May 2, Duffy was trying to bribe retiring air traffic controllers to stay on the job, part of a desperate bid to stop the bleeding caused by the Trump administration’s chaotic purges of the federal government. But no one had high expectations for the former reality TV personality who is scarily unqualified for the job of transportation secretary—even if he did star in MTV’s “Road Rules.”
The FAA’s air traffic controller shortage has plagued the last half dozen presidential administrations. But the Biden administration launched a serious effort to fix it, funded by an infrastructure bill that more than 200 Republicans voted against. The money that Duffy claims went to “racist roads” has in fact been used to improve airport infrastructure across the country.
Related | Unqualified ex-Fox hosts lead response to deadly plane crash
The troubled transportation secretary’s latest Fox News appearance comes amid reports of serious technical problems and staff shortages at Newark Liberty International Airport, leading to safety concerns and massive delays for travelers. Duffy’s insistence that diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives are to blame for our country’s air traffic safety challenges parrots Trump’s offensive remarks blaming a January crash between a commercial airplane and an Army Black Hawk helicopter on DEI efforts including “dwarfism.”
Since Trump returned to the White House in January, the shortage of air traffic controllers has only grown. That’s due in no small part to wholesale firings as well as the coerced resignation and retirement of federal workers—including important FAA safety specialists—initiated by Trump, his co-President Elon Musk, and their so-called Department of Government Efficiency. As with other essential government positions, the administration has been scrambling to rehire the very people it drove out.
It turns out that trying to run the United States the same way you ran a successful social media company right into the ground yields similarly poor results.
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