Sean Duffy, President-elect Trump’s pick for transportation secretary, testified before the Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday.
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WHO: Sean Duffy
Nominated for: transportation secretary
You may know him from: Fox News, where Duffy has contributed since 2020. He also spent more than 8 years in Congress as a GOP representative from his native Wisconsin.
Learn more about Duffy:
- A long career in public service, but his transportation resume is short
- One of several Trump cabinet picks linked to Fox News
- Starred on MTV’s “The Real World” before entering politics
Position: The Secretary of Transportation heads a department with a budget of more than $100 billion, responsible for maintaining the nation’s aviation system, highways, railroads and ports.
WASHINGTON — When Republican Sean Duffy was in Congress, he worked with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle to replace an 80-year-old bridge over the St. Croix River between his home state of Wisconsin and the Minnesota.
More than a decade later, the Holy Cross crossing — and the relationships the new bridge helped forge — came up repeatedly Wednesday during Duffy’s confirmation hearing to head the Department of Transportation .
“When I fly to Minneapolis and go to Hayward, where I was born and raised, I cross that bridge,” Duffy said during the hearing. “I am consistently proud of the bipartisan work we have accomplished together, and I would like to continue that kind of work if confirmed.”
This project required action by Congress to provide an exemption from the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. Duffy’s work to achieve this helped endear him to several Senate Democrats, including Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin.
“Our efforts show that when we work together, we accomplish important things. And we haven’t always agreed,” Baldwin said in his remarks introducing Duffy to the committee. “But ultimately, I am confident that Sean is the right person for this position in the next administration.”
While some of President-elect Trump’s Cabinet nominees faced sharp questions from Democrats on Capitol Hill this week, Duffy received an extremely friendly reception from Baldwin and other members of the Senate Committee on trade.
Duffy has a long history of public service, representing a northern Wisconsin district in the House of Representatives for more than eight years. But beyond St. Croix Crossing, he has relatively little direct experience in transportation — or in leading a large organization like the DOT, which has a budget of more than $100 billion.
During his confirmation hearing, Duffy pledged to prioritize safety on the roads and in the air, and said he would “work to cut red tape that slows down critical infrastructure projects, ensuring that funds are spent effectively. He pledged to bring “tough love” to Boeing as regulators work to restore confidence in the struggling planemaker. And Duffy said he would tackle the shortage of air traffic controllers, while only hiring “the best and the brightest” for these positions.
After leaving Congress in 2019, Duffy worked as a lobbyist and contributor at Fox News. In announcing his choice, President-elect Trump praised Duffy as a “respected voice and communicator” in an article on Truth Social in November.
Trump looked to the ranks of Fox News to find many of his cabinet nominees. But few have as much experience in front of the camera as Duffy, who starred on MTV’s “The Real World: Boston” in 1997. He met his future wife Rachel Campos-Duffy, a fellow Fox News contributor, when they both starred in another MTV reality show. . Campos-Duffy was present at Wednesday’s hearing, along with eight of the couple’s nine children.
Duffy noted that road safety “is close to my heart because my wife survived a fatal car accident that profoundly changed her life.”
The outgoing Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg also had little direct experience in transportation before taking the reins. Under Buttigieg, the department has doled out billions of dollars from the bipartisan infrastructure law to build roads and bridges, dig tunnels, upgrade airports and more.
Duffy was asked several times Wednesday if funding for these projects would continue to flow.
Sen. Andy Kim (D-NJ) asked specifically about funding for the Gateway Program, a multibillion-dollar project to replace a series of crumbling rail tunnels and bridges connecting northern New Jersey to Manhattan.
“I want to see what funds were spent,” Duffy said. “But I imagine that these good projects that are underway, we will continue.”
The Department of Transportation includes the Federal Aviation Administration, which is in charge of the nation’s airspace, as well as agencies that regulate the nation’s railroads and set safety standards for passenger cars, trucks, and vehicles. commercial.
There are several areas where the department’s broad mandate intersects with the business interests of Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, who has invested more than a quarter of a billion dollars in President-elect Trump’s 2024 election campaign .
Now, security advocates worry that Musk is trying to influence the federal agencies that regulate his companies. His rocket company SpaceX has sometimes clash with regulators to the FAA regarding its launch practices.
Federal regulators at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, part of the DOT, are investigating crashes involving Tesla’s advanced driver assistance systems. And security advocates fear Trump administration will end these investigationsas well as an accident reporting requirement that Tesla opposes.
Sen. Ed Markey (D-MA) asked Duffy if he would allow highway safety investigators to “follow the evidence and operate objectively in their investigations?”
“Yes, I am committed to this committee and to you to let NHTSA conduct its investigation,” Duffy responded.
The candidate was repeatedly asked about his level of commitment to Amtrak – not only by Democratic senators from New Jersey and Delaware, but also by Republicans from Kansas and Mississippi.
Duffy admitted to voting against Amtrak funding when he was a congressman from rural Wisconsin. But he said “this committee has spoken loud and clear about Amtrak and rail transportation in their home communities.”
If confirmed, as seems likely, Duffy said his first trip as transportation secretary would be to the Appalachian mountain regions of Tennessee and North Carolina, where flooding caused by Hurricane Helene damaged major interstate highways as well as countless smaller roads and bridges.
“It’s an emergency,” Duffy said. “I will do everything in our power to move the process forward as quickly as possible so that these communities get access and functional roads again.”
