Transportation Secretary Slammed After Admitting He Made A Telling Switch To Wife's Recent Flight

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy was criticized after admitting in a recent audio clip that he'd just switched his wife's Newark Liberty International Airport flight to one out of LaGuardia Airport—despite previously claiming his family flies out of Newark Airport "all the time."

Duffy’s remarks came as staffing shortages caused major flight disruptions at Newark on Monday, with the F.A.A. forced to delay incoming flights from across the continental U.S. and parts of Canada. According to an online advisory, delays averaged over 1 hour and 40 minutes and in some cases stretched to nearly seven hours.

The delays followed a brief radar outage on Friday at the Philadelphia air traffic control facility that oversees Newark’s airspace. That disruption echoed a similar outage on April 28, when controllers briefly lost communication with pilots. The April incident capped off months of technical issues that have left air traffic controllers overwhelmed.

Speaking on a radio show recently, after the host noted that issues at Newark are compounded "with both a runway closed for construction until June [and] air traffic controller issues," Duffy, with no trace of irony, said:

"My wife was flying out of Newark tomorrow. I switched her flight to LaGuardia.”

You can hear the exchange in the audio below.

Compare those words to the response he gave to Meet the Press moderator Kristen Welker when she asked him "if it's safe to fly out of Newark Airport right now":

"It is. I fly out of Newark all the time. My family flies out of Newark."

Many have called out Duffy's hypocrisy.

Earlier this week, Duffy attributed the ongoing issues at Newark—and broader disruptions across the U.S. flight system—to the Biden administration, criticizing what he described as a failure to address persistent staffing shortages and infrastructure challenges within the FAA.

He said:

“We didn’t have to be here. This did not have to be our story. Over the last four years, the last administration, they knew this was a problem. And by the way, during Covid, when people weren’t flying, that was a perfect time to fix these problems.”

What Duffy conveniently overlooked is that the period he blamed on the Biden administration also includes 2020—the final year of Donald Trump’s first presidency.