The Purest Distilled Essence of Trumpism

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy keeps going on TV and insisting it’s safe to fly in and out of Newark Liberty Airport in New Jersey, despite a string of extremely frightening outages and workforce shortages recently. But Duffy has now admitted he changed a flight booked for his wife on Monday so that she wouldn’t have to travel through Newark.

Duffy made the startling admission to David Webb, a conservative radio host, during his SiriusXM show on Monday. And it’s a shocking thing to hear from the guy who’s supposed to make sure American air travel is safe.

“My wife was flying out of Newark tomorrow. I switched her flight to LaGuardia,” Duffy told the host of The David Webb Show as they discussed the recent problems at the airport.

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Newark has had three significant tech outages in the past two weeks at the Philadelphia facility where air traffic is monitored for the New Jersey airport. Radar screens went black and radios fell silent on April 28 for about 30 seconds in an experience so harrowing that flight traffic controllers have taken trauma leave. Screens again went dark on May 9 for about 90 seconds, and on May 11, an equipment outage caused a group stop for 45 minutes.

The New York Times also reported late Monday that just three air traffic controllers were monitoring traffic at Newark during a shift that day when 14 should have been working. The paper reported that the number of “fully certified controllers” on duty was sometimes even just “one or two” during a shift.

In early April, the Department of Transportation renewed its deferred resignation offers after the initial round of offers expired in February. Some 4,700 DOT employees accepted the new offer according to Politico. It’s unclear how many of these workers were at the FAA, but given that the FAA houses roughly 80% of the total DOT workforce, it’s likely a significant number, building upon the loss of 700 employees who took the initial buyout. We do know, however, that two top FAA administrators have accepted the offers, further decimating the leadership capacity at the agency amid widespread safety concerns and increased scrutiny following January’s deadly crash at DCA that took 67 lives.

[…] Rather than take responsibility and decisive action, Secretary Duffy has deflected blame. “Over the last four years, the last administration, they knew this was a problem. […] During COVID, when people weren’t flying, that was the perfect time to fix these problems,” Duffy said in a Monday press conference discussing Newark’s issues. 

This is, of course, an absurd attempt by a panicked administration to avoid scrutiny of its assault on the federal workers that maintain air safety and failure to quickly alleviate potentially fatal problems at Newark. Duffy surely knows that his current boss was president when air travel halted during COVID. He knows the Biden administration passed an infrastructure bill that included“$25 billion to modernize and upgrade airports and air traffic facilities.” His tenure, in contrast, has been marred by terminations, widespread resignations, and multiple commercial crashes in just a few months. As we’ve highlight in our Aviation Disasters Tracker, it’s already had deadly consequences.