Duffy Makes His Case To Be Trump’s Transportation Secretary

If Tuesday’s Senate confirmation hearing on Department of Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth was a fiery clown car wreck (and it was), Wednesday’s question-and-answer session for President-elect Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Transportation was a Sunday ride down a smooth stretch of rural road.  

But then again, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation prides itself on its cordiality, its collegiality. As chairman Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, figuratively put it, the more genteel committee is a place of daisies in the hair and for the singing of Kumbaya. 

A stretch? Yes. This is still politics after all in the tireless battle between blue and red. But unlike the Senate Armed Services Committee, where Hegseth endured fierce and fatuous unfriendly fire from lying, grandstanding liberals, the Transportation Committee may well be one of the few truly bipartisan shops in D.C. That’s because nothing brings politicians together — on the left and the right — like spending money on big, beautiful transportation projects. President-elect Trump is a builder, after all, and he’s long been all-in on transportation and infrastructure spending. 

And Trump’s Transportation nominee, Sean Duffy, a former four-plus-term Wisconsin congressman and former Fox Business co-host with a strong conservative pedigree, is expected to have a smooth road to confirmation. He’s been known to work across the aisle, particularly on important transportation bills for his home state, whose deeply divergent senators — core conservative Ron Johnson and Madison leftist Tammy Baldwin — warmly welcomed him as the nominee.

It certainly was a lot of nicey-nice in the hearing room. But then again confirmation hearings always feel much more affable when Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, “technically the dumbest member of Congress” according to comedian Adam Carolla, isn’t involved (How many committees is that gaslighting gas bag on, anyway?) 

Duffy’s got a lot going for him. Perhaps No. 1 on that list is that he’s not the present bungling Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, the upward-failing political climber who has done a number on the agency he’s so inadequately served over the past four years. 

“You are certainly as qualified as our current Department of Transportation secretary, and I voted for him,” said Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska. 

‘A Golden Age of Travel’

It was a family atmosphere in the committee room. Duffy was joined by his better half, Rachel Campos-Duffy, and eight of the couple’s nine children. 

“As a farther of nine kids, I think about transportation quite a bit, and transportation safety,” he told the committee, noting that his wife of 25 years survived a head-on collision. “No federal agency impacts Americans’ daily lives and loved ones more than the Department of Transportation.”  

As secretary, Duffy would oversee an agency with an annual budget north of $100 billion, with its hands on everything from highways, railroads, and bridges to aviation and water travel. The next secretary also inherits the Goliath $1.2 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, a sweeping catch-all spending program that has been marred by delays, bureaucratic red tape, escalating costs, and a failure to deliver on bold promises more than three years after President Joe Biden signed it into law. 

“Among the reasons given for the slow progress on these initiatives include complex requirements for grantees, Buy America requirements, and preferences for unionized employees and those who have been involved with the justice system,” the libertarian Cato Institute wrote in a report issued in late June. 

Democrats on the committee like big union labor jobs. Baldwin is a big backer of Buy America, priority spending that sounds good in concept but has the tendency to raise taxpayer bills in practice. Trump is a very vocal — and active —proponent of Buy America, a core principle in the Make America Great Again movement. It’s the one thing he and a far-left senator like Baldwin can agree on. 

Duffy told the committee he’s ready to carry out the Trump agenda to “usher in a golden age of travel.” Committee members with dollar signs in their eyes definitely liked the sound of that. Sullivan wants Duffy to tour Alaska and perhaps some of the 251 communities, the senator says, that are not connected by road. Democrat Ranking Member Maria Cantwell of Washington wants Duffy to be mindful of the critical role troubled Boeing plays in her state’s economy. She had questions about Duffy’s support for a multi-billion dollar culvert repair program that proponents say is critical to the salmon trade. 

“I love salmon, and I love salmon spawning,” Duffy confessed. 

‘I Agree With You’

He answered question after after question, mostly, it seemed, to the satisfaction or acceptance of the committee that will vote on whether to recommend him for full Senate confirmation. 

“I agree with you, pedestrians dying is a bad thing,” Duffy said in response to Hawaii Democrat Brian Schatz’s concerns that the nominee will consider the full scope of transportation. 

“I think we’re all agreed that death is bad,” Cruz added. 

Duffy even agreed to look into a long-delayed National Highway Traffic Safety Administration program supposed to be developing more representative female crash-test dummies. The nominee and Cantwell found common ground on a point members of the left have struggled with in recent years, that “men and women are different.”

The senators definitely are agreed that they want copious amounts of federal cash for what they believe to be their state’s essential transportation infrastructure needs. They say they want the most cost-effective ways to accomplish that critically important political mission. 

Members of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation seem to believe Duffy is the man for the job. 

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.