Sean Duffy speaks during a Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation committee hearing on his nomination to be Secretary of Transportation on Wednesday, Jan. 15, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy — the anti-LGBTQ+ former congressman, reality TV personality, and Fox host who replaced former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg — is now saying that he will direct Department of Transportation funds to areas with higher marriage and birth rates.
In a series of orders on Wednesday intended to “rescind woke policies, roll back burdensome and costly regulations, restore economic growth,” Duffy said that “communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average” would be given preference when asking for federal grant money and contracts for transportation projects.
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The memo says that “families with young children” have more of a need for transportation.
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The memo also bans grant recipients from implementing “mask mandates” and requires recipients to help federal authorities identify undocumented immigrants, according to the HuffPost.
“The American people deserve an efficient, safe and pro-growth transportation system based on sound decision-making, not political ideologies,” Duffy said of the memo, which explicitly pushes several ideological positions.
Same-sex couples are less likely to have children than opposite-sex couples, which means that areas with large LGBTQ+ populations could face funding cuts.
The memo came just hours before American Eagle Flight 5342 crashed after colliding with a military helicopter as it was landing at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Washington D.C. on Wednesday night.
“My focus is on those who are impacted on this flight and again, I’ve been secretary for a little over a day,” he said at a press conference after the crash, which killed 67 people. The head of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which is in charge of air safety, was pushed out of his job a week earlier by Trump ally Elon Musk after he proposed imposing $600,000 in fines on Musk’s company SpaceX over safety concerns. The FAA, which is part of the Department of Transportation, still does not have a director.
Moreover, the New York Times reports that the air traffic control tower at the Reagan Airport was understaffed on Wednesday night. Usually, separate controllers work with helicopters and airplanes, but that night there was only one controller handling both helicopters and planes. A preliminary FAA report on the crash said it was “not normal for the time of day and volume of traffic” to have only one controller working.
Duffy was the co-host of The Bottom Line on Fox Business prior to his appointment to lead the Department of Transportation. Prior to that, he was a member of the House of Representatives, representing Wisconsin’s Seventh Congressional District. He first got national attention in the late 1990s when he appeared on The Real World: Boston and Road Rules: All Stars.
Duffy was a vocal opponent of marriage equality and earned a score of zero several times on the HRC Congressional Scorecard during his tenure in Congress, showing his staunch opposition to LGBTQ+ equality.
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