What happened to the reality show Pete Buttigieg's replacement spent 7 months making?

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy faced stiff criticism in June when he announced that he had taken a seven-month road trip paid for by millions of dollars in corporate largesse, ostensibly to produce a reality TV series celebrating America’s 250th anniversary.

But several months later, people are asking, “Where’s the show?”

“Summer is nearly over, and the American people haven’t seen a single episode of this reality TV show—so what did the corporate sponsors who helped fund this road trip actually pay for?” Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) told Forbes.

Duffy and his wife, Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy, announced their “Great American Road Trip” in May, a reality show that followed them and their nine kids for the previous seven months as they traveled to different cities and recorded their conversations in their car. They even released a trailer on Fox News.

“We did it for FREE to celebrate America 250 & encourage other Americans to get off couches & screens and spend time together seeing our country,” Campos-Duffy said in response to the inevitable criticism that they had wasted taxpayer money.

But her statement was false; a family of 11 cannot go on a road trip for seven months for free. They had actually accepted corporate sponsorships – including from many corporations that Duffy is supposed to be in charge of regulating – to fund it. Forbes estimates that the corporations that sponsored the Duffys’ trip spent $100 million in congressional lobbying last year alone.

They also faced criticism from former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s husband, author Chasten Buttigieg, who pointed out that the right was outraged for years that Pete Buttigieg took some parental leave to care for his children while in office, but was silent on the time the Duffys spent recording a reality show.

Months after the controversy, though, people are now wondering if America will at least get to see the reality show that resulted from the conflict of interest, but there’s no word yet. Forbes asked the corporate sponsors – which include Boeing, Shell, and the American Bus Association – if they had been compensated for the “delayed” release of the show, as they would typically expect in the case of a media sponsorship, but couldn’t get the corporations to even respond to the question.

“The administration continues to create these opportunities for corporate interests, to say nothing of the foreign ones, to fund their pet projects,” Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington president and CEO Donald Sherman told Forbes.