When Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced last week that he and his family were the stars of a new five-part reality series set to air on YouTube, the list of problems was not short. The Cabinet secretary suggested that this was just a fun little online exercise — the series, ostensibly tied to the United States’ 250th anniversary, will highlight a multipart road trip featuring Duffy and his family — but it wasn’t nearly that simple.
For one thing, the former Fox News host (and former 1990s-era reality television personality) decided to promote a lengthy road trip at a time when millions of Americans are struggling with the burdens of high gas prices, generated by the administration’s unnecessary war in Iran.
What’s more, there were questions about how he managed to squeeze this into his schedule while simultaneously leading a large Cabinet agency and NASA.
But perhaps most important of all is the fact that the show was sponsored by companies that Duffy’s department oversees and regulates.
With this in mind, The New York Times reported on the intensifying ethical questions.
The series, filmed across 10 states and Washington, D.C., over the course of seven months, is part of the department’s commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the United States this year. But it doubled as a set of family excursions for Mr. Duffy, his wife and his children, who traveled to national parks and major landmarks paid for by Great American Road Trip Inc., a nonprofit that names among its sponsors Toyota, United Airlines and Boeing.
All three of those corporate sponsors, the Times added, “have recently been subjects of department investigations and punitive actions.”
“Accepting travel from companies with business before D.O.T. potentially implicates even more significant corruption and misconduct concerns,” Donald Sherman, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, wrote in a letter this week to the Transportation Department’s acting inspector general, requesting an investigation.
Duffy was not paid by Great American Road Trip Inc. for the series, but the nonprofit accepted corporate donations, some of which have not been publicly disclosed; it’s run by a former lobbyist for General Motors and the U.S. Travel Association; and it provided obvious benefits to the secretary’s family, in the form of all-expenses-paid excursions. (Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in government ethics, described this as potentially corrupt “gift laundering.”)
Meanwhile, the former lobbyist who leads Great American Road Trip Inc. told the Times that the nonprofit took shape in June 2025, at which point it invited Duffy and his family to participate. That might sound benign, but the Duffy’s road trip actually began in May 2025, and the secretary’s wife, Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy, recently suggested the excursions were the family’s idea.
For his part, Duffy published a statement to social media this week, arguing that his critics are “upset because they don’t want you to celebrate America!”
That’s certainly one way of looking at the circumstances. The other is to understand that one can be both patriotic and concerned about government ethics and an administration that too often appears indifferent to corruption.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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