With the start of vacation season, travel is top of mind for many Americans.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy joined WTOP’s Michelle Basch and John Aaron to talk about travel, including electric vehicles and concerns about the safety of flying following the crash at Reagan National Airport.
For those who might plan to hit the open road, Duffy also previewed the Great American Road Trip Expo, which begins at 10 a.m. Thursday at the Transportation Department’s Southeast D.C. headquarters.
Listen to the interview with WTOP or read the full transcript below.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
John Aaron: Mr. Secretary, great to talk to you this morning. First off, tell us about the expo and what we’re going to find there tomorrow.
Sean Duffy: So with the expo tomorrow, we’re going to have an amazing layout of vehicles that are made in America from GM, Stellantis, Ford, Rivian, Tesla, Toyota, along with vendors as well, food: McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A, Dunkin’ Donuts, 7-Eleven. And so as we deal with rainy weather today in D.C., and cloudy and overcast, tomorrow’s it’s going to clear up. It’s going to be nice.
And so you know, again, if you want to come and see some of the newest models, what our great American carmakers are producing, come on down to DOT and Navy Yard, and we’re going to have a great, festive morning and afternoon with American vehicles.
John Aaron: Yeah, staying on the roads. The Senate has sent to President Trump a measure to bar that California plan to end the sale of gas-only vehicles by 2035. That affects people in this area, because Maryland would have followed that as well. Why do you think, in your opinion, this is a good move for drivers?
Sean Duffy: Well, listen, you want one government standard, one federal standard. We don’t want to make, you know, cars for California and those who follow the California standard in a different set of standards elsewhere in the country. Again, that’s really hard for manufacturers to try to comply with different rules in different states. And so we are one big, beautiful country. Let’s have one big, beautiful standard.
And again, to treat California differently than the rest of the country, I think was a mistake. It was driving up the cost of vehicles, and I think some of the policies coming out of California are, frankly, somewhat insane.
I mean, so we have a CAFE standard. That’s a fuel efficiency standard. The last administration set it at 50 miles a gallon. There is no combustion engine vehicle that can hit 50 miles a gallon on any fleet in the country.
So what you’d have to do is pay a tax, or you’d have to buy carbon offsets, and that cost would drive up the price of a vehicle, on average, by $2,000 and so we’re gonna go back to common sense. Yes, we love fuel efficiency, but we also have to have common sense in the standards that we set. And we’re gonna go back to that common sense, which is what’s gonna happen with getting rid of the California standard.
Michelle Basch: Well, Secretary Duffy, we also want to talk to you about air travel and, of course, safety. There have been safety concerns with air traffic control systems. What can you tell us about what’s being done to solve those problems?
Sean Duffy: That is the million dollar question. So what’s happened over the course of the last 20, 30, 40 years is our government and our Congress hasn’t paid attention to our air traffic control network. It has gotten old. We use copper wires for communication, not fiber.
The technology is, you know, back from the ’80s or the ’90s that we have in our towers and our TRACONs and so it’s showing its age, to be honest.
And you saw that in Newark with what happened with the telecom outages. It’s an old telecom system, and it showed the age. And by the way, they moved that TRACON from New York down to Philadelphia, and they didn’t test the new network as well.
And so we need money from Congress. This is bipartisan, by the way, and both bicameral House and Senate, most everyone agrees we have to build a brand new system in America. And so when they send us the money, we’re going to launch and do this build. Now, we have the plan we’re letting it get pressure tested by industry. So when the money comes, we’re ready to jump.
But this is going to take, I mean, it’s going to take two or three years to do this nationwide build of this infrastructure. It gets to be complicated. As we’re keeping, you know, planes in the air. We’re switching out equipment, and so the choreography of how we do that is, is real. And so that’s one problem — money. We’re going to, we’re going to launch this and fix it again, three, four years to do it.
The other problem is we don’t have enough air traffic controllers. We’re 3,000 controllers short in America. And so we’ve developed a plan to surge air traffic control young people into the academy. Get more of them in train, more of them up, get them into the pipeline.
And then we also have controllers that are experienced, that can retire after 25 years of service. We’re going to pay them a bonus, 20% of their salary up front, to stay on and continue to serve the American people as air traffic controllers. We need them to stay another one to five years. We’ll pay them every year that 20% and again, those two things expand the pipeline of new controllers coming in, and keeping those older controllers on the job is going to be the key to shrinking the shortfall that we have right now.
And so it’s a big lift. But listen, we have a great team, and I feel comfortable that we’re going to accomplish this, this goal, if the money comes from the Congress.
John Aaron: Now, that’s all down the road. How would you assess the safety situation, specifically at Reagan National Airport right now?
Sean Duffy: 100% safe. So what you saw with the DCA air crash is you for decades, you had helicopter and fixed wing cross traffic, and there were a number of warning signs, 85 really close calls in the last three years. No one stopped it.
So we have, we have basically boxed out an area off Runway 33 that’s going out over the Potomac. You can’t, you can’t have cross traffic through that area. And so what we’ve done is said, ‘Listen, if it’s the president, vice president, if there’s a life saving mission or a law enforcement mission, you can fly that route for down the Potomac.’ However, we also stop traffic at DCA, right? So we’re not going to allow what happened on Jan. 29 to happen again.
So that’s safe. We saw somewhat of a close call. It wasn’t that close, but again, the airspace was violated with a military helicopter, three four weeks ago. That’s under review right now. The FAA and me at DOT we’re talking about, you know, how do we make sure we have safety but still have some parameters around how those helicopters fly?
Listen, I think there are way too many and air quotes, ‘VIPs’ that fly out of the Pentagon. I don’t know who the VIPs are, but there’s a lot of VIPs in this town, and nobody flies. But for the president and the VP, a lot of people are flying out of the Pentagon.
We have to get our hands around who’s flying and if they’re going to fly training missions, when do they fly them? We should have those missions, training missions, flown at times where there’s limited traffic at DCA, maybe in the morning, maybe at night, and there has to be better communication between the DCA tower and the Pentagon to make sure we don’t have what happened a few weeks ago happen again.
Michelle Basch: Well, transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, thank you so much. We hope to talk to you again in the future.
Sean Duffy: I can’t wait. Come on down tomorrow to DOT 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. It’s going to be a great, great time. Come check out the cars and look forward to seeing you.
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