Sean Duffy's family vacation was funded by companies he regulates | Opinion

It's not exactly a mystery why Sean Duffy, President Donald Trump's secretary of Transportation, seems so befuddled and embittered about the backlash that followed his May 8 reveal that American corporations funded a five-part reality television series about a "Great American Road Trip" for his family.

Duffy and his wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy, first became well known as reality television participants on MTV's "The Real World" series and then later as anchors on Fox News, where she still works. And Trump, since his first term, has urged the biggest names in his administration to treat each day like an episode of a television show.

Television shows have sponsors. And the Duffy family road trip has some of the biggest corporations paying the bills. And some of them are regulated by the Department of Transportation.

Trump's administration has always seemed at least as interested, if not more interested, in content generation than in governing. Why do boring public servants work when you can be an influencer on television and social media?

But the look-at-me crowd gets pretty huffy when they receive actual scrutiny. Duffy, in a whiny social media post after the backlash began, attributed that to "the radical, miserable left."

So how did we get here?

Sean Duffy's extensive vacation is being funded by the companies he regulates

The Department of Transportation, on March 6, in a long news release about initiatives to celebrate America's 250th birthday in July, made a brief and vague reference to "The Great American Road Trip" as a "multi-platform storytelling initiative" to "inspire Americans to discover the people and places that make our nation special."

It said nothing about Duffy and his family going on an all-expenses-paid, extensive vacation, but it did link to "The Great American Road Trip" website. The reality TV series also issued a March 6 news release that quoted Duffy urging Americans to travel the country, but also did not mention paying for his family's long adventure.

A Department of Transportation spokesperson told me on May 12 that the agency didn't pay for any of the vacation costs and referred me to The Great American Road Trip Inc.

Duffy on May 8 revealed his family's sponsored vacation with his wife on – where else? – Fox News, as "The Great American Road Trip" released a trailer about the long trip.

Tori Barnes, executive director of Great American Road Trip Inc., told me on May 12 that it was registered last year as a nonprofit 501(c)(4) social welfare organization. It does not show up yet in an IRS search engine for nonprofits like that.

Barnes, a lobbyist who most recently worked as executive vice president for the U.S. Travel Association, did not respond directly when I asked three times for a copy of the initial IRS filing. She also would not tell me when that filing was submitted to the IRS.

This is playing the calendar against transparency. It looks like the public won't really see exactly how much was paid to finance the Duffy family's "Great American Road Trip" until long after it is over.

That should trouble Americans, no matter where you fall on the political spectrum, because Duffy clearly spent months coordinating his agency with corporations his agency regulates for a financial windfall of a multilocation vacation for his family.

'The Great American Road Trip' most Americans can't afford

"The Great American Road Trip" does list some of its sponsors on its website. Part of the backlash is due to the Department of Transportation's direct oversight and regulation of some of those sponsors.

We can't know for sure because of the lack of transparency here, but the trailer shows Duffy and his family visiting the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, snowmobiling in Montana, sailing on a cruise from Miami and dropping in on Kid Rock at some point.

And that's just the trailer, released by Great American Road Trip Inc., which lists Boeing, Toyota, United Airlines and Royal Caribbean Group among its sponsors. Which corporation paid for what? That would require transparency for us to know.

Still, sounds like a fun trip, right? Well, except for Kid Rock. Yech.

It also sounds out of reach for most Americans, especially since the Bureau of Labor Statistics' consumer price index on May 12 reported a 3.8% surge since last April, as the national average gas price hit $4.50 a gallon.

This would not be the first time Duffy was tone-deaf about how his life intersects the American economy. While serving as a Republican from Wisconsin in the U.S. House in 2011, he complained bitterly that his $174,000 annual salary was insufficient to pay his bills. That salary was more than four times what the average American was paid that year.

As secretary of Transportation, Duffy is paid $203,500 per year. His financial disclosure forms, submitted after Trump nominated him, showed he had $1.8 million in income and $1.6 million in assets, against $1.3 million in debt, Bloomberg calculated in 2025.

Duffy's financial disclosure did not detail what Fox News pays his wife, but it did list multiple entries for "speaking fees" that ranged from $15,000 to $25,000 per event.

In other words, here is a prosperous American family that could have paid for its own vacation but instead had a bunch of deep-pocketed corporations regulated by dad pay for the extravaganza. And Duffy, clueless and thin-skinned, determined that the inevitable backlash comes from people who "don't want you to celebrate America!"

So off base. So tone-deaf.

Duffy can't put himself in the place of Americans worried about paying for their vacations. And he certainly can't see that not everyone's job entitles them to a luxurious free ride across the country.

Follow USA TODAY columnist Chris Brennan on Bluesky, @bychrisbrennan.bsky.social, and on X, @ByChrisBrennan. Sign up for his weekly newsletter, Translating Politics, here.