The sun, the sweat, the sea — summertime often brings back memories of vacations and family fun, but this year it’s reminding Americans just how expensive things have gotten. Today, with surging fuel prices and stubborn inflation, the average vacation costs just about $7,250, up 10% from the year before, according to The Motley Fool.
The increased costs have left many families with the hard decision of cutting back on their vacation plans. It has also led some to criticize Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy for his “The Great American Road Trip” reality series, which stars him and his family. In the series, the Duffy family goes on a tour of the country, visiting and enjoying iconic landmarks to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary and encourage people to do the same, something that is increasingly more costly.
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“Over the course of seven months, we just kind of found these moments where I might be able to do some work,” Duffy told Fox News on Friday. “I could take the kids with me, do a road trip … and there’s so much to see in this beautiful country.”
Who is paying for Duffy’s show?
Over the weekend, Duffy defended his new reality show after some raised questions about who paid for it. He said private companies, not taxpayers’ dollars, funded the project.
“Here are the facts,” Duffy wrote on X. “Production costs were paid for by the Great American Road Trip Inc., not taxpayers. Zero taxpayer dollars were spent on my family.”
But the use of the nonprofit raises other questions, since the nonprofit’s sponsors are companies he works with as transportation secretary. The group’s website states that major transportation companies like Boeing, United Airlines, Toyota, Royal Caribbean Group, Enterprise, and others are sponsoring the show. Straight Arrow reached out to several of the nonprofit’s sponsors for comment are is waiting to hear back.
The use of companies that are heavily involved with Duffy’s work as the transportation secretary raises additional ethical questions. Boeing, for example, is currently facing federal safety scrutiny over recent high-profile events.
United Airlines, another sponsor of the nonprofit, is not only a major player in the transportation industry but also a company Duffy contracted with when he was a registered lobbyist for the airline industry.
Katherine Van Dyck, an anti-monopoly and consumer advocate, criticized the nonprofit and the companies supporting it. She said it also could raise legal issues, citing the Hatch Act.
“They are all regulated by DoT, and they all just funded his extended family vacation,” Van Dyck wrote. “That’s compensation even if it isn’t dollars deposited directly into the Duffy bank account. It’s a direct conflict of interest prohibited by federal ethics laws. It raises serious Hatch Act questions.”
The Hatch Act prohibits federal employees from using their government position to advocate on behalf of a campaign or candidate or from using those same resources to engage in partisan political activity while on duty. But Duffy said the government found that the project did not violate any federal policy before they started it.
“Career ethics and budget officials at the Department of Transportation reviewed and approved both my participation and individual travel in accordance with federal rules,” he wrote on X.
As transportation secretary, Duffy has rolled out regulations that have been criticized as helping companies but not necessarily consumers. Some of these changes included waiving large fines against American Airlines and Southwest Airlines and gutting consumer-friendly flight cancellation policies.
But the most significant change under Duffy was the cancellation of the Biden-era policy requiring airlines to pay passengers hundreds of dollars when a flight was significantly delayed or canceled due to factors within the airline’s control.
Duffy said he pulled out of the program for three main reasons. He argued Congress never told the Transportation Department to mandate specific cash payments as laid out in the previous DoT’s plan, meaning they couldn’t require it. Duffy said that airlines should compete on customer service rather than being forced into it by the government. Finally, he said the policy would cost airliners billions and that the cost would eventually be passed on to passengers.
The economic reality for most Americans
Despite Duffy’s use of his new series to encourage more Americans to travel, some of his and the administration’s policies have made it harder for Americans to take a break.
The war in Iran has caused gas prices for both cars and planes to sharply rise. At the same time, inflation remains elevated, leading to higher prices for just about everything else, with the Trump administration’s tariff policy partly to blame. These higher prices have led many Americans to cut back on driving and vacation plans, according to a poll conducted in late April by Ipsos.
But Duffy hopes to change some minds with his new series, something he highlighted on social media.
“Our message is really simple: to love America is to see America,” he wrote on X. “So put the phone down, hit the open road, and rediscover what makes America great.”
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