U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy spoke on Friday at the Federal Aviation Administration Technical Center in Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey. Duffy addressed recent domestic aircraft collisions and incidents including the fatal helicopter crash in the Hudson River on Thursday and the small plane crash in Boca Raton, Florida on Friday.
As seen in the Fox News video below, Duffy also spoke about the actions of federal government at large and how he sees the FAA fitting into the Trump administration’s efficiency mandate.
The Secretary said: “I want to talk about DOGE for a second. I know there’s been some freak out, there’s been some concern, there’s been a lot of emotion, and I would just tell you, do I want to make our government more efficient? Do I want to be able to do a little more with a little less? Because then I put money in the great work that we do? Yeah, I wanna do that. But you can’t do that without great people.”
Note: According to reporting by the New York Times, “nearly 800 U.S. Department of Transportation workers were terminated, placed on leave or sent home as a result of the DOGE cuts, although most have been reinstated and returned to work.”
Trump’s Transportation Secretary blames Elon Musk and DOGE for cuts after multiple fatal aircraft crashes pic.twitter.com/6llYp3q2eY
— FactPost (@factpostnews) April 11, 2025
Duffy added: “And so though I want us to be more efficient, I also look and think of DOGE cutting things, I don’t know about elsewhere but we actually build things here, right? You can’t cut your way to a new road, you can’t cut your way to a new bridge, you can’t cut your way to a new air traffic control system, so we’re actually going to build in this department.”
He added, “And if I don’t and you don’t all build with me, um, the President’s gonna come back in four months and go ‘where are the roads, where are the bridges, where’s the air space revamp?’ and he’s going to give us a very hard time.”
Kicked off this morning at the @FAA_News Technical Center in Atlantic City to celebrate their official renaming.
This center is at the cutting edge of aviation innovation, and their work is directly supporting our efforts to build an all new, state of the art air traffic control… pic.twitter.com/Z1EQLOOqGg
— Secretary Sean Duffy (@SecDuffy) April 11, 2025