Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is making a controversial road trip back to reality TV.
“The Great American Road Trip,” a five-part reality series set to air on YouTube in celebration of the United States’ 250th anniversary, follows Duffy as he travels across the country with his wife, Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy, and their nine children.
“The motto is: To love America is to see America,” Duffy says in the show’s trailer. “It’s more than a road trip. It’s a civic experience. It’s one of the most powerful ways to understand the vast, beautiful, complicated place we call home.”
The project marks a return to the couple’s reality-TV roots. Before entering politics, Duffy was a cast member on MTV’s “The Real World: Boston” in 1997, then joined the channel’s reality game show “Road Rules: All Stars,” on which he and Campos-Duffy first met.
“We’re encouraging everyone to go take a road trip to celebrate America’s 250th birthday,” Duffy says in the trailer, which also features the family meeting with President Donald Trump.
The show has drawn criticism from those who call it tone-deaf as average fuel prices have climbed to more than $4.50 per gallon, up roughly 50% since the U.S. entered war with Iran in late February.
Some commenters on YouTube were blunt. One compared the trip to “going on a foodie tour during the Great Depression.” Another wrote: “Americans are struggling to afford gas and groceries but these two reality tv and Fox News stars are treated to free trips with celebrity visits and a cruise. Read the room, Mark and Marie Antoinette.”
Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was among the first prominent voices to weigh in. “I love a good road trip, but this is brutally out of touch: a Trump Cabinet member making a documentary about himself while regular families can’t afford road trips anymore, because Trump and his war put gas prices through the roof,” he wrote on X.
Other Democratic politicians, including Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and California Gov. Gavin Newsom — who noted the multiple air travel accidents that occurred “on [Duffy’s] watch” while he was filming — echoed the criticism.
Transportation Department spokesperson Nathaniel Sizemore told NBC News that politicians criticizing soaring gas prices “should sit this one out.”
“These are the same people who waged a war on fossil fuels, pushed gas to over $5 a gallon, and forced American families into expensive electric vehicles,” Sizemore wrote in an email. “Secretary Duffy has already taken action to make cars for affordable and support the President energy dominance agenda.”
The Transportation Department also pointed to positive responses from the likes of Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a Republican, Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Ky., and country musician John Rich, who wrote the show’s theme song.
“Laina and I raised our kids to love this country and explore the incredible gift God gave us in America,” Marshall wrote on X. “God bless the Duffy family for doing the same.”
Duffy said on social media that all of the show’s production costs were covered by a nonprofit group, The Great American Road Trip Inc. — not taxpayers — and that neither he nor his family received a salary or production royalties. Sizemore said that covered costs included gas, car rentals, lodging and activities and that taxpayer funds were used only for official government travel.
Critics also raised conflict-of-interest concerns: Several of the show’s sponsors — including Boeing, Toyota, Shell, Royal Caribbean Group and United Airlines — are companies that Duffy’s department oversees and regulates. (Comcast/NBCUniversal, the parent company of NBC News, is also listed as one of its sponsors.)
The Transportation Department told NBC News that The Great American Road Trip Inc. is an independent organization, and “how and who they accept donations from in furtherance of their mission to celebrate America’s 250th birthday is their decision.”
When asked about the sponsors, Tori Barnes, executive director of The Great American Road Trip Inc., said it follows three key pillars.
“1. To celebrate America’s 250th birthday; 2. To promote travel and tourism and; 3. To bring focus to the transportation, infrastructure and ingenuity that built America over the past 250 years and will build America over the next 250 years,” Barnes wrote in an email. “Our partners are working with us for those reasons.”
Toyota said in a statement that it “is proud to support initiatives that celebrate America’s history, people and the spirit of exploration.”
Boeing, Shell, Royal Caribbean Group and United Airlines did not immediately respond to requests for comment
Questions also arose about how much time Duffy devoted to the project. In an interview, Duffy told Fox News that he spent seven months filming — a disclosure that prompted criticism about his commitment to official duties. Campos-Duffy disputed that characterization, telling Pete Buttigieg’s husband, Chasten Glezman Buttigieg, that filming took place in “small one and two day stops.”
“You and I both know that my husband has done more in one year to transform the DOT and ATC than your husband did in over 4 years on the job,” she wrote on X.
In his own post, Duffy wrote that the “radical, miserable left” are “upset because they don’t want you to celebrate America! And they definitely don’t want you to teach your kids civics & patriotism. So they tell lies to undermine the mission.”
He added that career ethics and budget officials at the Transportation Department had reviewed and approved both his participation and travel “in accordance with federal rules,” and concluded: “Under my leadership, DOT has become the most responsive, productive, and transformational in its history.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
