← Videos · Economy, Tariffs & Trade

Duffy Discusses the Shutdown's Impact on the Skies at Newark Airport, Oct. 6, 2025

October 6, 2025 · US Department of Transportation · 0:30:45

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy held a press conference at Newark Liberty International Airport on the impact of the government shutdown on the nation’s transportation systems, in the Department of Transportation’s upload of the event, alongside NATCA President Nick Daniels and the FAA official who manages the air traffic organization. Duffy said he had spoken with Newark’s controllers — over coffee, donuts, and pizza, as he described the visit — about what the shutdown meant for their lives and their ability to do their jobs.

Controllers, he said, are critical infrastructure required to show up for work; their paychecks were due a week from the following day, and instead of thinking only about departures and arrivals they were thinking about mortgages, car payments, and putting food on the table — some working six days a week and weighing a second job driving for a rideshare on top of an already stressful job, as he described their position. He added the equipment brief: controllers are asked to do the job on equipment from the 1960s, 1980s, and 1990s, as he dated it, and he repeated the modernization funding position — $12.5 billion in hand of the $31.5 billion needed, as he stated the figures.

Why it matters

Newark opens the airport shutdown tour this batch pages in full — Philadelphia, LaGuardia, and O’Hare follow across October and November — and it is where Duffy first joined the three strands he would repeat at every stop: the unpaid workforce, the aging equipment, and the modernization money still owed by Congress.

Scoreboard watch

Scoreboard watch: the $12.5 billion in hand against $31.5 billion needed for air traffic control modernization, as stated at Newark on October 6, 2025. Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.

Sources: U.S. Department of Transportation, “U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy on Impact of Radical Democrats’ Shutdown on Our Skies” (official upload, embedded above; description identifies the Newark Liberty International Airport press conference with NATCA President Nick Daniels). Remarks and figures as delivered by Secretary Duffy at the press conference.