← Videos · Economy, Tariffs & Trade

Duffy Holds a Press Conference at Philadelphia International Airport, Oct. 24, 2025

October 24, 2025 · US Department of Transportation · 0:23:20

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

What happened

Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy held a press conference at Philadelphia International Airport during the government shutdown, in the Department of Transportation’s upload of the event, alongside NATCA President Nick Daniels. Duffy said controllers had received 90 percent of their pay in the paycheck about ten days earlier, most of that pay period having fallen in September, but had just been notified that the coming Tuesday’s paycheck would be, as he put it, a big fat zero. He described the resulting frustration and anxiety — mortgages, car payments, childcare, and food planned around a paycheck that would not arrive — at what he noted was day 23 or 24 of the shutdown.

On safety, he was explicit as he stated the department’s position: the system is safe because, if staffing or stress leaves too few controllers able to do the job, the department will reduce capacity and cancel flights — he was less concerned, he said, with travelers arriving on time than with them arriving safely. He put the scale of the system at over 45,000 aircraft and 3 million passengers moved every day, and the shutdown’s delay effect at as high as 53 percent of delays caused by staffing shortages, against an average of about 5 percent, as he stated the figures, with every day of the shutdown above that average.

Why it matters

Philadelphia is the earliest of the three airport shutdown briefings paged in this batch — before LaGuardia on October 28 and O’Hare on November 11 — and it fixes the baseline Duffy argued from throughout: a zero paycheck for the workforce, a stated safety rule that capacity yields before standards do, and the delay share climbing toward the November 5 capacity-cut announcement.

Scoreboard watch

Scoreboard watch: the staffing-driven delay share stated at Philadelphia — as high as 53 percent during the shutdown, against about 5 percent on an average day. Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.

Sources: U.S. Department of Transportation, “Secretary Duffy Holds Press Conference at Philadelphia International Airport” (official upload, embedded above). Remarks and figures as delivered by Secretary Duffy at the press conference.