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Vice President JD Vance Gaggles with Press, Oct. 30, 2025

October 30, 2025 · The White House · 0:21:26

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

What happened

Vice President JD Vance took questions at the White House on October 30, 2025, after a roundtable with aviation-industry and labor leaders on the government shutdown, joined by Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy. The Vice President said everyone at the table was worried about “more delays, more stresses on the people who are actually making the aviation system run,” noting that TSA screeners, pilots, and air traffic controllers were working without paychecks. “Open the government. Stop this craziness and open the government,” he said, counting the reopening votes as 52 Republicans and three Democrats consistently in favor, five votes short of the 60 needed, as he stated the tally.

Secretary Duffy said controllers had received most of one early-October paycheck and had now missed a full one: “A lot of our people can go through the miss of one paycheck… None of them can get through two paychecks.” Teamsters president Sean O’Brien and an airline executive also spoke for a clean continuing resolution, as they stated their positions. In questions, the Vice President addressed the President’s nuclear-testing announcement: “Sometimes you’ve got to test it to make sure that it’s functioning and working properly… it’s an important part of American national security to make sure that this nuclear arsenal we have actually functions properly. And that’s part of a testing regime.” Asked about 42 million people losing SNAP benefits, as the reporter stated the figure, he said the administration was plugging leaks “with bubble gum” to make the shutdown as painless as possible. Secretary Duffy, asked about Thanksgiving travel, said: “It could be a disaster. It really could be.”

Why it matters

The gaggle is the administration’s fullest on-record statement of the shutdown’s aviation risk at the one-month mark — delivered by the Vice President and the Transportation Secretary together, with labor and industry beside them — and it carries the Vice President’s first explanation of the nuclear-testing decision the President had announced hours earlier.

Scoreboard watch

Scoreboard watch: the Vice President’s October 30, 2025 account of the nuclear-testing regime, and the administration’s Thanksgiving air-travel warning as stated by Secretary Duffy. Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.

Sources: The White House, “Vice President JD Vance Gaggles with Press, Oct. 30, 2025” (official upload, embedded above). Remarks and figures as delivered in the gaggle.