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Duffy Hosts the FIFA World Cup 2026 Kickoff Celebration at DOT, Dec. 4, 2025

December 4, 2025 · US Department of Transportation · 0:44:06

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

What happened

Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy hosted the FIFA World Cup 2026 kickoff celebration — the department’s World Cup Summit — at the Department of Transportation, in the department’s December 4, 2025 upload of the full event. Former U.S. international Cobi Jones, a three-time World Cup player and National Soccer Hall of Famer, emceed the summit, recalling the 1994 World Cup’s impact and noting that the 2026 tournament doubles the 1994 field to 48 teams across three countries — Mexico, Canada, and the United States — in America’s 250th anniversary year, as he stated the occasion.

In his opening remarks at the summit — also uploaded separately by the department and recorded in this site’s index as a source for this page — Duffy said the Final Draw would follow the next day at the Kennedy Center, with the President attending, and that six million people were expected to come into the United States for the games, as he stated the figure. The department’s role, as he put it, is to make travel seamless for those fans: he described coordination with the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security under the President’s directive to get fans where they need to go safely and on time, as the department’s own description of the summit states the brief.

Why it matters

The World Cup is the largest single transportation event of Duffy’s tenure on the calendar: millions of international visitors moving between host cities in the summer of the nation’s 250th anniversary, on the air, rail, and road systems his department oversees. The December summit is the department’s public kickoff of that operation, staged the day before the tournament draw fixed the schedule the operation must serve.

Sources: U.S. Department of Transportation, “U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy Hosts FIFA World Cup 2026 Kickoff Celebration” (official upload, embedded above). Remarks as delivered at the summit.