Duffy and Kennedy Launch the 'Make Travel Family Friendly Again' Campaign, Dec. 9, 2025
December 9, 2025 · US Department of Transportation · 0:29:37
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What happened
Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy launched the “Make Travel Family Friendly Again” campaign alongside Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in the Department of Transportation’s December 9, 2025 upload. Duffy announced $1 billion in funding for grant programs to make the airport experience better — widely open, as he described it, to what airports propose: expanded play areas for kids, additional nursing pods for mothers, workout areas, or a dedicated family lane through TSA screening were the examples he gave. He said he had also reached out to a majority of the major airlines’ CEOs that day to ask what the airlines themselves would do to improve the experience, as he stated it.
Duffy also used the launch to update the air traffic control build: controller hiring up 20 percent year over year, a 20 percent upfront bonus offered to controllers who delay retirement, a third of the system’s copper already transitioned to fiber, and an integrator hired the previous week — with this phase of the project to be done by the end of 2028 and another $20 billion needed from Congress for the next phase, as he stated the figures. Kennedy took up the health side of the campaign: three million Americans a day pass through airports, he said, where healthy diets “go to die” on deep-fried and ultra-processed food; he praised healthy airport options of the kind on display at the event and HHS’s encouragement of breastfeeding, and backed airport spending on nursing facilities, as he stated the case.
Why it matters
The campaign joins the two secretaries’ signature agendas at the airport: Duffy’s modernization build supplies the infrastructure money, and Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again program supplies the food and family-health brief — the administration’s family-friendly travel push presented as a single DOT–HHS effort, launched three weeks before the Christmas travel peak Duffy invoked at the event.
Scoreboard watch
Scoreboard candidate: the $1 billion in airport grant funding announced December 9, 2025, under the “Make Travel Family Friendly Again” campaign. Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.
Sources: U.S. Department of Transportation, “Secretary Duffy Launches ‘Make Travel Family Friendly Again’ Campaign With Secretary Kennedy” (official upload, embedded above). Remarks and figures as delivered by Secretaries Duffy and Kennedy at the launch.
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