Sean Duffy and his family took a super duper ultra cool road trip, and they want you to know all about it. In celebration of the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding, the transportation secretary, his Fox News-host wife, and their nine children spent seven months filming a reality TV show — The Great American Road Trip — to promote America’s great landmarks.
First and foremost: road trips are great. No TSA, no limits on snacks and drinks, you can stop as often as you want and detour to wherever strikes your interest. In theory, they are also a much cheaper form of travel than flying. They haven’t been so cheap since the president decided to go to war in Iran, however, setting off a chain of crises that has resulted in skyrocketing gas prices throughout the country.
Last week, the Department of Transportation released the first trailer for the Duffys’ odyssey, and boy does it look lavish. The family of 11 is shown riding in style in new model SUVs provided by Toyota — official vehicle partner of the show — lounging in bathrobes in hotels, snowmobiling, and even screaming down water slides on a Carnival Cruise (another partner of the project). Does a boat ride count toward a road trip? Who’s to say!
The trailer was met with widespread public backlash, with critics calling the seven-month production not only out of touch given the high costs currently hitting American travelers at the moment, but a potentially unethical misuse of federal resources. Duffy, who thinks people shouldn’t fly in comfy clothing because it’s uncivilized, is encouraging Americans to drive this summer, and get to know their country. “We’re encouraging everyone to go take a road trip to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary,” he says in the trailer, adding later to Fox News that a road trip “fits any budget.”
It sounds great, in theory. The problem is that dollar for gallon, the amount of road trip mileage that can fit into most Americans’ travel budget is shrinking. Amid the oil shock caused by Donald Trump’s ongoing war with Iran, airlines are going bankrupt, jet fuel prices are threatening mass flight cancellations through the summer holidays, and the average price of a gallon of gas is $4.52, as of this week.
So is it actually feasible? Rolling Stone attempted to calculate the fuel price of the Duffy family’s road trip, if one were to follow through on the transportation secretary’s recommendation and attempt to recreate the theoretical route traversed by him and his family.
The Great American Road Trip features over 100 suggested landmarks as “official stops” on its website, many of which are featured in the show’s trailer. The Duffys presumably have not visited all of them. In order to calculate fuel costs, we referred to a map showing the family’s route that was displayed during a Fox News interview with Secretary Duffy and his wife, Fox News weekend host Rachel Campos-Duffy. At stops that were not explicitly featured in the show’s trailer, like South Carolina and Florida, we selected a local landmark suggested on the Great American Road Trip’s website. The map goes from Boston, to Philadelphia, to Washington, D.C., to South Carolina and Florida, and then from D.C. across to Nashville, through Austin to Arizona, and up as far north as Montana.
While the Duffys made sure to note that their trip began with a visit to the White House to see Trump in the Oval Office, most Americans start their road trip from home. So we set the starting point in a home, of sorts — the house Secretary Duffy lived in as a cast member in The Real World: Boston, the reality TV show that introduced him to fame (and to his wife). The house is indeed featured in the Great American Road Trip trailer.
From there, we consulted an ancient oracle, MapQuest, to help craft the most efficient route between the identified points. The Independence Trail in Boston; the Liberty Bell and Rocky steps in Philadelphia; the White House in Washington, D.C.; Fort Sumter in South Carolina; the Kennedy Space Center in Florida; Kid Rock’s restaurant in Nashville (we’re not sure about the national importance of this one); the Texas Capitol; the Grand Canyon in Arizona; and Yellowstone National Park in Montana.
A one way trip clocked in at 4,706 miles and about 83 hours of driving. With the assumption that the average American family can fit comfortably in a single car (with 11 members, the Duffys need two SUVs), the assumption that the average American car gets about 20-30 miles per gallon of fuel, and the current national average of $4.52 per gallon of regular gas, that clocks in at around $900 just for fuel costs. If you pump premium, expect to pay over $1,000. Tacking on the return trip from West Yellowstone to Boston would mean increasing the drive by another 2,458 miles, and more than $400.
This calculation does not factor in the price of hotels, food and drink, tolls, park passes, entry tickets, or the cost of the luxury activities — like snowmobiling and skiing and their corresponding equipment rental costs — the Duffy’s participated in. It most definitely does not include the Carnival Cruise the family promotes in the show aboard the Icon of the Seas. The boat, the largest cruise ship in the world, features a water park, ice skating rink, stage shows, and a whole host of other amenities that are certainly not available in the family sedan. The cheapest summer package offered on Carnival’s website aboard the massive vessel is for a seven-day trip through the Eastern Caribbean at $1,273 a person. The Duffys were likely comped by the show sponsor, but if all 11 members of the family had paid for the (most basic) package, it would have run them a cool $14,000.
Now most Americans probably don’t have the vacation time or spare cash to pull off a literal round trip around the lower 48 with a luxury cruise tacked on as a cool-down. But even much shorter road trips are becoming a financial reach for families as the price of gas continues to rise. States like California, Alaska, Oregon, Nevada, and Washington have already surpassed an average of $5 a gallon.
Audiences who saw the trailer were quick to point out the potential ethical breaches. Why was Duffy spending seven months filming and producing a TV show during the time that the country was facing a series of transportation crises, including a long-term Department of Homeland Security shutdown which roiled airline travel and the Transportation Security Administration with severe disruptions to operations?
There were also concerns that the Duffys spent taxpayer funds on what is essentially an extended, multi-leg vacation for 11 people. To be sure, taxpayer funds would have been required given the secretary’s security detail and transportation needs, but the family insisted that the project was entirely sponsor-funded.
It sounds like a plausible defense until you look at who those sponsors actually are. Most of the involved companies are transportation-related and have business and regulatory interests before Duffy’s department. Toyota, Shell, United Airlines, Royal Caribbean, Boeing, and the American Bus Association are listed on the Great American Road Trip’s website as partners. On Monday, the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a complaint against Duffy with the Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General, demanding an investigation into potential violations of federal gift and travel rules.
“The arrangement raises questions about whether Duffy’s official time is being used for public purposes, whether he accepted or solicited gifts from companies with businesses before the DOT, whether this constituted an appropriate use of government travel and whether private products were being promoted by the secretary,” the group wrote in its complaint.
Chasten Buttigieg, the husband of former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, noted on social media that the “same Duffys who threw endless fits on national television when Pete was working from our son’s ICU bedside are now bragging about their multi-month, taxpayer-funded family road trip while gas and grocery prices soar for American families.”
The post referenced attacks by Fox News — where Duffy and his wife were both on-air personalities — against the Buttigiegs when the former secretary took a temporary leave to care for his infant son while he was hospitalized with RSV in 2021. Campos-Duffy responded to Buttigieg by complaining on social media that “no one in my family — including my husband — were paid to do this,” claiming they “did it for FREE” to celebrate America.
The Duffys may not have been paid, but they definitely enjoyed a whole lot of once-in-a-lifetime experiences. But for many Americans, this summer will likely be one of scrimping and saving on travel — no thanks to the president and his transportation secretary
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