Transportation Sec Has Staggering Excuse for Not Knowing Key Detail

Donald Trump’s Cabinet officials are not keeping track of America’s air traffic controllers amid a historic shortage.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy was shockingly quiet when asked about the number of air traffic controllers remaining in the United States while testifying before the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Wednesday, refusing to provide concrete details on America’s air infrastructure.

“Can you tell this committee how many air traffic controllers have left the FAA since January 20, 2025?” asked Democratic Georgia Representative Hank Johnson Jr.

“I don’t—,” Duffy started, before Johnson interjected: “Please don’t tell me you don’t know.”

“I don’t know that,” Duffy insisted.

“This is an important job,” Johnson said. “Are you trying to tell us you don’t know how many air traffic controllers are in the building?”

“They’re not in a building, they’re in towers,” Duffy responded.

“Well I’m just speaking figuratively,” Johnson said.

Industry professionals are not so ignorant: there are currently 10,800 certified controllers working in America, according to the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. Union President Nick Daniels has said that 41 percent of those air traffic controllers are working six days a week, 10 hours a day to meet the demands required of a full staff, which is estimated to be more than 14,600 workers.

The shortage of air traffic controllers is nothing new: it’s been an unmitigated problem decades in the making. A large bulk of the country’s controllers retired over the last 10 years—a coincidence made possible due to the fact that the majority were onboarded simultaneously as replacements for the 11,350 controllers fired by President Ronald Reagan in 1982.

In 2015, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association told Congress that the situation had reached a “crisis” level and that, at the time, the Federal Aviation Administration had missed hiring targets five years in a row.

The Biden administration attempted to step up the pace of hiring in 2024, onboarding 2,000 qualified applicants. But they barely replaced the outbound workforce: 1,100 controllers left their jobs last year.

For years, the federal government has failed to properly incentivize younger generations to view the famously high-stress, high-education, and relatively antisocial job as desirable—and similar to other industries, the growing lapse between the aging workforce and the stalling youth is contributing to a brain drain which will deplete experience across the board. (To address this, Duffy also said that the FAA would change retirement limits, advising the union that air traffic controllers will be allowed to work past the age of 56.)

The massive shortage has forced controllers to do double duty, tasked (at some airports) with juggling both the flight paths of commercial airplanes and helicopters—work typically done by two separate controllers.

But the industry has faced new struggles since Trump took office. There have been critical failures at airports across the country, including a mid-air collision at Reagan National Airport in Washington that resulted in the deaths of 67 people in January, as well as rolling blackouts at Newark International Airport. These crises have sparked a new wave of retirements due to heightened stress on the already overtaxed controllers.

In February, the administration erased 400 FAA roles, including positions that supported air safety. Duffy confirmed the cuts that time, though he attempted to minimize them by highlighting the overall staffing of the agency, which Duffy claimed employs some 45,000 workers.

Duffy has promised to “supercharge” air traffic controller hiring, hoping to shave four months off the typically arduous onboarding process. But even at an expedited rate, that likely wouldn’t make a dent in America’s air traffic staff anytime soon: it currently takes about four years to become a certified air traffic controller. Instead, NATCA’s Daniels has estimated that it could take as long as nine years to reach full staffing.

The president is gung-ho about gerrymandering ahead of next year’s midterm elections.

Speaking with reporters on the tarmac of Joint Base Andrews Tuesday evening, Donald Trump said there’s “about four” states besides Texas that he would like to redraw their congressional lines.

“In three cases, it’s one. And in one case, it’s two or three. And Texas would be five,” Trump said as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick nodded enthusiastically beside him. Trump had previously suggested that Texas could give Republicans five more House seats by flipping a handful of blue districts in the Lone Star State next year via “a very simple redrawing.”

But suggestions that California—the largest liberal contingent in the country—could do the same did not sit well with the MAGA leader.

“Are you concerned California will turn around and do the same thing?” asked a reporter.

“Well we’ll fight them,” Trump said. “You know they’re so corrupt in California, you never know what’s going to happen. But we’ve done pretty well in the courts in California, you see. We’re batting about 1,000, ultimately.”

Trump has made a volatile enemy out of Governor Gavin Newsom. California sued the federal government last month after Trump deployed thousands of National Guard members to manhandle Los Angeles’s anti-ICE protests. An appeals court later blocked a court decision that would have handed the authority of the National Guard back to Newsom.

Now, the vengeful governor is threatening to shift the state’s redistricting policy if Texas follows Trump’s orders. In an interview with The Tennessee Holler last week, Newsom accused Republicans of “playing by a totally different set of rules,” and warned that California’s liberally dominant legislature could “gerrymander like no other state.”

“We’ve been playing fair, but I saw what he just did, and it made me question that entire program,” Newsom said.

Congressional maps are typically redrawn every 10 years, after new census data is released. But Texas’s decision to do so in the middle of the decade—at Trump’s direction—has raised alarms, with Democrats in the state labelling the effort a threat to democracy.

“The scheme of the Republicans has consistently been to make sure that they mute our voices so that they can go ahead and have an oversized say in this,” Texas Representative Jasmine Crockett said at a news conference Tuesday. “So I fully anticipate that’s exactly where they’re going with this map.”

Last year, the ideologically conservative majority on the Supreme Court made gerrymandering that much easier, ruling in Alexander v. South Carolina NAACP that alleged racial gerrymandering in South Carolina (which is theoretically still illegal) was really just partisan gerrymandering, an apparently precious part of America’s democratic system.

New Hampshire Republican Governor Kelly Ayotte on Tuesday struck down seven separate right-wing bills in an open rebuke of her party’s MAGA arm.

Ayotte vetoed House Bill 324, which gave parents greater power to remove any classroom content they felt was obscene, placing a target on LGBTQ+ literature and themes.

“Current state law appears to provide a mechanism for parents through their local school district to exercise their rights to ensure their children are not exposed to inappropriate materials,” Ayotte said. “Therefore, I do not believe the State of New Hampshire needs to, nor should it, engage in the role of addressing questions of literary value and appropriateness, particularly where the system created by House Bill 324 calls for monetary penalties based on subjective standards.”

There was also House Bill 148, which would have allowed stores, jails, and workspaces to ignore gender identity and categorize people based on their assigned gender at birth.

“I believe there are important and legitimate privacy and safety concerns raised by biological males using places such as female locker rooms and being placed in female correctional facilities,” Ayotte wrote in her veto of the bill. “At the same time, I see that House Bill 148 is overly broad and impractical to enforce, potentially creating an exclusionary environment for some of our citizens.”

She killed House Bill 358, which would have streamlined the “religious exemption” process for parents who don’t want to vaccinate their children; House Bill 446, which would have required schools to receive parental permission to conduct non-academic surveys; and House Bill 667, an anti-abortion bill that would have forced students to view “a high quality computer generated animation or ultrasound video that shows the development of the heart, brain, and other vital organs in early fetal development,” according to The New Hampshire Bulletin.

There was also House Bill 475 and House Bill 115, both budget-centered bills that Ayotte deemed unnecessary.

Ayotte’s vetoes are a rejection of her party’s attempt to assert cultural control throughout the state, and the country. Lawmakers would need a two-thirds majority in both the state House and Senate to overturn Ayotte’s vetoes, which will be a very tall task given that Republicans don’t have those numbers.

Donald Trump started his Tuesday morning with a stark warning to his MAGA followers still interested in the Jeffrey Epstein case: Anyone who wants answers is falling for a Democratic “bullshit.”

“The Radical Left Democrats have hit pay dirt, again! Just like with the FAKE and fully discredited Steel Dossier, the lying 51 ‘Intelligence’ Agents, the Laptop from Hell, which the Dems swore had come from Russia (No, it came from Hunter Biden’s bathroom!), and even the Russia, Russia, Russia Scam itself, a totally fake and made up story used in order to hide Crooked Hillary Clinton’s big loss in the 2016 Presidential Election, these Scams and Hoaxes are all the Democrats are good at - It’s all they have - They are no good at governing, no good at policy, and no good at picking winning candidates,” Trump posted on Truth Social, in the longest, most nonsensical run-on sentence ever.

“Their new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax, and my PAST supporters have bought into this ‘bullshit,’ hook, line, and sinker. They haven’t learned their lesson, and probably never will, even after being conned by the Lunatic Left for 8 long years,” he continued, directly attacking those interested in the case as falling for leftist propaganda.

“I have had more success in 6 months than perhaps any President in our Country’s history, and all these people want to talk about, with strong prodding by the Fake News and the success starved Dems, is the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax. Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats work, don’t even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success, because I don’t want their support anymore!”

The post is proof that Trump is losing control of his base—and it’s getting to him. On Tuesday, he declared that those still interested in the case about the deceased sex criminal are “pretty bad people.” Despite all of Trump’s efforts, which have included directly calling MAGA influencers talking about Epstein and asking them to fall in line, his followers are still talking about how and why the administration suddenly closed the case. Alex Jones, Joe Rogan, Charlie Kirk, and many, many more have attacked the Trump administration and promised they won’t let this go.

Who better to re-investigate the Epstein case for the Trump administration than another alleged sex trafficker?

That’s apparently Colorado Representative Lauren Boebert’s line of thinking. Speaking with far-right commentator Benny Johnson on Tuesday, the QAnon-friendly Republican suggested that former Representative Matt Gaetz could serve as special counsel.

“I think moving forward, we need a special counsel,” Boebert said, offering up Gaetz’s name. “There has to be a special investigation into this if we aren’t going to be provided information.”

Gaetz was Trump’s original pick for attorney general before his candidacy fell apart over a string of controversies, including allegations that the 43-year-old Florida politico had paid for sex with a minor.

“I hope it doesn’t become a false idol to Republicans where we lose sight of everything else, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want answers,” Boebert underscored.

The lawmaker doubled down on the request after the interview, asking Gaetz directly on X if he would consider the post, despite hours earlier joining her party in blocking a Democrat-led effort to release the Epstein files. The final vote was 211 to 210—just one dissenting Republican would have tipped the scales.

Much to Trump’s chagrin, the botched rollout of the Epstein files has continued to plague his administration. A Morning Consult poll conducted earlier this month found that Trump’s popularity had tanked by six points since the Justice Department contradicted Attorney General Pam Bondi on the existence of Epstein’s so-called “client list.” The fallout has been so substantial that the president directed Fox News and some far-right influencers such as Charlie Kirk to stop discussing the topic altogether.

QAnon believers—who turned out at the polls in November to re-elect Trump—have believed for years that the 79-year-old billionaire would rid the world of Satan-worshiping, liberal-minded pedophiles who run the government and media. But Trump’s sudden refusal to offer up what he has promised his conspiratorial followers has cast his messiah-like status with the group into doubt.

Trump has told his Epstein-focused supporters to “move on,” claiming that the unreleased files are a political concoction that “nobody cares about.” On Tuesday, Trump told reporters that those still invested in uncovering the associates of the notorious child sex trafficker are—according to him—“pretty bad people.”

A reminder that Trump was named and photographed as an associate of Epstein, who even described Trump as a “best friend,” and reportedly slept with his now-wife Melania for the first time aboard Epstein’s plane, the “Lolita Express.” But Trump has a terrible track record with how he treats women outside of Epstein’s world, as well: the current president was found liable by a jury for sexually abusing Elle columnist E. Jean Carrol last year, was convicted as a felon for crimes relating to his affair with porn star Stormy Daniels, and famously boasted on a hot mic before his ascent to America’s political vanguard that he grabs women “by the pussy.”

President Trump thinks his own supporters are “pretty bad people” for demanding full transparency on the Jeffrey Epstein case, which his Justice Department effectively closed.

“I know you’ve urged people to move on, but I’m curious, why do you think your supporters in particular have been so interested in the Epstein story, and so upset about how it’s been handled?” a reporter asked Trump on the tarmac on Tuesday.

“I don’t understand it, why they would be so interested. He’s dead for a long time, he was never a big factor in terms of life. I don’t understand what the interest or what the fascination is, I really don’t,” Trump replied. “And the credible information’s been given. Don’t forget, we went through years of the Mueller witch hunt … all that information was fake. But I don’t understand why the Jeffrey Epstein case would be of interest to anybody. It’s pretty boring stuff, it’s sorted but it’s boring. And I don’t understand why it keeps going. I think really only pretty bad people, including fake news, wanna keep something like that going.”

The Epstein case is still of interest to Trump’s supporters because he and multiple people within his administration allowed it to fester. Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, Deputy Director Dan Bongino, and Vice President JD Vance have each questioned the outcome of the Epstein case multiple times. Bongino claimed outright that Epstein didn’t kill himself a few years ago, and Bondi claimed that she had the client list sitting on her desk just a few months ago. Now all of those people have reneged on basically everything they’ve said about Epstein, much to the chagrin of the MAGA supporters who expected them to expose the deep state, not become it.

“Remember when we learned that our wealthiest and most powerful people were connected to a guy who ran a literal child sex trafficking ring?” Vance wrote in 2021. “And then that guy died mysteriously in a jail? And now we just don’t talk about it.”

Now they don’t want anyone to talk about it. The reasons for this are varied. But it’s not a stretch for Trump’s supporters to assume he saw something that incriminated himself or one of his friends, especially given that he has well-recorded connections with Epstein going back to the 90s. In a 2002 New York Magazine piece, he called Epstein a “terrific guy” who likes “beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Even if he’s telling the truth, Trump has damaged a significant amount of goodwill with the base that got him here. Time will only tell how they react to his betrayal.

Officers from the Department of Homeland Security who arranged the arrests of foreign university students over their pro-Palestinian speech claimed that the orders they received were so unusual, they weren’t sure if they were legal, Politico reported Tuesday.

U.S. District Judge Willliam Young heard testimony from four veteran DHS officers as part of a lawsuit alleging that the Trump administration is implementing a policy of “ideological deportation,” violating the First Amendment rights of non-citizens in the United States. Across the country, federal judges have ordered the release of multiple students and faculty detained as part of Donald Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech.

Darren McCormack, a special agent with Homeland Security Investigations, said orders to arrest Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University grad student and green card holder, came from the very top.

“Somebody at a higher level than the people I was speaking to had an interest in him,” said McCormack, who oversaw Khalil’s arrest. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had attempted to justify Khalil’s months-long detainment and pending removal by claiming he was a threat to U.S. foreign policy interests because he would create a “hostile environment” for Jewish students.

McCormack said he’d been instructed to surveil Khalil ahead of his arrest, leading McCormack to consult with ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations office in New York, which typically handles deportation arrests.

“We historically in recent times had not enforced those laws,” McCormack said. “I wanted to confirm there was a legal basis for arrest.”

When asked why ERO wasn’t responsible for carrying out the arrest, McCormack said he didn’t have an answer. “I wondered why HSI was effecting this arrest and not ERO,” he said. “I still don’t know.”

Brian Cunningham, an assistant special agent at HSI in Boston, said there had been “a lot of hands in the fishbowl” regarding the horrific arrest of Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts University grad student who was swarmed by six masked plainclothes officers on the street in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Cunningham also said the orders for that arrest came from somebody high up. “I can’t recall a time that it’s come top-down like this with a visa revocation, under my purview anyway,” he said. “I did contact our legal counsel to make sure that we’re on solid legal ground.”

“The operation kind of developed pretty quickly,” he added.

Öztürk was detained over an op-ed she’d written for the school paper that advocated for the school to make good on student resolutions to acknowledge the genocide in Gaza and to divest from Israel.

Cunningham, who said that he’d skimmed the op-ed, testified that he “didn’t see anything in the op-ed that suggested she’d committed a crime.”

He admitted he didn’t have “much experience, if any” with conducting a deportation arrest. “Most of my career as an agent and as a supervisor has been in enforcement of drug laws, drug smuggling, money laundering,” Cunningham said.

“That’s changed recently,” he added. He said that shortly after Trump entered the White House, HSI had several meetings about prioritizing immigration enforcement.

Inside ICE, staff members from the HSI division, which typically focuses on transnational crime, are now being moved to ERO, in what some perceive to be a retaliatory move for HSI distancing itself from the agency’s deportation arm.

Ukrainians have begun to credit First Lady Melania Trump for her husband’s 180 on support for Russia and President Vladimir Putin in their all out war on Ukraine.

“My conversations with [Putin] are always very pleasant. I say, isn’t that a very lovely conversation? And then the missiles go off that night,” Trump told reporters on Monday while describing his frustration with Putin. “I go home. I tell the first lady, you know, ‘I spoke with Vladimir today. We had a wonderful conversation.’ She said, ‘Oh, really? Another city was just hit.’”

Putin is making Trump look incredibly foolish for supporting him for so long, and Trump says Melania helped him realize it. Ukrainians have picked up on this.

“Agent Melania Trumpenko,” one user wrote over a picture of the First Lady in her infamous inauguration hat with a Ukrainian military insignia edited onto her shirt.

In recent days, Trump has announced the United States will funnel new weapons to Kyiv and threatened secondary sanctions on Russia. While Melania’s input likely isn’t the only reason Trump has switched up on Ukraine, it seems to have played a role. This isn’t the first time Melania, who was born in Slovenia (a strong ally of Ukraine), has expressed support for Ukraine.

“It is heartbreaking and horrific to see innocent people suffering. My thoughts and prayers are with the Ukrainian people,” she wrote in February 2022, days after Russia invaded. “Please, if you can, donate to help them [at the] International Committee of the Red Cross.”

Asked whether Attorney General Pam Bondi told him his name is in the Epstein files, President Trump doubled down on the far-fetched notion that the whole thing is the product of a Democratic conspiracy against him.

Speaking to reporters, the president revealed that he’d received “a very quick briefing” on the files from Bondi, leading one to ask whether his own name appears in them. (Trump, after all, had a storied relationship with the deceased sex criminal.)

“No, no, she’s given us just a very quick briefing,” Trump replied, before venturing the paranoid notion that the Epstein affair is actually a Democratic plot to take him down.

“In terms of the credibility of the different things that they’ve seen, and I would say that, you know, these files were made up by [former FBI Director James] Comey. They were made up by Obama. They were made up by the Biden inf—you know.”

He then deferred to Bondi, who he said has handled the situation “very well.”

“It’s going to be up to her,” he continued. “Whatever she thinks is credible, she should release.” Bondi responded shortly thereafter, telling reporters, “Today, our memo speaks to itself, and we’ll get back to you on anything else. I haven’t seen all of [Trump’s] statements today.”

Meanwhile, House Republicans have blocked Democrats’ attempts to force the release of the files, and MAGA rancor over the matter is going nowhere.

Over the past week, Trump has been enduring a revolt from his political base over a recently released Justice Department memo that deflated conspiracy theories (that his own top officials had previously elevated) about elite figures’ ties to Epstein.

The memo found that Epstein had maintained no “client list” and stated that no more information related to his case would be released. Trump’s supporters predictably objected, with many turning against Bondi.

The president over the weekend pleaded with his “boys” and “gals” to drop the subject. On Truth Social, he suggested, as on Tuesday, that the true Epstein conspiracy is that a slew of his adversaries, such as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden, had created Epstein-related, “Radical Left inspired Documents” in order to undermine him.

This new tack—that a MAGA cause célèbre was, in reality, a left-wing conspiracy all along—seems unlikely to dissuade the countless people, across the political aisle, who are now hungrier than ever for answers about Epstein’s death and connections.

Even after President Donald Trump publicly gave her the go-ahead, Attorney General Pam Bondi desperately skirted questions about the release of additional files on Jeffrey Epstein.

Last week, the Department of Justice published a two-page memo declaring that the alleged sex trafficker kept no “incriminating ‘client list,’” despite Bondi previously claiming that she’d been in possession of such a document. After months of being promised answers on Epstein’s clients, Trump supporters are outraged, with some even calling for Bondi to resign.

During a press conference Tuesday about steps the agency was taking to combat drug trafficking, Bondi refused to answer questions about Trump’s statement saying that the attorney general should release “whatever she thinks is credible” from the files.

“This today is about fentanyl. This is about a wall of people right outside this room who have died from—I appreciate your question—but this today is about fentanyl overdoses throughout our country, and people who have lost loved ones to fentanyl. That is the message that we’re here to send today,” Bondi replied to a reporter asking if she would release more files.

“Nothing about Epstein. I’m not going to talk about Epstein,” Bondi said.

She continued to urge reporters to ask questions “only on topic.”

Yet another reporter asked about Trump’s comment. “The president said today you would release credible files related to Epstein. Are you prepared to do that, and when would you do that?” they asked.

“Our memo—today our memo speaks for itself,” Bondi said. “We’ll get back to you on anything else. I haven’t seen all of his statements today.”

“How do you respond to the MAGA base that has expressed a lot of frustration about Epstein?” the reporter pressed.

“We’re going to fight to keep America safe again and we’re fighting together as a team. That’s what’s so important right now,” Bondi said.

Meanwhile, Trump has taken to bullying his allies into line.