Since the start of the month, the 12th-busiest airport in the U.S. has dealt with a series of equipment failures and staffing shortages that left carriers like United Airlines (UAL) cancelling routes and one air traffic controller telling news outlets that flying out of Newark Liberty International Airport (EWR) is “not safe.”
As the airport saw hundreds of cancelled flights and even more delays over the weekend of May 3 and 4, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy put out a social media post about enjoying tacos.
“Nice to come home on a Friday night to home cooked steak tacos after a long week working at the DOT!” Duffy wrote in a May 3 X post with a photo of himself holding a plate of tacos in a home kitchen with the #LatinaWife hashtag referencing his wife and Fox & Friends host Rachel Campos-Duffy.
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‘Great to hear you like tacos’: Transportation Secretary slammed over social media post
Given that hundreds of flights out of Newark were in the process of being cancelled at the time that Duffy made the post, he received immediate criticism over a perceived failure to address critical transportation issues. On May 5, a labor union representing over 20,000 U.S. air traffic controllers also announced that a number of their members who navigated arrivals at Newark on April 28 went on stress leave after a fried piece of copper wire caused a 90-second radar blackout that left them “unable to see, hear, or talk to” any planes flying in.
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In an interview with NBC News, an anonymous air traffic controller told senior correspondent Tom Costello that flying into EWR is “not a safe situation right now for the flying public.”
“Soooo great to hear that you like tacos but can you work a little harder and make the planes stop crashing?” former Obama National Security Council staffer Tommy Vietor wrote in a comment that received over 1,200 upvotes in reference to two major commercial crashes that took place since the start of Duffy’s term in January.
Nice to come home on a Friday night to home cooked steak tacos after a long week working at the DOT! #LatinaWife❤️💃🏽 pic.twitter.com/VzvupZ5V6z
— Sean Duffy (@SeanDuffyWI) May 3, 2025
“DO YOUR JOB,” wrote another commenter underneath the post. Others have accused Duffy of “doing squat” to fix the situation in Newark.
On May 5, Duffy put out several posts about how the Transportation Department was going to “radically transform air traffic control” and make a “hiring supercharge” without any details on how this would be done (due to the high-stress nature of the job and mandatory retirement age of 65, multiple administrations have been unable to hit air traffic controller hiring targets).
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On May 5, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) put out a statement saying that multiple air traffic controllers at the Philadelphia Terminal Radar Approach Control TRACON Center working for Newark “have taken time off to recover from the stress of multiple recent outages.”
The blackout that occurred on April 28 was described as “90 seconds of pure terror” as air traffic controllers were unable to communicate with pilots or understand what caused the signal cut. The stress from being in charge of plane landings during such a blackout is classified as work-related trauma and qualified on-duty controllers may take leave under the Federal Employees Compensation Act.
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