Donald Trump’s transport secretary has fired shots at the president’s former government efficiency czar, Elon Musk, over the tech tycoon’s prior attempts to slash back on “safety-critical positions” in air traffic control.
“I get along well enough with Elon,” Sean Duffy told the New York Post, but “no one else is the secretary; I am, the Senate confirmed me.”
Duffy and Musk are reported to have butted heads in February, when Musk was still serving as chief of the MAGA administration’s cost-cutting DOGE initiative, and well before his spectacularly messy public divorce from President Trump in July.
Amid a slew of aviation near-misses, and just weeks after almost 70 people died in an air crash above Washington, D.C.’s Potomac River, the transport secretary confronted Musk at the White House over proposed firings at his department, telling the tech tycoon, “I have multiple plane crashes to deal with now, and your people want me to fire air traffic controllers?”
In front of Trump himself and roughly 20 other top officials, Musk is alleged to have blasted back that Duffy’s claims amounted to a “lie,” demanding the transport secretary “give me the names” of Department of Government Efficiency staffers who’d approached him.
During his sit-down with the New York Post, Duffy sought to downplay the severity of the exchange, saying that “it might not have been intentional, it might have been ham-handed by some of the requests that DOGE made.”
He nevertheless conceded that he and the Tesla CEO “had a little back and forth,” stressing, “Elon is an amazing innovator—he’s creative, and again, there’s a lot to learn from him.”
“But I run this department,” he went on. “I didn’t want someone on the outside trying to tell me to fire people where, had I done that, had I actually fired controllers, oh my god, think what the liberal media would do to me, I’d be slaughtered!”
Duffy went on to say that while he believes “we can do things more efficiently” and that “there is fat we can cut,” he said that cutting “safety-critical positions” remains a red line for his department.
“Throughout government, you have to make sure the secretaries are the ones who are driving policy,” he concluded.
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