On May 1, Sean P. Duffy was in New Orleans, touring its container terminals in his official capacity as the secretary of transportation.
Then, he climbed behind the wheel of a car with his family on the final, all-expenses paid stop for “The Great American Road Trip,” a slickly produced YouTube series that has raised questions about self-promotion and gifts his family may have accepted as he conducted official business as a prominent member of the Trump administration.
The series, filmed across 10 states and Washington, D.C., over the course of seven months, is part of the department’s commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the United States this year. But it doubled as a set of family excursions for Mr. Duffy, his wife and his children, who traveled to national parks and major landmarks paid for by Great American Road Trip Inc., a nonprofit that names among its sponsors Toyota, United Airlines and Boeing.
Mr. Duffy has said that ethics and budget officials in the department cleared the project. But the corporate ties — and the show’s timing, with gas prices rising — drew immediate blowback on social media when the trailer was released, announcing that it will air beginning in June. The average price of gas has gone up more than 40 percent since the war with Iran started in February.
“Accepting travel from companies with business before D.O.T. potentially implicates even more significant corruption and misconduct concerns,” Donald K. Sherman, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, a left-leaning government watchdog group, wrote in a letter this week to Mitch Behm, the acting inspector general for the Transportation Department. In it, Mr. Sherman asked Mr. Behm to investigate “whether the secretary violated the standards of ethical conduct or other federal ethics laws by his participation in the privately sponsored promotional road trip with his family.”
The concept of a great American road trip is a throwback to the U.S. bicentennial, when families were encouraged to pack up their cars and tour the country.
Mr. Duffy and his wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy, a Fox News anchor, are no strangers to the format of a filmed road trip, having met as cast members of the reality television show “Road Rules: All Stars.” But despite the branding, the Duffys’ “Great American Road Trip” isn’t a classic cross-country journey.
According to Mr. Duffy, the project was taped mostly in one- and two-day stints during weekends and school holidays, often alongside his official travel duties. The Duffys were not paid for the series, but he continued to collect his government paycheck during filming, and gas, lodging, car rentals and other production costs were covered by Great American Road Trip Inc., according to department officials.
The nonprofit does not disclose its donors, and declined to do so upon request. But it publicly lists major project sponsors including the U.S. Travel Association, which lobbies the department on behalf of the tourism industry.
Tori Barnes, a former lobbyist for General Motors and the U.S. Travel Association, who has run the nonprofit since its inception last summer, brushed off allegations of impropriety, stressing that the partnership between the nonprofit and the department is governed by a memorandum of agreement.
The memorandum, which was signed in December, says the nonprofit will not receive “any favorable consideration for any future federal financial assistance, action, contract, or other financial award.” But there is no indication in the contract that the limitation extends to the corporate donors, which are not signatories.
Nathaniel Sizemore, a Transportation Department spokesman, said in an interview that the memorandum would in fact cover the companies donating to the nonprofit, but did not elaborate.
In a statement, Ms. Barnes said that “our partners would never expect, nor have they asked for, special treatment.”
The memorandum also says that the nonprofit’s financial backing of the YouTube series counts as an acceptable gift under a federal statute allowing the transportation secretary to “accept and use conditional or unconditional gifts of property for the Department of Transportation.”
But it was not clear how that clause applied to the travel expenses that the nonprofit covered for Mr. Duffy’s family members, who can be seen in the trailer cruising down interstates, riding snowmobiles in Montana, splashing around in a water park, eating at diners, and affectionately wresting on hotel beds.
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They are not employees of the department and were not contracted to D.O.T. for the purposes of the YouTube series, according to Mr. Sizemore.
“Gifts to the secretary’s family are absolutely not gifts to the department,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in government ethics.
“This is really gift laundering,” she said, adding: “This is an incredibly corrupt endeavor, and it’s dangerous, because it affects public safety.”
Mr. Sizemore said that when career ethics and budget officials reviewed and cleared Mr. Duffy’s participation in the venture, they also approved the involvement of his family.
In a social media post, Mr. Duffy decried his critics: “They’re upset because they don’t want you to celebrate America! ”
Some of the companies that donated to the nonprofit have recently been subjects of department investigations and punitive actions. Boeing, a featured sponsor, has been subject to multiple departmental inquiries into what the head of the Federal Aviation Administration in 2024 called its “broken safety culture.” Such complaints resulted in fines and settlements worth millions as recently as last year.
Since 2019, Toyota also has paid millions in penalties, over its handling of federal recalls and emissions violations. And earlier this year, the department’s inspector general found that the F.A.A. was not conducting sufficient oversight of United Airlines’ maintenance operations, despite a series of in-flight engine shutdowns and emergency landings.
Toyota and United did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A Boeing representative declined to comment.
The road trip is the latest example of Mr. Duffy’s closeness with companies subject to his department’s jurisdiction, particularly as the Trump administration seeks to commemorate the nation’s 250th anniversary.
In recent months, Mr. Duffy filmed a 90-second video outside department headquarters promoting a limited-edition “Stars and Steel” Corvette, which is prominently featured on the department’s “Freedom 250” website. He rolled it out on the same day the department launched an app in conjunction with General Motors, called Explore250, which highlights national, state, and themed parks.
Last month, Mr. Duffy appeared with the chief executives of Southwest Airlines and American Airlines to unveil Southwest’s “Independence One,” a Boeing 737 Max 8 emblazoned with “1776” against a patriotic red, white and blue backdrop; and American Airlines’ America250, an Embraer jet emblazoned with the logo of the official semiquincentennial commission.
Department representatives have argued that these steps are in keeping with the legacy of major U.S. anniversary celebrations, pointing to corporate involvement in bicentennial projects like the Freedom Train, a traveling exhibition of American artifacts that spent over a year chugging through the contiguous 48 states.
The 200th anniversary celebration was indeed a commercial bonanza, with news articles from the time noting that some referred to the affair as the “buycentennial.” But according to historian Brian W. Martin, who scrutinized the bicentennial as a consultant for the congressional commission tasked with planning the 250th anniversary celebration, the federal government wasn’t as involved in 1976’s corporate-sponsored ventures as it is in today’s.
“There’s nothing that I can think of that was parallel, in the bicentennial,” he said, noting that most of the 200-year commemorations were state, local, or grass roots ventures, and not organized by the federal government. Even the higher-profile Freedom Train, he added, “was a private initiative and the government role was nearly nonexistent.”
“The rules of what’s an appropriate relationship between government officials and companies they regulate certainly were not suspended in some way for the bicentennial,” he said.
The administration’s all-in effort to mark the 250th anniversary with splashy, corporate-sponsored patriotic ventures has fueled some of the more serious ethical concerns regarding Mr. Duffy’s road trip venture.
While some gifts may be permissible for government officials to accept, officials are largely prohibited from soliciting gifts. The department officials and the nonprofit have presented competing narratives, however, about who originated the idea of the road trip and its production.
In emailed comments, Ms. Barnes said that after she created the nonprofit in June 2025, “our organization invited the secretary and his family to join us to increase visibility and to help inspire Americans to get out and see America.”
But Mr. Duffy had already publicly launched his Great American Road Trip initiative in May of that year. And during a recent Fox News interview to promote the YouTube series, Ms. Campos-Duffy strongly suggested that it had been the family’s idea.
“We thought we were going to do it on our iPhone and do little reels,” she said, adding that they ultimately decided: “Let’s go back to our roots, let’s do this one for free, we’ll put it on to YouTube, we’ll let the whole country see it.”
David A. Fahrenthold contributed reporting.
Karoun Demirjian is a breaking news reporter for The Times.
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