In one episode of a new reality road trip series starring the transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, he takes his family to tour a Boeing plant in South Carolina, eager to view some of the largest planes in the world.
In another, as his family embraces cowboy culture in Texas, he peels off to drop in on a subsidiary of CRH, the country’s largest asphalt company, stressing how there would be no interstates to take road trips on without such companies.
And in Arizona, before going to the Grand Canyon, he takes several of his children for test rides in Waymo self-driving cars, predicting that the company’s technology will “have a huge impact on saving lives on American roads.”
The segments were framed as official government business that Mr. Duffy undertook during the course of filming the “Great American Road Trip,” a six-episode YouTube series in which he, his wife, their nine children and their son-in-law, Michael Alfonso, a candidate in Wisconsin for Congress, visit American tourist meccas in honor of the country’s 250th anniversary.
The scenes featuring companies in those stops resemble corporate promotional cameos more than a vacation reel. And the companies are among the major sponsors whose money covered the series’ production and much of its stars travel costs.
The segments have fueled ethical concerns among Mr. Duffy’s critics, who question whether those sponsors— most of them transportation companies subject to Transportation Department oversight — received perks in exchange for helping fund the secretary’s trip.
Typically, “when a government official or cabinet secretary is visiting a Boeing factory, Boeing isn’t paying for his family’s vacation,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in government ethics.
She also questioned whether Mr. Duffy’s rosy statements about the companies could be trusted in light of their financial contributions. “There’s every reason not to trust Duffy to be protecting public safety when it comes to Waymo, because he’s accepted this gift,” she said.
Representatives for Boeing, CRH and Waymo did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Duffy and Tori Barnes, the executive director of the nonprofit that financed the project by finding the sponsors to cover its costs, have vigorously defended the series against allegations of impropriety. They dismiss the ethical concerns as driven by the secretary’s political adversaries.
In an interview on NewsNation last week, Mr. Duffy said that the release of the series was pushed back by several weeks to allow extra editing and bring episodes into compliance with department ethics rules. The series was initially intended to be out in June.
Each episode ends showing the logos of major sponsors with a small disclaimer: “The appearance of any product, individual, business or private entity in this program does not constitute an endorsement by the U.S. Department of Transportation.”
Nathaniel Sizemore, a department spokesman, said that government ethics officials also approved the project at every turn, and said that the nonprofit’s support was a legally permissible gift to the department for official business. Mr. Duffy’s family members, whose travel expenses were also largely covered, are not department employees or contractors.
“Career ethics officials at D.O.T. reviewed every aspect of this partnership and cleared both the secretary’s participation and the release of these episodes,” Mr. Sizemore said in a statement. “Regulatory decisions at D.O.T. are guided by career safety professionals, the law and the facts.”
An agreement between the department and the nonprofit stated that the nonprofit would not receive “any favorable consideration for any future federal financial assistance, action, contract or other financial award.” But the contract did not indicate that the limitation extended to the corporate sponsors, which were not signatories.
Ms. Barnes, the nonprofit’s director, added in a statement that the sponsors were just a few of the restaurants, hotels and other businesses seen throughout the series.
“There is no conflict of interest,” she said. “There were visits to a range of businesses of all sizes.”
The family spends the bulk of the episodes, which run 20 to 35 minutes, away from the project’s corporate sponsors, doing activities like line dancing, snowmobiling, touring national parks, visiting college campuses and dining. But Mr. Duffy’s critics, including in Congress, aren’t buying that the operation was above board.
“The public still does not have answers about what exactly the corporate sponsors of the secretary’s road trip are getting in exchange,” Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, said in a statement. “Americans need answers and accountability, because this nonstop corruption by the Trump administration cannot become the norm.”
Mr. Duffy’s encouraging comments about each of the featured companies are largely in keeping with other enthusiastic statements he has made about American manufacturers and emerging technology in his official duties.
But critics say that the context of the road trip series is different. Highlighting specific companies could be seen as giving them a competitive boost, said Donald K. Sherman, the president and chief executive of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a left-leaning watchdog group. In a letter earlier this year, the group urged the Transportation Department’s inspector general to investigate the show’s production.
The donations also raise questions about whether certain companies are trying to influence Mr. Duffy and secure favorable regulatory decisions, he said.
“What I think was really offered, and seems clearly to have been provided more than anything else, is access to the head of the agency that oversees their industry,” Mr. Sherman said.
Boeing has been the subject of significant scrutiny from the Transportation Department — through the subsidiary Federal Aviation Administration — and autonomous vehicle companies, including Waymo, are also heavily dependent on the regulations from Mr. Duffy’s department as they seek to grow.
Even if Mr. Duffy’s participation passed muster with government ethics officials, some ethics experts suggested that the road trip’s troublesome optics ought to have dissuaded him.
“Even if the Transportation Department has the legal authority to accept gifts, its secretary has a continuing duty to avoid creating any appearance of a loss of impartiality or preferential treatment as to the sponsors of his tour,” said Walter Shaub, who leads the Project on Government Oversight’s Government Ethics Initiative and ran the U.S. Office of Government Ethics during the Obama administration.
“There’s a common-sense question about what kind of promotion of private companies a cabinet secretary should be doing and another question about whether performing in a reality show is how he should be spending his time leading a major federal department,” he added.
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