ByBruce Kimbrell(Policy Op-Ed)
Why a Road Trip?
They called it a vanity project that was out of touch. A family vacation dressed up as policy. A cabinet secretary playing tourist while real work sat undone in Washington.
They missed the deeper point.
Thecontroversyobscured a simpler and more interesting question: Why would the Secretary of Transportation spend months filming across the country in the first place?
President Donald Trump may have come closer to the answer than many commentators when hejokingly askedthe Duffy family in the Oval Office whether everyone really wanted to go. “This isn’t just Mom and Dad saying get in the car, you’re going?”
The question drew laughter because it touched something familiar. Road trips are a mixture of excitement and exhaustion. Long hours. Rest stops. Kids asking if they’re there yet, even though everyone already knows the answer.
And still, generation after generation keeps climbing into the car. Because road trips are about more than transportation. They’re about discovery.
America is one of the few countries where the journey can feel as significant as the destination. Mountain ranges, rivers, farms, industrial cities, ports, and small towns stretch across a continent-sized nation. On a map they are abstractions. From the road, life slows down and those abstractions become something else entirely.
Perhaps that is why the idea of a road trip still resonates. We know America through movement, through seeing it firsthand. We cannot let ourselves become so occupied in Washington, D.C. that we forget how we are connected to one another across thousands of communities, rivers, rail lines, roads, and skylines.
That is what makes it notable the nation’s top transportation official was spending precious time inviting Americans to see the country by moving through it, despite his otherwise demanding schedule. The more I thought about it, the more it became apparent that Sean Duffy’s Great American Road Trip wasn’t about vacation or solely about remembering America.
It was about reconnecting America to itself, which reveals something fundamental about how he views transportation, and the importance he places on knowing the nation. In that respect, the road trip may become one of the most revealing decisions of his tenure.
Transportation Connects Us
Most Americans only think about transportation when their flight gets canceled, a bridge closes, or a container ship gets stuck somewhere inconvenient. It enters daily life as interruption. But its primary function is not disruption; it is connection.
Most of the time it operates quietly in the background, connecting workers to jobs, manufacturers to suppliers, farmers to markets, energy producers to consumers, and communities to opportunity.
We rarely notice it because, when it works, we’re not supposed to.
The shelves are stocked, the lights come on, the package arrives, the plane lands, and life moves forward because transportation is the structure beneath movement. And movement is how a nation as large and diverse as the United States becomes legible to itself. That observation helps explain why the idea of a road trip mattered to Duffy.
The Real World Shows Up
One of the reasons the Great American Road Trip is such an interesting idea is that it arrives at a moment when many Americans increasingly experience the world through screens. Information moves instantly. Commerce takes place online.
Relationships are maintained through digital platforms.
Much of modern life can feel detached from geography. Yet many of the things that ultimately determine national prosperity, security, and opportunity remain rooted in physical places. The digital world has transformed how Americans communicate, work, and exchange information. It has not replaced the physical world beneath it.
Transportation occupies a unique role within that reality because it enables a 50-state nation to function as something larger than a collection of individual communities.
Duffy’s essential observation is that we need to see America to know it, and that is more significant than it first appears. National ambitions still depend on physical realities that cannot be understood from a screen.
What Secretary Duffy Appears to See
Duffy appears to view transportation as the enabling layer underneath national power and prosperity. In this framing, it is not simply roads, ports, airports, and freight systems to be administered, but the network through which economic growth, industrial capacity, energy security, competitiveness, and national resilience are made possible.
This perspective informs a governing approach defined by scale, urgency, and direct intervention. The distinction is not that Duffy views transportation as important. All transportation leaders do. The distinction is that he increasingly appears to view transportation weaknesses as constraints on broader national objectives. Rather than treating those constraints as fixed conditions, he has pursued structural reforms, expanded institutional capacity, and advanced changes aligned with the scope of the challenges he believes the country faces.
Aviation, particularly the air traffic control (ATC) system, illustrates this focus. For decades, policymakers largely managed around mounting ATC infrastructure and workforce challenges even as demand continued to grow. Duffy’s approach has been different. He has elevated ATC modernization as a priority for system-wide reform, bringing the issue directly to Congress and the President to secure large-scale investment to rebuild core infrastructure.
The same instinct appears in trucking. The Department has pursued enforcement against fraudulent Commercial Driver’s License schools while strengthening commercial-driver standards. Rather than accepting declining standards, it has moved to reset expectations, elevate accountability, and restore confidence in the credentialing system that underpins freight mobility. His 12 June announcement of the Supply Chain Sovereignty Initiative extends this approach, emphasizing system-wide modernization of how supply chain capacity is understood and managed.
The same pattern is visible in maritime affairs. The U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point faces more than $1 billion in identified campus revitalization needs after decades of deferred maintenance and underinvestment. After entering office, Duffy broke with decades of incremental maintenance approaches by elevating the Academy as a departmental priority and committing to a comprehensive long-term revitalization effort through a 10-year agreement with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Secretary Sean Duffy has said, “The American people deserve an efficient, safe, and pro-growth transportation system.” Critics will say public narratives, policies, and resources alone do not guarantee outcomes, but they do reveal priorities. The question is whether this approach translates into execution in the physical world.
His record suggests it will, particularly in regions and places whose economic importance is often overlooked.
More Than Coordinates
The Secretary’s personal involvement and policy attention in the Great Lakes probably reflects his intuition that some locations are more than their coordinates suggest. Not because of sentiment, because of what they produce and the role they play in the broader American economy. For much of the twentieth century, the Midwest understood this instinctively.
Steel mills, ports, railroads, highways, waterways, power generation, and skilled workforces did not operate as separate assets. Together they formed an integrated industrial economy. And that economy did not just move goods. It generated life.
The American dream did not arrive as an abstraction in Northwest Indiana, the outskirts of Detroit, or along the Ohio River corridor to Pittsburgh. It arrived through networks that tied those communities to the rest of the country.
My grandfather on my mother’s side spent fifty years at Thrall Car welding freight cars in Northwest Indiana. My grandfather on my father’s side built his life at U.S. Steel. My parents, aunts, and uncles built their lives in other factories, all of which connected to Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and the broader Great Lakes industrial economy. Steel and manufacturing became a way of life. That is what network effects feel like from the inside. And what I watched happen to those networks over the years is why what is happening now feels like more than policy. It feels like recognition.
As a former U.S. Congressman from Wisconsin, Duffy arrived at the Department of Transportation with a decade of Great Lakes experience behind him. Then, as Secretary, one of his earliest actions in office expanded the U.S. Marine Highway Program and strengthened the M-90 corridor across the Great Lakes. Announcing his decision, he argued that maritime dominance depends not only on oceans, but on the inland waterways, rivers, and ports that move American products throughout the country.
His attention to the Great Lakes reflects a broader pattern. Duffy appears to view transportation not as a collection of isolated projects, but as a system shaped by geography, industry, and comparative advantage. Some places matter because of what they connect. Others because of what they produce. The most important often do both.
The Comparative Advantage of Place
Consider Burns Harbor. Situated at the intersection of Great Lakes shipping, Class I railroads, interstate highways, and steel production, this Indiana port connects transportation networks reaching deep into the American interior. Mariners move cargo across the Great Lakes, dock workers load freight for regional manufacturers, steelworkers process raw materials arriving by rail and water, and rail crews dispatch goods into a national network reaching both coasts.
On 19 June, Secretary Sean P. Duffy became the first sitting U.S. Secretary of Transportation to visit Burns Harbor, saying, “The Great Lakes and Inland Waterways are vital arteries for America’s freight network.” Burns Harbor serves as a multimodal hub linking steel production, rail logistics, and Great Lakes shipping.
Duffy’s attention is consistent with bipartisan congressional efforts led by Senator Todd Young (R-IN), in bi-partisan collaboration with Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and Gary Peters (D-MI). They have focused on achieving a fair share of federal funding for Great Lakes ports and lake protections.
Together, these efforts reflect a broader recognition of the region’s role in national freight and industrial systems.
The Department of Transportation, under Secretary Duffy, has placed increased emphasis on port modernization and the strengthening of multimodal freight corridors as part of a broader effort to improve system capacity and resilience, while working across national, state, and local authorities.
Burns Harbor is not an exception. It is an example of how transportation, industry, and geography converge to create national capability, which reflects Duffy’s conviction that the nation is tied together through place and movement.
The Transportation Secretary’s New Job
Sean and Rachel Duffy met on the 1998 season of Road Rules, a pioneer road trip reality television series. Two young Americans moving through a country neither fully knew yet, finding each other. Over twenty-five years later, with nine children of their own, they chose to do it again. Not because they needed another road trip.
Because America did.
The Great American Road Trip was not a distraction from Duffy’s transportation agenda. Once fully released, it will be an expression of it.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has said, “To love America is to see America.” Because he understands that Americans do not see themselves in policies, plans, or programs. They see themselves in communities. On the open road. In the people, industries, and landscapes that make this country what it is.
If transportation ultimately shapes how communities, industries, and regions function together, then helping Americans understand those relationships is part of the Secretary’s job. What better symbol for that than a road trip across America just in time to celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary?
Not as transportation policy. As transportation leadership.
Commander Bruce Kimbrell is a career naval officer with deployments in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. He has deployed with U.S. Carrier and Expeditionary Strike Groups. He previously served as a Director with the National Security Council at the White House and has supported strategic maritime initiatives as staff for the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations and the Office of the Secretary of the Navy. He also served as a national security and defense staffer for U.S. Congressman Michael Waltz of Florida’s 6th Congressional District.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Navy, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.
