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Well, without doxing myself too much, its mostly aerospace related matters, specifically involving certification of new aircraft, new rules for airports and air traffic controllers, and how the US would harmonize its regulations with other national and supranational regulators (like EASA... okay mostly EASA). The list of sins is long- it was never clear who was actually making a formal decision (lots of 'here's what i think, but xyz all need input'), despite a formal decision being requested. Some paperwork remained outstanding for 4 years. Certain statutory limits on how long the government has to respond to requests and filings were routinely ignored without apology or explanation, to the point we seriously considered suing the FAA and DoT. It also became obvious that several key administrators were completely AWOL and had delegated their entire function to assistants, and when this was brought up directly to him, we got an out of office (I believe it was his paternity leave stint, which is charming, but as a cabinet secretary the buck stops with you, respectfully you dont get to take months of paternity leave), our concerns about serious government malfeasance were never addressed in even a perfunctory manner.
My experience with the previous two secretaries of transportation, as well as the current one, are nothing at all like that. Night and day difference, and I know there are many other people in similar positions who have similar feelings.
I never met with him personally, but the issues i was involved with were the kind of things that would require his approval, or st least input, and that really never happened. In contrast, i have emailed Secretary Chao before and recieved a personal response about three hours later. Secretary Duffy appears to be much the same.
Completely forgot to respond to this— thanks for the informative reply. Sounds like you have an interesting job! The substantial difference with previous secretaries is definitely concerning, as is the general sense of dysfunction you’re describing. Maybe he was a good politician but a not-so-good administrator, appointed above his level of competence? I’ll certainly keep this in mind about him.
I think that would be a fair assessment. There is certainly a wide gap between being a fairly local politician and trying to run a campaign on a bigger stage, and then actually delivering once you've won the race. In many ways, the skills don't translate, and cabinet secretaries are one of the posts where it can be most obvious (not guaranteed though- regardless of how you feel about the moral and philosophical implications of her actions, it's hard to deny the Clinton got shit done as Sec State, Cruz seems to be doing similarly).
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Most of the better-publicized examples tend to be culture-warry and tied to emergency response stuff that's hard to measure directly, but there's a lot of stuff in this class, too. For a well-documented-if-poorly-known one, I'd point to checkrides.
Pilots are required to pass a checkride for their pilot's certificate and for a variety of add-ons after that point. These exams are lengthy processes that can only be provided by FAA examiners directly, or by FAA-approved examiners called Designated Pilot Examiners (DPEs). FAA Examiners offer the service for free*, but have become increasingly unavailable over the last twenty years; in the modern era, >95% of exams are operated by DPEs, amounting to tens of thousands of exams per year. Because of the exam's complexity, it's very rare for a DPE to do more than one exam per day, there are a wide variety of practical constraints due to weather and other environmental conditions, and there are less than a thousand DPEs in the entire US. That was in an awkward but plausible equilibrium for most of the 2010s, but post-COVID, there was both a glut of new pilots and a lot of DPEs who had drastically reduced availability (it's very difficult to make a full-time job, so you get a mix of retirees and weekend warriors), along with other constraints getting baked into the system that made it hard for remaining DPEs to maintain the same velocity as before.
As a result, if your flight school did not have a staff DPE (technically against the rules, but largely tolerated), it could take months and cost over a thousand dollars to run the test for your initial pilot certificate, and if you failed -- or even if you had to cancel because of weather! -- you'd have to pay it a second time later. Most students also had a maximum time between graduation from their flight school's internal tests and when they even attempt a checkride, so other delays could lead to even more costs. This was a very well-known problem in pilot communities to the point I'd heard about it by March 2022. By 2024, a law passed with a specific requirement to start an office specifically monitoring the problem and by 2024 Congress had sent the FAA a further letter asking what the fuck was going on. Complete mess, entirely an infrastructure and coordination problem, zero culture war politics...
And a lot of internal political problems. Flight Standards District Offices (FSDOs) manage DPEs in their geographic area, and while there's been a long waiting list for DPE applicants, FSDOs don't like actually certifying them or managing a large number, both because of the recurrent inspection overhead and for more interpersonal reasons. (I dunno if the DAR/DER stuff is any less bad, but I've heard stories.) And once you became a DPE, the gig was extremely renumerative while their shortage existed, and coincidentally the people who did get to become DPEs inevitably were or became well-known by the FSDO. Fixing this was, inevitably, going to ruffle feathers.
But allowing a snowjob of a biannual report to float through with a general Solving Inefficiencies was easy. Guess what we got? The first biannual report revealed that the FAA, six months in, still wasn't trying to collect data on how much DPEs were charging. Almost zero information about why FSDOs had so low a pass rate for DPE applicants, or why wait lists to apply as a DPE were so long. They did switch around a lot of individual DPE in and out in the local area (sometimes without even telling ex-DPEs why!), as if they only problem was the physical offices of those DPEs, and for a good year it actually got worse in our area. Modernized the search tool, and it's almost impressive how bad it is. Absolute epitome of following the streetlamp effect off a cliff.
Tbf, it's still early game for the current admin; I don't have great hopes.
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