Trump Transportation Sec Grilled On Claim Air Traffic Issues Were Years in the Making: Why Didn’t ‘First Admin’ Deal With It?

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy took questions from reporters on Monday about the ongoing issues at Newark’s airport, which have included radar outages and air traffic controller shortages.

“You’ve been saying that this is decades-old problems and these issues have been present for years and years and years. So why didn’t this administration initiate changes in their first administration?” a reporter asked Duffy — a former reality TV star and Republican congressman.

“Well, I think what we saw is the cracks that you are now seeing today were highlighted actually over the last four years. We were seeing more and more of it. And the president has said this a number of times. He had a plan to come into the second part of his administration because he knew what was going on to actually fix it,” Duffy replied, seemingly to blame the issue on Trump not getting reelected.

“Some money, some billions of dollars were allocated from the last administration to this effort, and it was wasted. You don’t see any result of any money that’s been spent over four years. And by the way, they had no problem spending money. They spent a lot of money, and they didn’t spend the money here. The president was understanding the cracks at the end of his administration and was going to fix it four years ago,” Duffy concluded.

Duffy was on Meet the Press over the weekend and warned that “What you see in Newark is going to happen in other places across the country.” Duffy told moderator Kristen Welker, “It has to be fixed.” Duffy, however, worked to reassure the public on Monday as well, telling reporters that Newark remains safe to travel from and that “we are the safest airspace.”

Watch the clip above.