Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced a new $1 billion federal grant program to “make the experience better in airports,” a program that he suggested could include workout areas.

“I want to expand the play areas for kids,” Duffy said while announcing the funding at the Ronald Reagan National Airport yesterday. “I want additional nursing pods for nursing mothers. I want a workout area where people might get some blood flowing, doing some pull-ups or some step-ups.”

Related

Pete Buttigieg’s replacement threatens unpaid air traffic controllers for not being “patriotic”

Insights for the LGBTQ+ community

Subscribe to our briefing for insights into how politics impacts the LGBTQ+ community and more.
Subscribe to our Newsletter today

“I don’t want you to have a full-body sweat going on till you stink,” he said. “But if you do a few good pull-ups, get your blood flowing, I think that’s positive. This is not like go to the gym, sweat and get on an airplane.”

Duffy and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. then had a pull-up competition at the airport. Kennedy got 20 in the contest, although his form was questionable. Duffy, with better form, got 10.

Last month, Duffy announced a new Department of Transportation initiative aimed at getting people to be more polite and dress better when they travel by air.

“And so sometimes you just have to ask people, hey, let’s maybe go back to an era where we didn’t wear our pajamas to the airport,” he said on Fox Business. “We actually might dress up a little bit. And if somebody needs help putting their luggage up in the overhead bin, help them out!”

Duffy has spent the past year blaming the massive problems air travel in the U.S. has faced this year on his predecessor, out former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. He said that Buttigieg didn’t work hard enough to modernize air traffic control equipment and was instead focused on frivolous problems, like climate change.

Buttigieg, though, didn’t do anything to get even simple gym equipment into airports during his tenure at the Department of Transportation, and he didn’t even try to do a single pull-up at an airport during a press conference.

Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.