U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy has been one of the higher-profile members of President Donald Trump’s cabinet in the early weeks of the new administration.

Duffy, 53, was one of Trump’s least controversial picks. He got confirmed by the U.S. Senate with a unanimous vote by a Senate committee and a 77-22 vote from the full Senate.

He immediately took center stage Jan. 29 in the aftermath of the fatal airplane-helicopter collision over the Potomac River, near the border between the District of Columbia and Virginia.

During his confirmation hearing Jan. 22, Duffy identified as goals improving safety; “to make sure we get Boeing back on track, producing great airplanes that are safe airplanes; and advancing infrastructure projects.

And he was in North Carolina today, surveying the damage and ongoing needs in the region post-Hurricane Helene.

Duffy is a lifelong Catholic. One of his daughters attends the University of Dallas. 

1. He appeared on a reality-TV show — and met his wife on that reality-TV series.

Duffy was a cast member on MTV’s The Real World: Boston in 1997, when he was 25.

It was the sixth season of the show widely cited as the first of the modern reality television shows.

He lived in a converted fire station on the flat of Beacon Hill in Boston with six other 20-somethings, picked by producers to bring maximum chance of culture clash in occasionally sexually charged settings. 

Duffy’s wife, Rachel Campos-Duffy, appeared as a cast member of the 1994 edition of MTV’s The Real World, set in San Francisco. The two met when they participated in a spinoff show in 1998 called Road Rules: All Stars, traveling to five cities with three other Real World alumni.

The couple appeared with their then-four children on MTV’s Real World Awards Bash in 2008.

These days, Campos-Duffy, 53, a third-generation Mexican-American originally from Tempe, Arizona, is a co-host of Fox & Friends Weekend and the host of Fox Noticias, a Spanish-language weekday program.

2. Duffy was the first reality-TV star to be elected to Congress.

In 2002, when Duffy was 30, the governor of Wisconsin appointed him district attorney of Ashland County (population 16,000), to fill a vacancy. He subsequently won election to the office four times.

In 2010, he ran for the U.S. House of Representatives as a Republican, winning election to represent Wisconsin’s northernmost congressional district in a nationwide GOP wave.

Duffy was a pro-life conservative in Congress, with a lifetime American Conservative Union rating of 78 out of 100.

He won election to Congress five times, before resigning in September 2019.

3. He has campaigned as “as a lumberjack advocate.”

The narrator in a campaign ad for Duffy in the 2010 race for Congress called him “a lumberjack advocate,” as video showed him wearing a red and black flannel shirt.

Duffy competed in log-rolling as a child and into adulthood.

4. He helped investigate Planned Parenthood as a member of Congress.

In 2016, Duffy served on a select investigative panel in the U.S. House of Representatives that investigated allegations that Planned Parenthood sold body parts of aborted babies.

A transcript of the panel’s public sessions shows he questioned witnesses about ethical concerns over using fetal parts for taste tests and cosmetics, among other things.

5. He and his wife have nine children.

Duffy and his wife Rachel have nine children.

The youngest, a girl, has Down syndrome. In September 2019, at age 47, Duffy resigned from Congress around the time of her birth, citing the need to spend more time with his family and to help care for his youngest daughter.

At the time, Duffy was being floated “as a likely contender for governor or a U.S. Senate seat,” according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

6. He worked as a lobbyist.

In November 2019, two months after leaving Congress, Duffy became senior counsel at BGR Group, a Republican-leaning lobbying firm in Washington, after working briefly as a commentator for CNN.

“The BGR team provides me with a solid foundation to assist financial services companies, trade associations, their members and communities navigate the heavily regulated policy arena,” Duffy said in a written statement at the time, according to the Wisconsin Examiner.

7. He and his wife included their family traditions in a Christmas-themed book.

In 2021, Rachel and Sean Duffy included their Christmas traditions in their compilation of 23 Fox News Channel personalities called All-American Christmas.

“Marriage, especially inter-racial marriage, is another way Christian traditions evolve and meld into something new and beautiful,” Rachel Campos-Duffy writes in the book. “For us, that meant bringing Irish and Spanish-Mexican Christmas and Catholic traditions together.”

Sean Duffy recalls in the book his Irish grandmother’s mincemeat pie and playing hockey on a frozen lake in Wisconsin.

Both families agreed on leg of lamb for Christmas dinner.

8. He wants federal highway funds to go to geographical areas that have higher birth rates.

Duffy signed an undated memo (presumably sometime after he took office Jan. 28) directing U.S. Department of Transportation officials to steer money disproportionately toward places with higher marriage and birth rates in the United States.

The memo, reported by The Hill, calls on the federal transportation agency to “mitigate the unique impacts of DOT programs, policies, and activities on families and family-specific difficulties, such as the accessibility of transportation to families with young children, and give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.”

The memo has drawn criticism from Democrats, who argue that communities need assistance with road projects irrespective of their fertility rate.

States with higher marriage and birth rates tended to vote for President Donald Trump and other Republicans in November 2024, while states with lower marriage and birth rates tended to side with Democrats.

9. He prayed the Hail Mary with his family before his confirmation hearing.

The viral video highlighting the Duffy family praying the Marian prayer together at the U.S. Capitol ahead of his hearing for the transportation post has made the rounds on social media and was included in a EWTN News roundup of Catholics in President Trump’s cabinet.