Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy detailed the vast amount of damage North Carolina sustained after Hurricane Helene last year and how the Trump administration will move in a more expedient manner to repair the area.
Duffy explained on Monday that repairing Interstate 40, a portion of which was closed following Hurricane Helene, is one of the priorities in this relief. The transportation secretary assessed how rock will be needed to rebuild the roadway and that the Department of Transportation can partner with the Forest Service to get this resource closer to the site rather than traveling up to 40 miles to get it elsewhere.
“So again, we’re out here assessing and looking at how we can partner with local officials to rebuild quickly, and Donald Trump, he doesn’t move at the speed of prior administrations. He moves lightning quick,” Duffy said on Fox News’s The Faulkner Focus. “So we want to go fast, we want to go cheap, and we want to go safe.”
The transportation secretary said that repairing just the portion of I-40 will cost “billions,” which he predicted will be the department’s “most expensive emergency relief project” in its roughly 50-year history. He added that the goal is to open single-lane traffic within a month to allow traffic flow on the interstate again.
Duffy then contrasted the current administration to the previous administration, saying local residents felt “forgotten” by their federal and state governments. The Trump administration is working to ensure disaster relief is provided equally to all affected, Duffy said, noting how President Donald Trump visited North Carolina within his first week back in the White House.
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Ahead of his North Carolina visit, Trump indicated that massive changes could be made with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, accusing it of “complicating everything” and saying that disaster relief should be up to individual states. Since making this comment, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has similarly said that the government needs to rid itself of FEMA “the way it exists today.”
Apart from providing relief to North Carolina, the Trump administration has dealt with the recent plane crash near Washington D.C., leading Duffy to seek to “upgrade” the staffing of air traffic controllers. Part of this attempt to improve air travel safety includes offering veteran air traffic controllers incentives to stay on board.