Sean Duffy was dumbfounded by this Fox News host attacking him

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy expects the fake news media to attack him relentlessly.

But now the slings and arrows are coming from an unexpected direction.

And Sean Duffy was dumbfounded by this Fox News host attacking him.

Fox News joins media pile-on over mass firings 

With America $36 trillion in debt following Joe Biden’s disastrous four years in office, President Trump has no choice but to slash spending everywhere he can.

The bloated federal bureaucracy is an easy area to identify cost savings and President Trump ordered mass firings of deep state bureaucrats.

But the media wants to make mass layoffs of federal workers a rallying cry to marshal opposition to President Trump.

And so the press is highlighting any negative story they think they can blame on Trump axing government bureaucrats.

Airline accidents are a ripe target for the press.

Even Fox News got into the act with host Bill Hemmer rattling off a spate of recent airline accidents and asking Duffy to respond to the claim that the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) firing workers caused these disasters.

“I also want to show you the incidents, the aviation disasters so far this year. You look at January 29, January 31, February 6, Feb. 10 and then Feb. 17, Delta regional jet flips, that was the one in Toronto,” Hemmer began.

“A question for you, Mr. Secretary. Some say this is not a time to cut employees given the safety factors that are concerned. What do you say to them?” Hemmer added.

Duffy shot down the claims as nonsense.

The Transportation Secretary noted that they laid off .008 percent of the workforce.

“Bill, there’s fat everywhere in government and in DOT as well. But let’s be clear, at FAA, we cut 352 people out of 50 — I mean, sorry, 46,000 people. That’s 0.8 percent of the workforce. These were probationary workers,” Duffy began.

The fired workers were also probationary workers on the job for less than a year so the idea that they were mission critical to airline safety was absurd.

“They were employed for less than a year at DOT. So, these weren’t the old school, really ingrained employees of the DOT. And not only that, we kept all the critical safety positions and we actually hired more positions into critical safety, like air traffic controllers. We hired more inspectors for things like pipelines and for aircraft. So, again, we have a safety mission,” Duffy concluded.

The media began hyping airlines disasters after the horrific January 29 crash in midair over Washington of a Blackhawk army helicopter and a commercial airliner where all 67 passengers were killed.

Democrats tried to blame the crash on Trump’s layoffs.

But experts such as former U.S. Air Force colonel and pilot and current senior director of the University of South Florida’s Global and National Security Institute Jim Cardoso rejected that assertion.

Cardoso told PolitiFact that “the actions by President Trump would not have led to such an immediate impact.” 

“All the processes to control and deconflict air traffic in the D.C. area have been well established for a long time,” Cardoso added. “The personnel involved in the accident — air crew from the two aircraft and the (air traffic controllers) in place at the time of the accident — would similarly not have been affected by” the recent policy changes in Trump’s executive orders since January 20.