By Colleen Mondor

June 26, 2025, © Leeham News: On March 12, 2019, then-Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao and her staff flew from Texas to Washington (DC) on a Southwest Airlines 737 MAX. It was two days after the crash of Ethiopian Airlines flight 302, the second devastating accident involving the 737 MAX.

In taking the flight, Chao showed not only her support for Boeing and Southwest, but even more so the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which steadfastly refused to ground the aircraft. As the pressure mounted, the agency stressed the importance of its methodical data-gathering process, which had begun months earlier with the October crash of Lion Air.

Chao also reassured the public, telling reporters “I want people to be assured that we take these accidents very seriously. We are reviewing them very carefully.” The day after her flight, President Trump announced that after conversations with Chao, the CEO of Boeing and Dan Elwell, the FAA’s acting administrator,  his administration was grounding the aircraft. Elwell told reporters later that day, however, that the decision rested with the FAA. “So the decision is an emergency order to ground the airplanes,” he said, “and that is authority rested in the FAA with me.”

Chao’s flight centered her in yet another chapter of the ongoing saga between the Department of Transportation (DOT) and FAA. This was familiar territory for DOT which, since the FAA lost its independence in 1967, has often portrayed itself as the crucial, agent of flight safety in the U.S.

The most recent example was when current transportation secretary Sean Duffy captured media attention after the January 29 midair collision over Reagan National Airport. The FAA, which again had an acting Administrator, was relegated to secondary sound bites as Duffy declared, “We are going to take responsibility at the Department of Transportation and the FAA to make sure we have the reforms…to make sure that these mistakes do not happen again and again.”