The Duffys' reality show, The Great American Road Trip, will premiere on YouTube in June.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy spent the last seven months filming a reality television show with his family, the former Fox Business host revealed during an episode of Fox & Friends on Friday, May 8.
Duffy, 54, who appeared on MTV's The Real World: Boston in 1997, said he was inspired to take the trip in celebration of America's 250th anniversary this summer. Duffy's reality show, The Great American Road Trip, will air on YouTube beginning in June, he said.
TMZ first reported in March that Duffy, along with his wife, Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy, also 54, and their nine children, were taping the show, created in partnership with producers from Duffy's season of The Real World.
Duffy and Campos-Duffy, an alum of The Real World: San Francisco, met in 1998 while filming the MTV reality spinoff Road Rules: All Stars.
"Over the course of seven months, we just kind of found these moments where I might be able to do some work, I could take the kids with me, do a road trip," Duffy said of the family's new show on Friday. "There's so much to see in this beautiful country."
"It's more than a road trip, it's a civic experience," Duffy says in a trailer for the show, also released on Friday. In it, the Duffys are shown traversing the country, making pit stops to ride snowmobiles in Montana and to take a Mississippi River cruise in St. Louis.
The family visits the Rocky statue and the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia (with a cameo from Interior Secretary Doug Burgum); the Boston firehouse where Duffy lived during his season of The Real World; and what appears to be the homes of Kid Rock and John Rich in Nashville.
"To love America, you gotta see America and meet her people," Campos-Duffy says in the trailer. "The Great American Road Trip will inspire families to step away from the noise, hit the open road and reconnect with what matters most -- each other."
Speaking to Fox & Friends on Friday, Duffy recalled childhood road trips to Florida from his family home in Wisconsin.
"We didn't have a lot of money, so my mom would pack up a cooler, and we would drive straight through," he said, adding, "It fits any budget to do a road trip."
But rising gas prices tied to the war in Iran threaten to disrupt the summer driving season. "If prices continue to rise and the [Strait of Hormuz] remains closed, then I would start to believe that it will impact more Americans' summer travel plans," Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, told the Associated Press on Friday.
Campos-Duffy said the couple decided to film their cross-country road trip after President Donald Trump told Duffy and other Cabinet secretaries to "do something special" to celebrate the nation's semiquincentennial in July.
"We thought we were just going to do it on our iPhone, and just do little reels," she said Friday. "Then we started talking about -- we're like, let's go back to our roots. Let's do this one for free. We'll put it onto YouTube. We'll let the whole country see it."
A Transportation Department spokesperson tells PEOPLE the series was filmed "over the course of many months in small, one day or two stops," and was launched in partnership with the "Great American Road Trip, Inc.," which also covered the cost of production.
The nonprofit organization, according to its website, is sponsored by companies including Boeing, Toyota, Shell, United Airlines and Comcast NBCUniversal.
Neither Duffy nor his family will receive "any financial compensation" from the show, the Transportation Department spokesperson says.
Pete Buttigieg, who was transportation secretary under former President Joe Biden, shared his thoughts on the Duffys' reality show via social media on Friday.
"I love a good road trip, but this is brutally out of touch," he wrote, adding, "a Trump Cabinet member making a documentary about himself while regular families can't afford road trips anymore, because Trump and his war put gas prices through the roof."