In a bit of a disappointing development for Baton Rouge’s outgoing Republican congressman, Garret Graves fell a bit short in his bid to become Secretary of Transportation in the Trump administration to come. Instead, another former congressman got the job.

Louisiana Congressman Garret Graves was not selected as the nominee for President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet.

Multiple reports showed Graves was on a nominee list for Trump’s Secretary of the United States Department of Transportation.

On Monday, Trump announced that former Wisconsin Congressman Sean Duffy was nominated for the position.

Graves posted to Facebook, “Congrats to Sean Duffy. We’ve been in touch.” He continued to mention Trump and said, “Another solid selection.”

The Louisiana representative has been a member of Congress since 2015, representing the sixth district in Louisiana. He is a chairperson of the Aviation Subcommittee on Transportation and serves on the Natural Resources Committee.

Duffy brings a couple of things Graves can’t. First, he and his wife Rachel Campos-Duffy have both hosted shows on Fox News, and in Duffy’s case he’s torn current Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg a new orifice over and over again.

He’s got a long TV history. Duffy was on MTV’s The Real World, and because he’s an experienced log-roller he’s done color commentary for ESPN’s Great Outdoor Games. The guess is that this cabinet post is a vehicle to promote him for an eventual run for the Senate or for governor in Wisconsin.

Duffy didn’t serve on any transportation-related committees when he was in the House from 2011-2019. He was mostly in the banking and financial services committees during his time.

But the other big advantage Duffy has on Graves is that he’s a big Trump booster, going all the way back to 2017 when he made the circuit of cable news shows defending Trump’s ban on travel from Muslim countries where minimal or no vetting was available.

It’ll be interesting to see where Graves goes from here. Does he get a job under Duffy? Or does he return to being Louisiana’s top political free agent for the 2026 and 2027 elections?

In our previous post on this subject, we noted that for a lot of the state’s pols, having Graves tucked away in the Trump administration would be a great thing. One who is probably quite relieved that he didn’t get the Transportation Secretary job is Jeff Landry, whose feud with Graves is the main reason his seat is now going to Cleo Fields.

Had Graves become Secretary of Transportation, Landry would be in the position of having to work with him to get funding and permissions for road and bridge improvements, and that could have been…awkward. Now it’s a little different; Landry was in the House for the first two years Duffy was there, so he’s got a relationship with him that’s presumably friendlier.

But we’ll see how long Duffy is in that job. He doesn’t bring the kind of specific policy expertise Graves does, so this feels like a stepping-stone position for him.