An increase in ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz could help ease pressure on oil prices, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent suggested Monday, signaling potential relief as markets fret over rising costs.

“Any supply is helpful, and we want to get back to normal,” Bessent told “Fox & Friends,” referencing the uptick.

“The market is in deficit [by] about 10 to 12 million barrels a day, and we’re making up for that deficit.”

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As more countries strike deals with Iran to keep oil moving, Bessent said the increase in shipments is helping ease supply concerns.

On top of movement through the strait, the Trump administration has facilitated a 172-million barrel release from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) as part of a 400-million-barrel coordinated international effort to address energy supply chokeholds.

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That effort, combined with unsanctioning Russian and Iranian crude already on the water, is said to help mitigate the cost as well.

“[There is] no extra money for either one of those regimes,” Bessent clarified, referencing the eased sanctions.

“So the market is well-supplied, and we are seeing more and more ships go through on a daily basis as individual countries cut deals with the Iranian regime, for the time being.”

He added that further relief could be on the horizon as the U.S. moves to secure the key global oil route.

“Over time, the U.S. is going to retake control of the straits, and there will be freedom of navigation, whether it is through U.S. escorts or a multinational escort.”

Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport air traffic controllers warned for years about safety risks, long before the Jan. 29, 2025, midair disaster over the Potomac River, when 67 were killed after a military training helicopter collided with a commercial passenger jet.

“The warning signs were all there,” Emily Hanoka, a former Reagan National controller, told CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday. “Controllers formed local safety councils and every time that a controller made these safety reports, another controller was compiling data to back up the recommendation. And many recommendations were made, and they never went too far.”

Hanoka described pressure to keep traffic moving at an airport handling roughly 800 daily flights, including the use of tightly timed operations on a constrained runway system.

“Some hours are overloaded, to the point where it’s over the capacity that the airport can handle,” Hanoka, who clocked out just before the fatal crash that night, added.

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“There was definitely a pressure. If you do not move planes, you will gridlock the airport.”

Notably, it was not the air traffic of the commercial airlines, but a military training aircraft flying at the incorrect altitude through “helicopter alley” that crashed into the unsuspecting airliner.

A U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter crashed into the side of an American Eagle regional jet approaching Reagan National just before landing, killing all 67 people aboard both aircraft. Federal investigators later issued urgent safety recommendations focused on separating helicopter and fixed-wing traffic near the airport.

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Since the disaster, regulators have moved to tighten procedures.

There were multiple near-misses just a day before the disaster, according to CBS, and 85 near-collisions reported between 2021 and 2024 during the Biden administration.

“There were obvious cracks in the system, there were obvious holes,” Hanoka said. “You had frontline controllers ringing that bell for years and years, saying this is not safe. This cannot continue. Please change this. And that didn’t happen.”

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The airport’s 25 million airline passengers a year is reportedly 10 million more than its intended capacity.

To handle the load, Hanoka described “squeeze play” maneuvers unique to that crammed airspace and three runways where two aircraft are on one runway within seconds of each other.

“A squeeze play is when everything is dependent on an aircraft rolling, an aircraft slowing, and you know it’s gonna be a very close operation,” she said. “And that is a really common operation.”

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Air traffic controllers coming from other locales give the airport’s stress work a hard pass, she said.

“So you’ll get new controllers come in, so they’ve transferred from other facilities and they’ll look at the operation and say, ‘Absolutely not,'” she continued. “And they’ll withdraw from training. And that, when I was there, was about 50%.

“About half of the people that walked in the building to train would say, ‘Absolutely not.'”

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“It was surprising walking into that work environment, how close aircraft were,” Hanoka said.

Reporting last week said the FAA suspended the use of visual separation between helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft in that airspace and shifted controllers toward radar-based separation, while restrictions were also imposed on certain helicopter operations near Reagan National.

The safety concerns Hanoka described align with broader findings from investigators. The National Transportation Safety Board blamed systemic FAA failures and found the crash was preventable, with concerns including overreliance on visual separation and longstanding risks in the airspace around Reagan National.

PHOENIX – The Tush Push witch hunt that made last year’s NFL annual meeting about terse exchanges among NFL royalty, showed how duplicitous the NFL office can be when it wants, and had multiple NFL people admit that if you can’t beat ‘em, get them banned, is not a thing at this year’s meeting.

This year’s NFL owners meetings began here on Sunday and the Tush Push is not on the agenda, won’t be debated and is not on anybody´s lips, and that includes Philadelphia Eagles coach Nick Sirianni.

Sirianni, who privately feels a strong connection to the play, is publicly being guarded about predicting the play is clear of renewed future scrutiny.

“I don’t know, you take one step at a time,” Sirianni said Monday morning. “It’s not something I have to think about right now. So, I guess I don’t really have a lot of thoughts on that. We’ll play by the rules of whatever we need to be able to do in every aspect.”

So the league is in quite a different place than it was one year ago when the Green Bay Packers proposed the play be banned, then the NFL office surreptitiously worked to make that happen, and practically every team in the NFC that knew if had to defend against the play on the field used its off-the-field vote to ban the Eagles’ signature play.

But this year, well, nothing. The Tush Push lives and perhaps the debate about the play is over. 

“I don’t know that it’s the end of the debate, because I think there’s still people that are concerned with the whole pushing element,” NFL Competition Committee co-Chairman Rich McKay said. “But I would say to you that, just like last year I told you – there was no Competition Committee proposal last year on the Tush Push, there was no proposal the year before on that.

“And over the years, we’ve now seen that the Tush Push is going down. The percentage of, or I should say the number of plays it’s being used on, is going down. The success rate on the traditional sneak is above the Tush Push success rate. So, I just think there’s less talk about it within the football community, and there was no proposal on the table to put anything in this year to deal with that.”

This, of course, is one explanation why the Tush Push isn’t a big deal this year. But it’s a snapshot from an instamatic (look it up, Gen Z) rather than a portrait.

And to fill in the extra pixels, one must understand that while it is true the Competition Committee made no proposal on the play last year, McKay was against it and the committee ultimately favored banning the play. 

League officials all the way on up to perhaps even commissioner Roger Goodell preferred that the Tush Push be banned. Goodell consistently mentioned his health and safety concerns regarding the play despite there being no health and safety data to present as evidence.

There are another couple of reasons the Tush Push lives on. 

Sean McDermott is gone as the coach of the Buffalo Bills and he – and his team by extension – were an ardent opponent of the Tush Push last year. The Bills were one of only two AFC teams that voted to effectively ban the Tush Push – and then used the Tush Push in their offensive repertoire during the season.

The Green Bay Packers are still around. But club president Mark Murphy, who spearheaded that team’s effort to get the Tush Push banned, retired. So another net-plus for the Tush Push.

We should recall that about half the NFL was prepared to vote in favor of banning the Tush Push at last year’s annual meeting. But that didn’t reach the three-fourth plateau the measure needed.

So the NFL, whipping votes beforehand, decided to avoid defeat by never taking the vote. The vote was tabled during those meetings at the end of March and the issue was pushed to another league meeting in May. 

In past years, pushing issues to the next meeting had been a tool the NFL used to win the day because the May meeting allowed league personnel to lobby owners in favor of their measures, knowing coaches and general managers would not attend that next meeting.

The proposal in May still fell two votes short, 22-10 in favor of a ban. Only one NFC team, aside from the Eagles, voted to keep the play:

The Detroit Lions.

While the initial proposal from the Packers focused on player safety, McKay later admitted that the discussion in the room in Palm Beach ventured away from player safety into aesthetics.

It’s worth noting the Eagles were not as successful with the play last season. In their 2024 Super Bowl season, the Eagles converted over 81 percent of the time on the Tush Push. That percentage sank to 63.6 percent in 2025.

Suddenly, all those NFC teams that hated the play last spring because it was such a huge headache in 2024 don’t feel quite so motivated to get rid of it now.