Make New York Post a Preferred Source President Trump is blaming the Biden administration for Friday’s nationwide flight-grounding debacle, while urging billions of dollars be spent on rebuilding the country’s air-traffic-control system.
“The Biden Administration was an FAA disaster. Everything they touched turned bad,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday.
“Big money spent unwisely, making an old and broken system worse than when they began.”
The posts were the president’s first public comments on the monumental meltdown, which stranded more than 1.5 million travelers across the nation and canceled flights well into the weekend.
Minutes later, Trump posted again, this time taking up his transportation secretary’s demand for billions of dollars to improve the system.
“If Congress approves the desperately needed money for Air Traffic Control, we can get it built quickly and efficiently,” the president wrote. “Much of our current air control system is 50 years old – RIDICULOUS! We have already started the work, but it should be done all at once, not in drips and drabs.”
The pitch matched what Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Friday night, when he asked Congress for $50.billion. That’s up from the $30 billion he wanted in September and would come on top of the $12.5 billion lawmakers gave the FAA in last year’s Big Beautiful Bill.
“What he have is an incredibly old air-traffic-control system,” Duffy said Friday, warning, “You will have more of these” massive and potentially deadly disruptions without an overhaul.
The FAA stopped airplane departures nationwide late Friday afternoon, with the halt lasting more than four hours — the longest since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
FlightAware clocked 9,938 cancellations Friday and more than 7,000 Saturday.
Duffy said Saturday that the trouble started while contractor L3Harris was upgrading an old telecommunications system at a remote site. Routers then overloaded with data, and the upgrade failed, shutting the system down, he said.
FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said as many as 17 of the country’s 22 air-route traffic-control centers were affected, though none went completely offline. He said investigators had found “zero evidence of anything nefarious.”
The last time every departure in the country was halted was in January 2023, under former President Biden, when contract workers accidentally deleted files from a system that sends safety alerts to pilots.
