President Trump is blaming the Biden administration for Friday’s nationwide flight-grounding crisis while calling for billions of dollars to rebuild the country’s aging air-traffic-control system.
“The Biden Administration was an FAA disaster. Everything they touched turned bad,” Trump wrote Sunday on Truth Social.
“Big money spent unwisely, making an old and broken system worse than when they began.”
The remarks marked Trump’s first public response to the massive breakdown, which stranded more than 1.5 million passengers nationwide and triggered flight cancellations that continued through the weekend.
Minutes later, the president returned to the issue, backing his transportation secretary’s call for a multibillion-dollar investment in the nation’s air-traffic network.
“If Congress approves the desperately needed money for Air Traffic Control, we can get it built quickly and efficiently,” Trump 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.”
Trump’s proposal echoed Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s comments Friday night, when he urged Congress to provide $50 billion for an overhaul. The request is higher than the $30 billion Duffy sought in September and would be added to the $12.5 billion Congress allocated to the FAA through last year’s Big Beautiful Bill.
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“What we have is an incredibly old air-traffic-control system,” Duffy said Friday, warning that “you will have more of these” massive and potentially dangerous disruptions without a comprehensive upgrade.
The FAA halted all aircraft departures nationwide late Friday afternoon. The stoppage lasted more than four hours, making it the longest nationwide ground stop since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Follow the latest developments in the FAA’s nationwide ground stop:
FlightAware recorded 9,938 cancellations Friday and more than 7,000 additional cancellations Saturday.
Duffy said Saturday that the disruption began as contractor L3Harris worked to upgrade an outdated telecommunications system at a remote facility. The upgrade failed after routers became overwhelmed by data, causing the system to shut down, he said.
FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford said the outage affected as many as 17 of the nation’s 22 air-route traffic-control centers, although none lost full functionality. Investigators had found “zero evidence of anything nefarious,” he said.
The last nationwide halt to all departures occurred in January 2023, during President Joe Biden’s administration, after contract workers accidentally deleted files from a system responsible for sending safety notices to pilots.
