President Donald Trump has blamed former secretary of transportation Pete Buttigieg for the air traffic chaos engulfing one of the country’s busiest airports.
The president’s finger-pointing comes after Newark Liberty International Airport, the nation’s 12th-busiest, suffered 84 cancellations and 26 delays before noon Wednesday, according to FlightAware.
From last week, a mix of tech issues and a lack of staffing has triggered hundreds of flight disruptions. And as the incumbent Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy takes action “immediately,” to resolve the problem, Trump has taken to his keyboard, hit the “caps lock” key and started blaming everyone but his own administration.
“Air Traffic problems caused by the incompetent Biden Administration, as headed by, in this case, a total novice and political hack, Pete B. I WILL FIX IT!!!” he said, blaming the former president and his transport chief in one fell swoop.
Early in Trump’s second term, he had to deal with a raft of problems at airports after Elon Musk’s cost-cutting force DOGE fired employees left, right and center, including hundreds at the Federal Aviation Administration. The cull came just weeks after a mid-air crash over Washington, D.C. that killed 67 in late January.
A crack squad of experts from Musk’s SpaceX was set to visit the FAA to suggest improvements to the U.S. air traffic control system after that accident, but it continued to falter last week due to a “fried piece of copper wire,” according to the New York Post.
The system that processes radar data for the Newark controllers was affected, before totally failing. For more than 90 seconds, planes were flying completely blind.
A Newark air traffic controller in the room during the outage told CNN: “It was just by the grace of God that there wasn‘t another plane in its way. We all expected what happened in D.C. to happen here.”
The incident was so jarring that several controllers even had to take “trauma leave.”
Now, Duffy and the FAA are aiming to avoid another catastrophe by adding three new communications connections, installing a backup system, and replacing copper wire with fibre optic cables.
The FAA said it has also increased Newark’s inadequate air traffic control staffing. There are now 22 fully certified staffers.
An air traffic controller told MSNBC last week that the airport is “not a safe situation right now for the flying public.” They urged travelers to “avoid Newark at all costs.”
While Trump blames Buttigieg, it is Duffy, 53, who has been feeling the heat on the Newark situation. He was the subject of mass outrage over the weekend after he shared a photo of himself smiling with a plate of tacos while hordes of travelers were stranded in New Jersey and elsewhere.
Buttigieg, too, faced his own slew of crises when he was head of the department. During the festive period in late 2022 all air traffic in the United States was grounded for the first time since the Sept. 11 attacks. This was due to a system failure.
This saga came just weeks after Southwest Airlines canceled nearly 17,000 flights during the busy holiday travel season due to an outdated personnel management system.
In Feb. 2023, a train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, spilling more than 1 million gallons of toxic chemicals into the surrounding environment.
Buttigieg was criticized for not visiting the site quickly enough. Trump re-entered public consciousness when he visited the area and bought McDonald’s meals for emergency services.
Earlier this year a probe was launched into Boeing after a door plug blew off one of its Alaska Airlines planes. The FAA grounded 171 planes that had the same door plug installed and Buttigieg said the government would not be rushed into clearing them—despite hundreds of flight cancellations.
Buttigieg left office at the end of Joe Biden’s presidency on January 20, 2025.
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