Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy refused Sunday to apologize for the failures that led to the longest nationwide ground stop of American air traffic since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack and instead blamed previous administrations for not investing in the nation’s aging air traffic control system.
“It happened on my watch,” Duffy said of the 4½-hour halt to flights across the country on Friday, which led to the cancellation of 12,000 commercial and private flights that day and thousands of others over the weekend.
“But we have to be clear: I am moving at an incredible speed that no one has done at the FAA or in decades,” Duffy continued in an interview with “Meet the Press” on NBC. “I can’t apologize for what was passed off to us.”
Duffy’s remarks came during a blitz of appearances on news shows Sunday, two days after the failure of a communications router at a remote Federal Aviation Administration facility in Arkansas overwhelmed air traffic control systems. It was only the third time the FAA had ever ordered a nationwide ground stop.
Duffy on Sunday repeatedly maintained that the nation’s aviation infrastructure was secure and that operations should be back to normal by Monday at the latest. Yet he reiterated his calls for Congress to allocate more than $50 billion in emergency funding for needed upgrades to the U.S. air traffic control system that he said had been ignored for years.
“I can’t blame Republicans or Democrats, because it’s all of them,” he said. “It goes back 20, 25, 30 years of a lack of investment.”
President Donald Trump, in his first public comments on the subject since Friday’s ground stop, used the travel chaos to place blame specifically on the Biden administration, and to call on Congress to approve more money to upgrade the United States’ air traffic control system.
“Everything they touched turned bad,” he said Sunday in a Truth Social post. “Big money spent unwisely, making an old and broken system worse than when they began.” (Asked Sunday about the president’s earlier silence during the ground stop, Duffy described Trump as “fully engaged.”)
Duffy is facing criticism from some Democratic lawmakers over the funding request. In a letter sent to lawmakers Thursday, before the ground stop, Duffy requested $30 billion, a figure similar to a request last year to fund the Brand New Air Traffic Control System. To start, he got $12.5 billion in summer 2025.
Asked Saturday about the apparently increased request, Duffy said in a news briefing that “what I’m trying to do is get a number that I think the Congress will give me,” and that a full, itemized request would be detailed Monday.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, the top Democrat on the Senate Commerce subcommittee on aviation, criticized Duffy’s comments. “Apparently, there’s always been money for vanity projects. But none to fix our air traffic control system?” she wrote on X.
Reps. Rick Larsen of Washington state and André Carson of Indiana, Democrats who sit on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said Congress had already approved $12.5 billion for upgrades but the administration had spent only $1 billion. “Explain to Congress, again, why they need more money?” they said in a joint statement.
“This is not a Congress money problem,” Rep. Jim Himes (D-Connecticut) said Sunday on “Face the Nation” on CBS. “This is not immediately a spending problem; it’s a prioritization problem.”
Duffy defended his request on “Fox News Sunday,” saying that already approved funding “is all accounted for” and will be deployed by the end of 2028 but that he needs more money for a full overhaul.
Federal officials have said Friday’s disruption was triggered as an FAA contractor, L3Harris Technologies, was working to replace a copper line with newer fiber optic cable in El Dorado, Arkansas. While that work was being done, a router at the facility began broadcasting reams of data to the system that allows controllers to talk with planes cruising at high altitudes and quickly overwhelmed it.
“When we turned that router on,” Duffy told “This Week” on ABC, “we saw that in Amarillo, Texas, a system we had replaced about three weeks earlier started to flood our system as well. So we’re looking at those issues and trying to find the root cause of what happened.”
Authorities have painted the failure as an isolated incident and said there is no evidence that it was the result of a cyberattack or sabotage, though FAA investigators and the FBI continue to examine the routers suspected as the source of the problem.
L3Harris said in a statement Saturday that it was cooperating with that review and that it takes the ground stop’s “impact on travelers, airlines and air traffic operations seriously.”
The company, a major defense contractor and tech services provider, has been overseeing the replacement of outdated copper wires with fiber replacements at many key facilities — a project aviation experts have identified as essential to ensuring airspace safety. The firm has said an estimated 70 percent of the work had been successfully completed.
Some aviation experts have questioned why the replacement work that prompted the ground halt was being done on a Friday afternoon, one of the busiest travel periods of the week.
“We felt comfortable doing it in the middle of the day because it’s been done thousands of times,” Duffy told “Face the Nation.” “We’ve never had this situation. We’re going to have to reevaluate now when we do this work.”
Asked Sunday whether the Transportation Department should consider cutting ties with L3Harris, Duffy told NBC he can’t and blamed government contracts awarded to the firm years ago.
“I want to get away from L3Harris and get a new one, but they own the network,” Duffy said. “I can’t cancel the network that they own and I operate on.”
Duffy has argued his department’s reliance on the contractor could be lessened if Congress granted his request for $50 billion in funding.
“I’m doing all I can to keep people safe,” he said on “State of the Union” on CNN. “But I’m also telling you, if you don’t give us the resources we can’t complete the job.”
Olivia George, Taz Ali and Miriam Waldvogel contributed to this report.
The post Duffy blames Congress, prior administrations for air travel halt, chaos appeared first on Washington Post.
