Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg pushed back on suggestions that the Biden administration failed to do enough to upgrade the system and prevent Friday’s nationwide FAA ground stop.
Amid the FAA’s nationwide ground stop Friday evening, Buttigieg spoke with press, where he was confronted with comments from the Trump administration, suggesting he and his former boss may’ve been to blame for today’s crisis. Buttigieg disagreed with this sentiment, defending that during his tenure as transportation secretary they “did a lot to upgrade the system.”
“When we had an outage, I didn’t stand there complaining about the Trump administration,” he said. “We got to work… I’m certain that that’s what career officials and the career day-to-day employees at FAA and USDOT are doing. This should not be about politics.”
Buttigieg demanded clearer “answers” into what caused Friday’s telecommunications and computer system outage, which ultimately brought air traffic to a halt across the United States.
.@PeteButtigieg: “We did a lot to upgrade the system. When we had an outage, I didn’t stand there complaining about the Trump administration. We got to work… I’m certain that that’s what career officials…at FAA and USDOT are doing. This should not be about politics.” pic.twitter.com/RxD0dcD7a6
— CSPAN (@cspan) November 14, 2026
Current Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy attributed the ground stop, which was initially said to simply be caused by a “telecommunication outage,” to old technology during the Friday evening briefing.
“We have old switches, old routers. We use 1980s little copper lines,” Duffy told the press. “It’s an old system that went down, and went down everywhere. It got overloaded.”
Duffy also claimed that none of the new equipment put in by the Trump administration “went down,” adding, “This is all the old legacy equipment that has existed forever.”
“Now, if you look to the past administrations going back 25 years, $15 billion has been given to the FAA to fix this air traffic control system,” he said elsewhere in his briefing. “And guess what? Barely anything was done.”
Duffy wasn’t the only one speaking out against past administrations Friday, as TKO CEO Ari Emanuel went viral on X for slamming Buttigieg during the air traffic pause.
“No one’s hands are clean here,” Emanuel wrote on X, which now has over 2 million views. “However, Mr. Secretary Buttigieg, you had four years in the job and infrastructure money, yet made zero progress modernizing the FAA. You left a failing system in place. THANKS!”
The post Pete Buttigieg Pushes Back at Suggestion He’s Responsible for FAA’s Ground Stop: ‘Did a Lot to Upgrade the System’ appeared first on TheWrap.
