A top Trump official’s daughter has inserted herself in Friday’s aviation meltdown.
Evita Duffy-Alonso, the 27-year-old daughter of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, chimed in on the rare nationwide ground stop that sent airports into chaos—by deflecting blame away from her father.
“It’s time for Congress to fund air traffic control!!” Evita wrote in an X post on Friday night.
“@SecDuffy has been sounding the alarm on this from DAY ONE. We spend billions of taxpayer dollars on things—especially abroad—that do not matter. Our leaders need to put AMERICA FIRST and prioritize the homeland ABOVE ALL ELSE!” she added.
On Friday, the Federal Aviation Administration abruptly announced that it had issued a nationwide ground stop at all airports due to “extraordinary circumstances” and “reasons of safety.”
“All departing traffic should remain ground stopped until further notice,” an air traffic control advisory read. “Inbound international flights will be managed on a case-by-case basis.”
The nationwide ground stop took effect at 3:54 p.m. Friday and was lifted roughly four hours later. Over 1.5 million passengers were scheduled to depart after the ground stop started, according to aviation data firm Cirium.
Passengers were left scrambling after a nationwide ground stop.
The Friday breakdown was only the second nationwide ground stop since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. A similar incident occurred in January 2023, when the FAA paused domestic departures for about 90 minutes over a system outage.
In a press conference, Duffy and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin blamed old air traffic control technology and overloaded routers. They made clear that the ground stop was not linked to a threat to the U.S. nor to this week’s widespread Microsoft outage.
Over 1.5 million passengers were scheduled to depart after the ground stop took effect.
Duffy was less than reassuring when asked whether Americans should expect the same scenario to happen again.
“Is this exact thing gonna happen again? I don’t—I don’t know that this exact scenario will happen, but I did have New York a couple months ago; I had Newark a year and a half ago,” he said, referring to earlier aviation crises.
Trump officials had little information to offer during a Friday press conference on the crisis.
Duffy, in a message later echoed by his daughter, demanded Congress fork over $50 billion.
“This is the greatest country—by the way, with the greatest president,” he said. “Let’s give the money to fix this very real problem.”
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