Yesterday, we saw the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issue a nationwide ground stop, which wasn’t fully lifted for over four hours. This represents the single biggest grounding of flights in the United States since 9/11, so the scale of whatever happened is pretty wild.
At around 8PM last night, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin held a press conference to update people on the state of things. I can’t help but cover this, because it felt like something between an SNL skit and a shakedown, and they couldn’t even keep their story straight… all while praising themselves for doing an unprecedented job!
Duffy & Mullin praise themselves, demand $50 billion
Below you can find the press conference last night regarding the FAA shutdown, which happened around the time that the ground stop was lifted. First Mullin and Duffy spoke for around 10 minutes, and then they took questions for around 20 minutes.
The gist of the story is that they claim there were no signs of this being a cyber attack, and basically they broadly blame the outdated air traffic control system.
Mullin didn’t speak for long, and his primary comment was this:
“This is what the leadership of President Trump looks like, by the organization and team he has put together. We are built to handle crises like this, and that’s exactly what we’re doing. We’re moving at an unprecedented pace, as a whole of government, to make sure we’re doing the public justice by making sure everyone is safe, which everyone is.”
Isn’t this a little self-congratulatory, especially while he’s also claiming that they don’t fully know the cause here? Just objectively, the pace was indeed unprecedented… it was the longest ground stop since 9/11!
Then you have Duffy speak, and this basically just turned into a demand for Congress to give him $50 billion to modernize our aviation infrastructure, while not actually being honest about the state of things:
“The President, for the last year, has been asking Congress to fully fund a full build of a new air traffic control system.”
That’s just not accurate at all. In July 2025, Congress authorized $12.5 billion for modernizing air traffic control, which Duffy described as a “down payment.” Since then, the size of the request kept changing, and the formal ask only went to Congress this week, when Duffy asked lawmakers for $30.1 billion for air traffic control and airport upgrades.
So it’s a bit rich to claim that Congress has been uncooperative over the past year, especially when you consider Republicans have controlled the White House, House, and Senate.
He then tried to explain what happened, which just feels like a complete deflection to me, as it’s about an overall need to modernize ATC, rather than what actually went wrong here:
“What happened is that our switches, actually got overloaded with data, and they went down… I shouldn’t say they went down… they started to give us inconsistency with the data from those routers, and because of that, we shut the system down. Now, I have already replaced some of those switches with President Trump, and our new IP switches did not go down. It’s the old hardware that went down, and I think the question for the American people is, ‘do you want your Congress to fund this?'”
“I think the Congress at a point looked at the history of the FAA, and said ‘we don’t trust you.’ Well with President Trump, and what we’ve done, I think they do trust, because what we’ve done with that first tranche of money.”
“I’ve asked the President to ask for $30 billion. I want $50 billion.”
Duffy & Mullin can’t keep same narrative about cause
Obviously our air traffic control technology is really outdated and does need updating, there are no two ways about it. However, what was different yesterday, and caused an outage to this scale?
You can see I quoted Duffy above as saying that he claimed that “what happened is that our switches, actually got overloaded with data,” and that this caused the shutdown. I’m not a tech expert, but how exactly does that happen and cause the systems nationwide to have issues? At most, you’d assume it would be regionalized, no?
So this is where the questions from reporters come in handy. Mullin seemingly threw Duffy under the bus, saying:
“What it appears to be right now is that as Secretary Duffy and FAA was going in and putting patches in the system, they were putting new equipment, and new technology, and that new equipment and new technology was overwhelming the older system.”
Duffy was then asked what was different yesterday, given that the system had been in place for years. As you’d expect, there was no good answer.
Initially Duffy made it sound like they knew exactly what happened, but then he backtracked on that, and said “we’re still working on the details of what went wrong, I’ll be happy to give you more information, but I don’t want to give you the wrong information.”
I also appreciate how someone actually asked the question about this being blamed on Congress, given that the Republicans have had full control for the past two years. As you’d expect, Duffy’s response was first to ask what network the person was from.
What’s amazing to me is the overall tone of the press conference. They feel bad for themselves, with Duffy pointing out that he hopes he doesn’t have to give another press conference after 8PM. You know what’s not mentioned once, though? Thanking travelers for their patience throughout all of this, or apologizing to the public for the disruption. Not once.
I’m 100% in support of funding and modernizing air traffic control. But when you have the biggest outage you’ve had in over 25 years, it seems a bit rich to say “give us $50 billion” and “we’re doing an unprecedented job.” And again, if Mullin is to be believed, the system updates that were put in place were to blame.
Bottom line
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin held a press conference last night about the nationwide ground stop, and it just struck me as being incredibly tone deaf and off base.
You had Mullin congratulating the Trump administration for their “unprecedented” response, you had Duffy claiming the outage was due to switches getting overloaded with data, and you had had Mullin then claim this happened because of the system updates that Duffy put in place. Oh, and the focus was also on demanding that Congress give them $50 billion, suggesting they’ve been dragging their feet for the past year.
There was zero tone of accountability or apology. There was no “thanks to everyone traveling for their patience,” but instead, self-pity for the fact that they had to be there after 8PM on a Friday, when they’d probably rather be at home… or a bar, maybe.
What do you make of this press conference?
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