Trump admin blames nationwide ground stop on outdated systems, Congress

After thousands of planes were grounded across the country Friday for about five and a half hours, White House officials quickly blamed aging infrastructure and Congress for not providing more funding for upgrades.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin held the press conference Friday night after a “telecommunications outage” caused the Federal Aviation Administration to issue a ground stop for all commercial aircraft from about 12:50 p.m. to 5:15 p.m. PST.

Duffy explained that at around 3:36 p.m. EST the FAA began having “inconsistency in the data from the radars and our communication with airplanes.” At the time, there were about 3,500 planes in the air, all of which were able to land safely, Duffy said.

“So what happened? What we have is an incredibly old air traffic control system,” Duffy said. “Our routers actually got overloaded with data … and because of that, we shut the system down.”

The incident led to thousands of flight cancellations and delays. According to FlightAware.com, a total of 7,736 flights within, into, or out of the U.S. were canceled Friday. While not every cancellation can be attributed to the outage, the figure represents a significant jump from previous days — combined, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday cancellations totaled 1,242.

FlightAware already shows more than 4,000 cancellations in the U.S. for Saturday.

In Long Beach, at least nine flights were canceled, including three Saturday morning, according to the airport’s website.

Duffy said that it will “take us some time” to get back to capacity, but added that he does not expect disruption of forthcoming holiday travel beginning later next week.

Mullins and Duffy said Trump declared the air traffic control failures a national emergency. The president, who famously posts announcements — both major and minor — to his social media, has not mentioned the ground stop once. In fact, he has only posted to Truth Social three times since the incident:

• At 2:58 p.m. PST to announce he is working with Congress on the bipartisan Motion Picture, Television, and Entertainment Revitalization Act.

• At 2:58 p.m. PST to thank the U.S. Coast Guard and other first responders after they saved dozens of people when a tanker hit a riverboat in Louisiana.

• And at 6:54 a.m. PST this morning to denounce Gov. Gavin Newsom commuting the sentence of 548 California death row inmates, which was announced more than a week ago.

This is only the third time the FAA has issued a nationwide ground stop. The first was after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the other was on Jan. 11, 2023, when all air traffic was halted for about 90 minutes after a failure in a pilot-alert system.

“I just want to reiterate this: The public was never at danger through this process,” Mullin said of Friday’s incident. “There was never any lives at risk. There was no flights at risk. FAA was able to handle it. We did it out of an abundant [sic] of caution.”

Under questioning from reporters, Mullin said the incident "was not another 9/11," referring to the 2001 terrorist attacks that killed more than 3,000 people, destroyed the World Trade Center and significantly damaged the Pentagon.

Duffy said that Friday’s outage had no connection to Microsoft’s outages the day before. He also said it was “impossible” that Friday's incident could be linked to the FAA’s deployment of its Strategic Management of Airspace, Routing and Trajectories — or SMART — AI tool Thursday.

SMART, which cost the Transportation Department $875 million, is meant to analyze real-time flight and weather data to recommend flight path changes to air traffic controllers.

“This is completely disconnected, and I love that some people have said this would be the root cause. By the way, if it was, I’ll tell you that, but this is not even plugged in,” Duffy said. “So, there’s no possible way SMART would have impacted what happened today.”

While Mullin said he has not 100% ruled out a cyberattack, he did say that there was no evidence thus far that one occurred. He and Duffy maintained that the old analog system was to blame and lambasted Congress, both past and present, for not taking action sooner to fund critical repairs to FAA infrastructure.

“This is a national security risk,” Mullin said. “This is what happens when Congress kicks the can down the road.”

For the past two years, Republicans have controlled both houses of Congress as they did during the first two years of the first Trump presidency. Democrats held both houses from 2021 to 2023.

While funding for FAA upgrades may not have met the secretaries’ expectations, Congress has allocated billions of dollars to these projects over the past five years.

Biden’s 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act allocated $5 billion to “reduce our backlog of needed maintenance, updates, upgrades and replacement of critical buildings and equipment needed to operate our nation’s airspace safely.”

Another $20 billion was allocated to airport infrastructure and terminal improvements.

The FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024 included more than $17 billion for “facilities and equipment” from 2024 to 2028.

Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” included $12.5 billion to “overhaul America’s outdated and failing air traffic control systems,” as well as fund workforce recruitment, training and retention efforts for air traffic controllers.

Despite these investments, in September, Duffy asked Congress for $30 billion for FAA infrastructure modernization. The request came after another telecommunications failure that halted flights across the northeast. During Friday’s press conference, Duffy upped his ask to $50 billion.

“We can play politics, by the way,” Duffy said. “Play politics all you want on all kinds of issues. That’s great, there’s a lot of issues to play politics on. This is not one of those issues.”

Duffy stressed that Trump and his administration is dedicated to keeping air travel safe, claiming that he has talked about the issue at “100 plus” press conferences.

On Jan. 29, 2025, a military helicopter collided with an American Eagle flight at the Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C. killing 67 people. The incident was the first fatal commercial crash in the U.S. since 2009, according to CNN. Since the start of the Trump administration, there have been 260 aviation incidents that have resulted in the death of 506 people, according to the Revolving Door Project.

In February 2025, DOGE laid off about 400 FAA personnel. At the time, the administration said no one with a “critical safety” position was fired, according to the Associated Press. Some of the jobs, however, supported safety inspectors and airport operations, according to their union and former employees.

Duffy's message during the press conference seemed to contradict itself. At one point, he stated the U.S. has the “safest airspace in the world, bar none,” but then added that he “can't anticipate every catastrophic failure” and that the country “will have more [failures] … unless the American people and the Congress tell us to build, and I can't wait for that.”