More than 1,600 cancellations and thousands of delays hit airlines Sunday, according to Flight Aware, while President Donald Trump broke his silence on the disruption to demand more funding from Congress and blame the Biden administration for the issues that caused the complete ground stop Friday.
“If Congress approves the desperately needed money for Air Traffic Control, we can get it built quickly and efficiently. It will be the BEST SYSTEM anywhere in the World,” Trump wrote Sunday on Truth Social. “Much of our current air control system is 50 years old - RIDICULOUS!”
The president added that his administration has “already started the work” but Congress must provide additional funding to allow the modernization efforts to happen all at once.
“The Biden Administration was an FAA disaster,” Trump wrote in a separate post to Truth Social on Sunday. “Everything they touched turned bad. Big money spent unwisely, making an old and broken system worse than when they began.”
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The president had not publicly addressed the ground stop, which was the second complete ground stop covering the entire U.S. airspace since the Sept. 11 attacks, until he posted Sunday. A pilot warning system failure prompted a 90-minute ground stop in 2023.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy told CBS’s “Face the Nation” that flights should return to “running at full capacity” by Monday.
Duffy took a more measured approach to assigning blame for the issues that led to Friday’s ground stop, arguing that a lack of decades of poor investment in modernizing the systems were at fault.
“I’m proud of the work we’re doing, the attention we’re bringing to this issue. But I can’t apologize for what was passed off to us,” Duffy said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “And I can’t blame Republicans or Democrats because it’s all of them.”
In a press conference on Friday evening, Duffy called for $50 billion to replace the Federal Aviation Administration’s aging telecommunications system. Air traffic controllers have been relying on aging copper wire and routing systems, but the Trump administration has pushed to overhaul this technology by replacing it with fiber optic networks and satellites.
Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill” also designated $12.5 billion to modernize the air traffic control system. The FAA has described that $12.5 billion as a “down payment” and said in December 2025 that $20 billion more is needed for the Brand New Air Traffic Control System, also known as BNATCS.
Duffy told CNN’s “State of the Union” the FAA still needs more money because the $12.5 billion is “very specific” and said there is “no money in that $12.5 billion that I can use for a new architecture for telecom.”
Some Democratic lawmakers have questioned Duffy’s push for additional funding, criticising the Trump administration’s focus on controversial construction projects like the Triumphal Arch near Arlington National Cemetery.
“You’ve literally controlled Congress for the past two years. And apparently, there’s always been money for vanity projects. But none to fix our air traffic control system?” Sen. Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, the top Democrat on the Senate Aviation Subcommittee wrote Friday on X. “Perhaps Trump should prioritize aviation safety over his pathetic Arch.”
Duffy announced over the weekend that the FAA is actively investigating how a contractor’s replacement of the copper wire may have caused the ground stop. Duffy explained that the maintenance caused the FAA’s network to be flooded with thousands of connection attempts every minute, which overloaded the system.
Duffy railed against the L3Harris, the telecommunications contractor, on Sunday as the FAA continues to investigate whether the issue can be attributed to technician error or faulty equipment.
“I want to get away from L3Harris and get to a new one, but they own the network, so I can’t cancel the network that they own and I operate on,” Duffy said on “Meet the Press.”
The transportation secretary said he is asking for “billions of dollars from Congress to build a brand new architecture of a network by the best companies in the world, including AT&T, Verizon, and Lumens” — adding that the companies are “ready to deploy tomorrow” but the FAA needs “the money to tell them to start.”
Duffy and other administration officials like Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin have repeatedly said that they do not believe the U.S. had been targeted by any sort of cyber attack and had not been linked to the global Microsoft outage last week.
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