Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy refused Sunday to apologize for Friday’s nationwide ground shutdown that stranded hundreds of thousands of travelers across the country following a router glitch that derailed air traffic control communications.
Instead, the secretary blamed his predecessors and previous presidential administrations who he said had not done enough to modernize the nation’s air traffic control system.
“This has happened on my watch, but we have to be clear: I’m moving at an incredible speed that no one has at the FAA or in decades, and I’m proud of the work that we’re doing, the attention that we’re bringing to this issue,” Duffy told NBC News’ “Meet the Press.” “But I can’t apologize for what was conveyed to us, and I can’t blame the Republicans or the Democrats because it’s all of them.”
The secretary of state also blamed “30 years of lack of investment” from the country’s previous leaders.
“Why they didn’t do it, I don’t know, but they gave me a system that needs to be fixed, and President (Donald) Trump and I are going to fix it,” he added.
His remarks came less than two days after the Federal Aviation Administration issued a nationwide shutdown that lasted several hours, leading to thousands of flight cancellations starting Friday and continuing through the weekend.
FAA contractor L3Harris was working to replace a copper line with a fiber optic line at a remote site when the work led to a router overwhelming the FAA’s national telecommunications network, Duffy said Saturday.
Duffy also said Sunday on “Meet the Press” that he expects airports and airlines to resume normal operations by the end of the day or early Monday morning.
“By the end of the day, through tomorrow, I think we will be back to normal,” he said, adding that Friday’s ground stop led to planes and crews being “out of position.”
“It’s taking a while for airlines to re-choreograph all of their crews and planes. We’ll start to see things improve today, but I’m looking back to normal tomorrow,” Duffy said.
The secretary also demurred when asked if he could guarantee that a similar travel disruption would not occur in the future.
“We first need to understand what happened. Was it a faulty installation of L3Harris doing its job for us? Was it a fault of the router itself? We need to do that investigation and make sure we take precautions. We don’t want to close the airspace,” Duffy told “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker.
“We’re going to figure out what the root cause was and then move forward with changing the way we do business at the FAA,” he added.
Duffy also reiterated a call he made all weekend for more funding from Congress to modernize the nation’s air traffic control system, which has long been outdated and beset with problems.
“The president, since he took office, has pushed for airspace modernization. Even before I was sworn in, he brought this up,” the secretary said, pointing to the $12.5 billion allocated for air traffic control improvements in a Republican-backed spending bill last year.
“Congress has been very specific about how I spend this money. I have a certain allocation for radars, a certain allocation for radios, a certain allocation for building new infrastructure for my air traffic controller centers. They haven’t given me money for telecommunications. They haven’t given me money for new software,” Duffy said.
“I return to Congress and the American people to explain all the great work we are doing now,” he continued. “We’re going to spend this $12.5 billion by the end of 2028, but I need the rest of the money for software and a new telecommunications architecture that will be much more resilient. I need this money to be able to start this construction.”
On Saturday, NBC News reported that on Thursday, just a day before the ground stop, Duffy and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought sent a letter to members of Congress asking lawmakers for $30.1 billion to modernize America’s aging airports and air traffic control system.
They wrote: “This investment is critical to completing the modernization of our national airspace – providing resilient telecommunications infrastructure for air traffic controllers, modern hardware and software, state-of-the-art control towers and world-class airport infrastructure. These investments will address current challenges, including weather-related delays, while preparing the national airspace system for emerging demands, such as the safe integration of air traffic with the space industry growing.”
On Sunday, Duffy urged Congress to “just do it.”
“I’m doing everything I can to keep people safe,” he said. “But I also tell you, if you don’t give us the resources, we won’t be able to finish the job. And this is – of all the partisanship – this is the most bipartisan thing in all of Washington. Democrats, Republicans, the president, everyone agrees on this. Let’s do it.”
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