WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump on Sunday broke his silence on the nationwide ground stop that snarled airline travel this weekend, using the incident to push Congress on money to fully upgrade America’s air traffic control system.
The Republican president has been conspicuously quiet on the ground stop since it began Friday afternoon, instead issuing statements on social media about completely different topics as frustrated passengers were left stranded at airports and his government scrambled with airlines to restore normal travel.
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Trump said in a new post on his social media platform that his administration has begun upgrading that system, but that the task should not be done in “drips and drabs.” The Republican-controlled Congress approved $12.5 billion for the Federal Aviation Administration as part of the party’s sweeping tax cut package last year, but Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has repeatedly characterized that funding as an down payment on a broader overhaul of the aging system.
“If Congress approves the desperately needed money for Air Traffic Control, we can get it built quickly and efficiently,” Trump wrote on social media Sunday. “It will be the BEST SYSTEM anywhere in the World. Much of our current air control system is 50 years old – RIDICULOUS!”
In another post, he complained about how his Democratic predecessor had maintained the FAA and the air traffic control system, accusing Joe Biden’s administration of making an “old and broken system worse than when they began.”
Biden signed a massive infrastructure bill into law in the first year of his presidency, which set aside $25 billion for the FAA to improve airports and its traffic control towers, to redevelop airport terminals, to “upgrade the foundation” of the air traffic control system, according to the FAA.
Duffy was the administration’s public face on the ground stop across the Sunday news shows, pressing Congress for billions of dollars for upgrades to the air traffic control infrastructure.
“I can’t apologize for what was passed on to us. And I can’t blame Republicans or Democrats, because it’s all of them. It goes back, 20, 25, 30 years of a lack of investment,” he told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
READ MORE: Thousands of flights canceled as airlines work to recover from nationwide ground stop
In a post on the social media platform X, Duffy said contractor L3Harris Technologies Inc. had secured two routers from FAA facilities in Texas and Arkansas and was conducting “deep diagnostics” on the equipment. He has said the problem began when L3Harris was replacing a section of old copper wire with new fiber wire, somehow causing the system to overload.
After the wire was replaced at the site in El Dorado, Ark., and the router was turned on, a problem then cropped up at a facility in Amarillo, Texas, cascading into the ground stop. “We didn’t think that should or would happen, he told ABC’s “This Week.”
As for the traveling public, he told CBS’ “Face the Nation” that “we have some delays in the airspace right now,” but looking to the end of the day and into Monday, “we should be running at full capacity.”
In a ground stop, airplanes and crews are taken out of position, he said, “so it takes a little bit of time for the airliners to get back … at full capacity and operation but we’re well on our way.”
