Duffy Floats $50 Billion Price Tag For Congress To Prevent Repeat Paralysis Of US Air Travel

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy doubled-down during a Saturday press conference on his request for Congress to give his department $50 billion to upgrade America’s air traffic control systems.

“If we don’t start to switch out our systems, how long are we going to wait? I think this is a sign for to lean in. This is bipartisan,” Duffy told reporters. Duffy held the briefing to address the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) lifting a Friday order to halt all departing flights across the U.S. in response to a critical outage.

Neither the FAA nor multiple members of Congress immediately responded to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment. The U.S. Department of Transportation referred the DCNF to Duffy’s latest briefing.

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Duffy also said the outage occurred after a contractor in one of the FAA’s “remote” locations was making a “routine” switch from copper to fiber wires.

“So, what we’re working to determine was whether we had incompetence — meaning was it user error or install error from L3Harris — or did they install a faulty router? We haven’t determined what the fault was,” Duffy said.

Duffy also claimed Congress gave his department a “partial payment” for upgrading the FAA’s air traffic control system.

“They gave me $12.5 billion. And one of the problems that we had was quite sure that we would spend the money well and we’d build with the money,” Duffy said. “And that’s the history of the FAA that goes back from Republicans and Democrats. They haven’t spent the money well. So, they want to make sure we’re going to spend and spend it well. And we have.”

In light of that challenge, Duffy announced his department replaced 69% of the copper wires with “high-speed” fiber, deployed “Surface Awareness Initiative” technology at 143 control towers,modernized 469 radio sites, replaced paper flight strips with electric ones at 25 towers, set up 224 IP voice switch systems at towers, added 18 new tower simulator systems, and installed nine SMR4 surface movement radars.

During a Friday night press conference at the White House with Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin — who denied a cyberattack was the root cause of the outage — Duffy upped his funding request to Congress. To prevent a repeat outage from triggering a nationwide ground stop in the future, he claimed, would cost $50 billion, up from $30 billion.

Duffy drew backlash from both parties over his request.

Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul called for him to resign Saturday morning.

“America’s airspace ground to a halt yesterday, leaving thousands of flights canceled and travelers stranded across the country,” Hochul wrote on X. “More than 3,500 planes were already in the air as radar and communications systems faltered. We’re fortunate no lives were lost.”

“From chronic air traffic controller shortages to repeated communications breakdowns, serious lapses in our aviation system have become a pattern on Sean Duffy’s watch,” she continued. “With millions of Americans preparing to travel for the holidays, families deserve answers and confidence in the safety of our skies. Congress must launch a full investigation to determine what went wrong and ensure it never happens again.”

Former Republican Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene likewise took to X on Friday, describing Duffy’s request as a “shakedown.”

“ is demanding $50 billion immediately to fix systems so that we can all safely fly,” Greene wrote. “I mean it doesn’t matter to any of them that the US Congress and every administration has spent like $15 trillion on foreign wars over the past 25 years but yeah you guys gotta fork over 50 billion more dollars so they can finally fix something in America.”

Greene, who resigned her seat in January 2026, also took a swipe at Mullin.

“Oh, and by the way, according to Markwayne Mullins , this is a national security risk so Congress needs to handover the money is what he is saying,” she continued. “They are claiming it’s not a cyber attack, even though there’s been plenty of cyber attacks happening like freezers in Europe, blood banks, Microsoft literally yesterday and more, but they are claiming this is not a cyber attack just ‘old out of date systems’ that the American people have to fork over more fucking money so that we can actually be safe to fly on an airplane.”

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