As US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy faces the prospect of hours of congressional grilling over what precisely caused a massive outage of the country’s air traffic control system on November 13, 2026, he used a White House press conference to lay at least some of the blame on a Republican-led Congress he said had yet to provide the money needed to modernize the system.
“How many times does this have to happen before Congress gives the money to fix it?” Duffy asked.
By the time Duffy spoke, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had lifted a nationwide ground stop that halted most US departures for more than four hours. Duffy told reporters the agency needs $50 billion to overhaul the ATC system. Just that morning, before the first reports of trouble with the ATC system surfaced in Chicago, Duffy and White House budget director Russell Vought had asked lawmakers for $30.1 billion for air traffic control and airport upgrades.
Lawmakers approved $12.5 billion in July 2025 for ATC upgrades and controller hiring, including $1.9 billion to replace outdated en route centers. The Republican majority on the Senate Commerce Committee said Friday’s outage showed why the FAA should give those centers priority. Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington, the committee’s ranking Democrat, said the panel was looking into the telecommunications problems.
The request that morning included $10.1 billion for ATC modernization, $2 billion for control towers and $18 billion for airport projects. Of the airport money, $10 billion would go toward modernizing or replacing aging terminals. At the evening briefing, Duffy did not explain how the $50 billion figure related to the request he and Vought had sent lawmakers that morning.
What caused the ATC outage?
Aging routers on the FAA’s communications network became overloaded and began producing inconsistent data, Duffy said. That prompted the decision to halt departures. The communications problems affected all US Air Route Traffic Control Centers, the regional facilities that manage aircraft during the en route portion of a flight.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who appeared alongside Duffy, said new equipment and patches appeared to have overwhelmed parts of the older network. CBS News, citing multiple sources, reported that an update triggered a reboot and crash on the private network operated by L3Harris. FAA officials had yet to identify publicly which update or piece of equipment first failed.
Mullin said investigators had found no evidence of a cyberattack and saw no connection to the separate Microsoft outage that affected email and other services worldwide the day before. Duffy also said the FAA’s recently deployed SMART air traffic management tool, which uses artificial intelligence, played no role in causing the failure.
More than four hours on the ground
Ground stops began at Chicago O’Hare and Midway at 3:10 p.m. Eastern time. Shortly before 4 p.m., the FAA Command Center directed operators nationwide to hold departures until further notice. Aircraft already airborne continued to land or divert, and the FAA handled inbound international flights individually. Some departures also received clearance during the stop, including flights from San Francisco bound for Hawaii and Asia.
By 7:05 p.m., aviation analytics firm Cirium had identified 827 diversions. Of those flights, 670 returned to their departure airport and 157 landed at another airport. Duffy said about 3,500 aircraft were airborne when the stop began. By the time he briefed reporters, the number had fallen below 400.
The FAA reopened the airspace at 8:15 p.m. Eastern time, Duffy said. By 9 p.m., FlightAware had recorded more than 6,000 cancellations for the day. With aircraft and crews out of position, JetBlue canceled its remaining Friday flights except for Europe-bound departures from New York JFK and Boston. The airline warned passengers to expect more cancellations on Saturday.
It was the first nationwide ground stop since the January 2023 failure of the FAA system that distributes safety notices to pilots, and only the second since the September 11, 2001, attacks.
Duffy said he expected flight operations to recover in time for the Thanksgiving rush. Asked whether the same failure could happen again, he said he could give no guarantee.
The Department of Transportation has been asking Congress for more money since April. In September, Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas, the Republican who chairs the Senate aviation subcommittee, said he supported additional ATC funding but wanted to know how the FAA had allocated the money Congress had already approved.
US President Donald Trump has faced resistance from Senate Republicans on other priorities as well. Senate Majority Leader John Thune resisted Trump’s push to change Senate rules to pass a bill requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections.
If Congress leaves the ATC request unresolved this year, Duffy will have to make his case to Democrats, who won control of both the House and Senate in the November 3 midterm elections and take their majorities in January 2027.
Duffy cited bipartisan support for modernization in April, and Trump signaled after the election that he was willing to work with the incoming Congress.
“Well, we’re going to work with the Democrats to make sure things go well for our country,” Trump said.
Duffy, who cited bipartisan support for ATC modernization in April, made his appeal to both parties at Friday’s briefing.
“Give us the resources to build a state-of-the-art air traffic control system. Let’s not do a patchwork fix to a system that’s critical for every single family,” Duffy said. “It’s not red, it’s not blue, it’s not Democrat, it’s not Republican, it’s American. Give us the money to fix it.”