Trump breaks silence on nationwide ground stop, urges Congress to fund air traffic control overhaul

President Donald Trump on Sunday spoke publicly for the first time about the nationwide ground stop that began on Friday, urging Congress to approve funding quickly to fully upgrade America's 50-year-old air traffic control system.

Trump wants Congress to fund the overhaul in full

"If Congress approves the desperately needed money for Air Traffic Control, we can get it built quickly and efficiently," Trump wrote on social media on Sunday. "It will be the BEST SYSTEM anywhere in the World. Much of our current air control system is 50 years old - RIDICULOUS!" He added that his administration has begun upgrading the 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 last year's sweeping tax cut package, but Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has repeatedly described that funding as a down payment on a broader overhaul of the ageing system.

The cause: an overload during a switch to fibre

Duffy was the administration's public face on the ground stop across the Sunday news shows. In a post on X, he said contractor L3Harris Technologies had secured two routers from FAA facilities in Texas and Arkansas and was conducting "deep diagnostics" on the equipment. He said the problem began when L3Harris was replacing a section of old copper wire with new fibre at a facility in El Dorado, Arkansas, somehow causing the system to overload. After the wire was replaced and the router 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."

Duffy has said investigators believe the disruption was caused by a faulty router or an installation error, rather than a foreign cyberattack, and the FBI is assisting the investigation.

Full capacity expected by Monday

Duffy told CBS's "Face the Nation" that "we have some delays in the airspace right now," but looking to the end of Sunday and into Monday, "we should be running at full capacity." He explained that a ground stop takes airplanes and crews out of position, "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."

In another post, Trump blamed his predecessor, accusing Joe Biden's administration of making an "old and broken system worse than when they began." Biden signed a massive infrastructure bill in the first year of his presidency, which set aside $25 billion for the FAA to improve airports and air traffic control towers, redevelop terminals and upgrade air traffic control infrastructure.

(Source: Associated Press, Nov. 15, 2026.)