It was inevitable that Democrats would politicize Friday's FAA ground stop, and they didn't disappoint. The loudest critics turned out to be the people with the least standing to complain.
The FAA ordered the stop just before 4 p.m. on Friday, and the cancellations quickly snowballed at the major hubs (LaGuardia and JFK in New York among them). The order was in place for just over four hours. Following the order, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy asked Congress for another $50 billion to replace the aging air traffic control and communications systems. He said that airlines would need time to get back to normal, but that he expects flights to be "back up and operational as we come into the heat of travel during Thanksgiving."
Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg slammed the ground stop anyway. Buttigieg, a 2020 presidential candidate and possible 2028 contender, took his shot at the start of his remarks at the "What's Next" conference in Colorado on Friday night.
For sure, nationwide ground stops are extremely rare. Before Friday, there had been exactly two. The first followed the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. The second came in January 2023, when a broken pilot notification system grounded flights nationwide.
Who was president at the time?
That's right, Joe Biden.
Guess who ran the Transportation Department at the time.
That’s right, Pete Buttigieg.
He probably doesn’t want you to remember that.
No, he pretended that the Biden administration was proactive about modernizing the system.
"We did a lot to upgrade the system," he said. "When we had an outage, I didn't stand there complaining about the Trump administration. We got to work."
Buttigieg also had demands. "There needs to be answers and there needs to be transparency about what happened," he said. "As a member of the flying public — as well as somebody who cares a lot about what goes on in the national airspace — I will have a lot of interest in getting answers, too."
Buttigieg had four years, a mountain of infrastructure money, and his own nationwide ground stop to learn from. If he "got to work," where are the results?
Even Hollywood superagent Ari Emanuel went after him online.
"No one's hands are clean here," Emanuel wrote. "However, Mr. Secretary Buttigieg, you had four years in the job and infrastructure money, yet made zero progress modernizing the FAA. You left a failing system in place."
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And then there's Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-N.Y.), who wants Duffy fired over the ground stop. On Saturday, she released a statement calling on President Donald Trump to remove Duffy if he doesn't resign immediately, and urging Congress to investigate.
"America's airspace ground to a halt yesterday, leaving thousands of flights canceled and travelers stranded across the country," Hochul said. "More than 3,500 planes were already in the air as radar and communications systems faltered. We're fortunate no lives were lost."
She laid the blame on Duffy. “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," Hochul said. With millions of people about to travel for the holidays, she argued, Congress must fully investigate.
"Sean Duffy must resign, or President Trump must remove him immediately," she added.
Of course, Hochul never demanded that Joe Biden fire Buttigieg after the 2023 ground stop. The same failures that earned Duffy an ultimatum earned Buttigieg a pass.
In fact, it’s well documented that Biden and Buttigieg were warned repeatedly that America’s air traffic control system was outdated and on the verge of collapse, and that they did nothing about it.
“The largest infrastructure package, Martha, ever known to man in the history of the world — the infrastructure bill under Joe Biden — was $1.2 trillion,” Duffy explained last year. “They sent only $5 billion to fix air traffic control, and of the $5 billion, Pete Buttigieg spent less than $1 billion to fix this problem.”
Duffy also noted that Buttigieg was too busy with DEI and woke virtue signaling to care about modernization. “He was focused on racist roads and changing the name of ‘cockpit’ to ‘flight deck’ or ‘airman’ to ‘aeronaut,’” he said. “Stupid stuff.”
Things were so bad that an August 2023 New York Times investigation found that under Biden and Buttigieg, there was a sharp rise in near-collisions at U.S. airports nationwide, with internal FAA records showing that commercial airline close calls were happening multiple times a week.
Democrats left behind a crumbling air traffic system, and now they want to prosecute the people trying to fix it. Their outrage over infrastructure failures turns on only when Republicans are in charge and trying to fix the mess they left behind.
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