New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said Saturday that Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy “must resign, or President Trump must remove him immediately.” She wrote that “America’s airspace ground to a halt yesterday, leaving thousands of flights canceled and travelers stranded across the country. More than 3,500 planes were already in the air as radar and communications” failed.
Duffy spent Saturday’s news conference pointing at a contractor. He said the stop began when L3Harris, which he said “actually owns that network,” was moving a facility from copper wire to fiber when a new router “started flooding other routers in our air traffic control system.”
Duffy said he asked the contractor whether the cause was “incompetence” or a faulty router. “This is not complicated. It’s pretty straightforward work,” he said. “It shouldn’t have that kind of impact, which is what we saw yesterday.”
[NOTE: L3Harris said it was cooperating with the FAA’s investigation but did not address Duffy’s suggestion of contractor error.]
Duffy said he has been asking Congress for money “for almost two years,” and that until he can build a new network, “I’m stuck with L3Harris.”
FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford apologized to “the American traveling public,” and said there was “zero evidence of anything nefarious and zero evidence of anything AI related.”
Democrats on the House Homeland Security Committee, who will have subpoena power come January, said they plan to investigate Duffy. “You brought the nation’s skies to a standstill,” the Committee Democrats wrote on X. “If you think Congressional Democrats will let you bury how this happened, you are sorely mistaken. Preserve all documents and emails. Oversight is coming.”
A day earlier, Duffy — at a press conference with DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin — said “our new IP switches did not go down. It’s the old hardware that went down.”
Duffy said Congress had rebuffed requests for funds the system needed to upgrade, a figure he set at $50 billion.
[NOTE: Congress appropriated $12.5 billion in July 2025.]
In addition to Hochul, members of Congress wanted more answers from Duffy. Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), ranking member on the Senate aviation subcommittee, answered Duffy’s first press conference on X, taking aim at his assertion that Congress was to blame: “You’ve literally controlled Congress for the past two years.”
She added: “And apparently, there’s always been money for vanity projects. But none to fix our air traffic control system? Perhaps Trump should prioritize aviation safety over his pathetic Arch.”
You’ve literally controlled Congress for the past two years. And apparently, there’s always been money for vanity projects. But none to fix our air traffic control system?
Perhaps Trump should prioritize aviation safety over his pathetic Arch.
— Tammy Duckworth (@SenDuckworth) November 14, 2026