Trump Implies Biden Administration To Blame For Friday’s Nationwide Aviation Shutdown

President Donald Trump has urged Congress to back his plans to modernize the U.S. air traffic control system after a reported telecommunications failure grounded all departing U.S. flights for about four hours on Friday.

"The Biden Administration was an FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] disaster. Everything they touched turned bad. Big money spent unwisely, making an old and broken system worse than when they began. We have the knowledge and plan for the Flight Control Systems, we need Congress to give the money, FAST! Our FAA is doing a great job, and is ready to go," the president posted on Truth Social on Sunday.

In a subsequent, second post on the issue, Trump reiterated his accusation that the Biden administration set the air traffic control system "back years" and claimed that "if Congress approves the desperately needed money for Air Traffic Control, we can get it built quickly and efficiently."

The BBC, citing data from digital aviation platform FlightAware, reported that over 8,500 flights were delayed and nearly 8,000 cancelled on Friday.

The FAA has said that airlines are expected to return to their normal operating schedules by Sunday night.

"Here's what we believed happened yesterday: in at least one of our remote FAA locations, a contractor [L3Harris] was doing routine maintenance to switch telecommunication lines from old copper wire ... to fibre," Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a statement on Saturday.

"What we're working to determine was whether we had incompetence, meaning was it user error, installator error from L3Harris, or did they install a faulty router? We haven't determined what the fault was."

L3Harris is a technology company which the FAA has, according to Duffy, employed for over two decades as a contractor and was responsible for installing a new router as part of the general upgrade of the telecommunication lines from "analog to digital."

"That router ... started flooding other routers in our air traffic control system ... what that did was it gave us issues with our communication with airplanes and it also caused some disruption with our radar feeds."

In addition to speculating that "not great work" performed by L3Harris could have been a factor in the failure, Duffy mentioned that the FAA was one of the last institutions to make the copper to fibre optic switch because of a lack of investment.

The government official then claimed that Trump had been "leading the charge" on the modernization push, and urged Congress to "step up with the resources."

As part of Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill" - passed in July 2025 - $12.5 billion was allocated to modernizing the U.S. air traffic control system and the construction of new facilities.

Although Trump blames the Biden administration for the out-of-date technology, reports show that the system had been declining for decades, and that the Biden administration invested billions into modernization but did not fix the underlying problem.

Congress also did not approve additional funding Biden had earmarked for 2025.

On January 11 2023, flight departures were paused for approximately an hour after the FAA issued a nationwide ground stop order in order to fix a system outage. At the time, Trump said in a Truth Social post that the pause was evidence of "incompetence and the fact that we are now living in the equivalent of a Third World Nation."