Disastrous White House press conference raises more questions than answers about nationwide ground stop

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin offered shifting explanations for Friday’s nationwide flight shutdown, repeatedly blaming the Republican-controlled Congress and praising President Donald Trump during a White House briefing that left the cause unresolved.

The secretaries stumbled through explanations and qualified earlier assertions. Emergency procedures had kept passengers safe, but aging equipment would fail again. New technology was working, but Mullin suggested upgrades had overwhelmed older systems.

The briefing followed hours of disruption after the FAA halted departures nationwide Friday afternoon, citing “extraordinary circumstances and for reasons of safety.” Duffy initially described a communications problem affecting all Air Route Traffic Control Centers and said technicians were investigating.

“This is what the leadership of President Trump looks like,” Mullin said.

Trump, who posts frequently on Truth Social, had not publicly addressed the crisis by the briefing. His secretaries nevertheless described him as deeply engaged through private conversations.

“He puts leaders in place, and he allows them to lead,” Mullin said.

Related: Robert Garcia demands answers as Trump officials offer few details on nationwide ground stop stranding flyers

Duffy emphasized Trump’s interest in aviation. “He loves aviation. He loves the airspace, which is why he has been so engaged on this,” he said. “He understands it very well.”

Asked why Americans had not heard directly from Trump, Duffy replied, “I don’t run the president’s comms.”

The White House press secretary position remains vacant following Katie Zacharia’s five-day tenure in October.

A reopening without a settled explanation

Duffy said radar information and communications became unstable Friday afternoon, with more than 3,500 aircraft airborne. Pilots and controllers followed emergency procedures to land aircraft safely. The airspace reopened shortly after 8 p.m. Eastern.

Duffy’s explanation faltered as he described the equipment failure. “Our switches, our routers actually got overloaded with data, and they went down,” he said, before correcting himself. “And I shouldn’t say they went down. They started to give us inconsistency in the data from those routers.”

Mullin suggested new equipment and technology Duffy implemented were “overwhelming the older system.”

Asked whether Federal Aviation Administration patching caused the outage, Duffy reiterated that older equipment failed without establishing whether upgrades triggered it.

“All of the new equipment that we put in, none of that went down,” he said.

He also excluded the FAA’s AI-assisted SMART planning tool, describing it as disconnected from the affected systems. Neither official clarified which new technology Mullin meant.

Mullin’s cyberattack assessment shifted from “there is actually no cyber attack” to “there’s nothing completely certain right now.” He said investigators had found no evidence of an intrusion.

Blaming Congress and seeking answers

Both secretaries repeatedly faulted Congress, where Republicans still control both chambers.

“This is what happens when Congress kicks the can down the road,” Mullin said.

Duffy called the administration’s $12.5 billion modernization allocation insufficient. “I want $50 billion,” he said. Challenged about Republicans’ responsibility, he questioned an NBC reporter’s coverage and praised Fox News.

The appeals followed the administration’s own reductions. The FAA dismissed 352 probationary employees during Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative in February 2025, with hundreds more dismissed elsewhere at DOT. A court ordered reinstatements.

Speaking separately, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg declined to speculate but questioned why backups had failed to contain the disruption.

“It is not clear to me why that redundancy did not prevent an outage of this magnitude,” he said.

Buttigieg defended the Biden administration’s modernization work, called for transparency and praised career employees.

“This should not be about politics,” he said. “I am very much rooting for them to get this resolved as quickly as possible.”

At the White House, Duffy admitted, “We didn’t think we would have this kind of outage.”

As reporters shouted questions, Mullin closed with another tribute.

“You’ve never had a builder and a leader like President Trump lead this nation, have a vision and put the team together,” he said.