Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy called for a $50 billion overhaul of the nation’s air traffic control system Friday night, after a communications failure halted departures nationwide for hours.
The request would go beyond the roughly $30 billion the administration had previously sought. Duffy called for new hardware, software and telecommunications equipment rather than more patchwork repairs, The Hill reported. Congress would still need to approve the funding.
Congress already appropriated $12.5 billion for modernization in July 2025. But a September report from the Government Accountability Office raised questions about how the overhaul was being managed.
The watchdog found that FAA lacked a reliable, comprehensive cost estimate and an integrated schedule. Instead, it had 11,389 separate project schedules that were not coordinated into a master plan. GAO warned that those gaps increased the risk of cost overruns, delays and air traffic disruptions.
The report also documented progress: FAA said it had replaced 2,560 of 5,170 aging copper connections with fiber-optic communications cables by May.
The GAO report doesn’t say what caused Friday’s outage. But it shows that, even before the shutdown, the government’s plan to modernize the system had problems of its own.