Funny as Buttigieg spent less and kept things going while stymied by a Republican House. Duffy had carte blanche and a huge amount more funding and still managed to blame the past.
Buttigieg: Got $5 billion for air traffic control in the 2021 infrastructure law and had spent about $3 billion of it by the end of FY2024 (towers, power and comms gear, controller hiring), while his $9 billion facility replacement and radar modernization request went unfunded.
Duffy: Got $12.5 billion appropriated in July 2025 as the first tranche of a $31.5 billion “brand new” system he says finishes by the end of 2028, and is now back asking for $30 billion more through the Modern Skies Act, on top of the $50 billion request.
I’d bet that the new AI system wasn’t set to rate limit and ate up all their bandwidth. If you’ve had to work with some of these types of systems from the networking side, you see how much data they try to suck in. I’ve heard of Palantir using an entire months bandwidth cap at a remote site in a day.
Ah…so it was nothing more than another indirect trump shakedown. Makes sense now.
Every penny given in response to this request will go directly into the pockets of conservatives in charge. They’ve already stolen untold billions from taxpayers and they know the spigot will be turned off soon. Expect conservatives to demand money “to fix what Hillary/Obama/Biden broke” everytime their shitshow craps out another disaster.
Mmmmmmm I call bullshit. That’s just not how “old routers and switches” work. You don’t get thousands of them simply failing all at once unless there is some sort of systemic change, or a step-function jump in traffic. And they just fucking admitted that’s exactly what happened.
TL;DR: this was just fuckwitted DOGE wunderkind intern idiocy-level antics, which is par for the course for the regime.
That link takes me too a different reel every time.
Huh? It works reliably for me…
It takes me to a reel of a dog doing an impression of the Airbus hydraulic PTU, and I don’t mind one bit.
DOGE cuts everything to save money. Now they ask for more than ever to fix it
Why do I get the feeling one of the chuds fell victim to a ransomware attack and the 50 billion is to turn it back on?
Take it from ICE.
The officials said they have seen no evidence that the failure was caused by a cyberattack or system failures linked to artificial intelligence, but added that they are still investigating the precise cause of the outage.
If they don’t know the cause of the outage, how can they say $50 billion will fix it?
Never let a good crisis go to waste.
The description sounded exactly like a DDoS.
It could also be Ai bullshit though.
You’d be surprised how often DDOSes (?) can be caused my misconfiguration.
Their newfangled AI toy probably flooded the network.
Guess how much they were defunded by dump
Civil aviation infrastructure has been tragically underfunded for decades. Maybe it kicked off when Reagan fired striking air traffic controllers, but a recent article was talking about how a lot of control towers still run off floppy disks.
But maybe that’s also partially explained by “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and tried-and-true is worth more than the latest technology. I mean, jeez, imagine if two planes collided because Windows 11 insisted on installing an update…
Sure, Trump’s probably been the worst of the lot since he’s a Russian plant out to destroy the country by all means possible, but he’s only the head of the pack.
The floppy disk thing is 100% because they had a system which worked, and replacing it would be difficult and expensive to do properly and safely.
Air traffic control has to be designed and built just as carefully as the aircraft themselves, and if a mistake is made it could kill hundreds of people. In that kind of environment, “if it ain’t broke” is a really strong argument.
The floppy disk thing is 100% because they had a system which worked, and replacing it would be difficult and expensive to do properly and safely.
A thumb drive with an emulator of the floppy protocol would be dirt-cheap, and almost certainly more reliable, since floppies are among the shittiest storage media that exist. This is instead the result of deliberate resource starvation and consequent accumulation of decades of technical debt.
Air traffic control has to be designed and built just as carefully as the aircraft themselves
Should be. I worked on ATC systems for over a decade in an earlier phase of my career. Your assertion is only true if the aircraft you’re referring to are DC10s. The languages used, the methodologies used, the protocols, and the hardware and comms systems were no better engineered than anything else from that era. The big difference is process: they test the hell out of those systems before deployment, and build in several layers of redundancy and failover capability. They also regression test any new software releases to an extreme degree, give major attention to rollback, and extensively test that too. And that’s also what drives up the cost of such systems.
At least, that’s what they used to do, and are supposed to do now.
In this case, my guess is that Trump and/or DOGE have cut the staff that did that validation, or may havereplaced them with engineers who didn’t know dick about safety-critical systems. This also may be another case of sabotaging an agency to create a pretext for its privatization.
Also, if they were trying to fit LLM-based AI into the ATC system, the people responsible for that decision should be jailed for life. LLMs are inherently unfit to be used in any decision affection people’s lives, health or livelihoods. If it’s ML, there are some cases where that might be OK, subject to the rigorous testing and process controls I’ve already mentioned.
A couple of facts I can give you, interpolate what you will:
The FAA comms network has been in place since 2013. Those routers were working fine yesterday.
AI gets released, routers no work anymore.
The AI SMART system does not “do” anything, it makes recommendations to ATCs.
My pretty well-informed opinions:
The AI system most likely uses the comm network to distribute those reccos.
It was probably overloaded, with cascading impacts.
Edit: Oh look, I was right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_FAA_ground_stop
Don’t worry folks, The Real World: Boston’s Sean Duffy promises he’s going to fix what he broke and it’s only going to cost us $50 billion. JFC.
They came up with that number pretty quick.
Bitch, what party controlled both houses, the presidency, and the Supreme Court the past two years?
Seems that they admitted they royaly screwed up a AI rollout.
It’s embarrassing how obvious it was. It felt like I was back in high school listening to someone read a book report on a book they never read. The “it’s not the new stuff. It’s the old stuff” from the white house press briefing.
Dude. They essentially plugged in 100 hair dryers, turned them on at full heat, and then complained that the wiring in the house was old when the circuit breaker tripped. “It’s not the hair dryers fault!”
“All the SI smart system does is send information”
“The outage was caused by the servers being flooded with too much data”
“They aren’t connected in anyway”
They fucking ddosed themselves dude. You can’t make this shit up.
Controlled? They still have a month and a half.
They sabotaged it with the new SMART ai systems, then demanded 50B to invest into the AI bubble. They were asking for 30B just before this happened. Shit is so fucked.
My primary concern is that this money is likely to be given out to no-bid contractors with personal ties to the administration officials handing them out.
The upgrades are actually necessary.
I don’t know. As someone that has worked for Cisco and Microsoft on both routing/switching and cloud/datacenters. I really would put my trust in a system that has been running perfectly fine for decades over anything these companies want to replace it with. There isn’t really any company in the US that doesn’t have ties to this administrations corruption.
The entire tech industry needs to be gutted and the criminals in it need to be rotting in prison before id trust anything to be done right.
I agree our infrastructure needs to be maintained and upgraded. But, holy shit, the flight industry does not need AI. It needs a massive jobs program funded by the government for training.
hard agree it needs to be done, also hard agree that the current administration isn’t competent enough to be able to
Upgrading the nation’s flight control system, 2 weeks before America’s biggest travel season, to an AI solution backed by a Real World: Season 6 cast member.
What could possibly go wrong?
Well, I’m thinking that another pandemic isn’t out of the question. Imagine being stranded in a crowded airport, waiting some unknown amount of time, surrounded by a variety of petri dishes, sleeping on the floor, and then finally getting to go home but carrying a super virus back with you. Or maybe it hits while people are still in the airports.
The news probably wouldn’t really hit the national level until after the new Congress gets sworn in on Jan 3rd, so stupid motherfuckers will insist that it’s them durn dumocratses faults. Despite the RFK Jr of it all.