Hmmm, perhaps those DOGE cuts to the FAA and DOT (among others) were not the bargain they seemed, especially considering it didn't resolve the budgetary/national debt issues. I don't want to sound accusatory, but it's starting to appear as if they might have been for some other purpose.

"We should talk to our senators and our members of Congress to say 'we don't deserve this, America,'" Duffy said. "This is the greatest country — by the way, with the greatest president — let's give the money to fix this very real problem."

LOL "greatest country" who can't even keep planes in the air, and "greatest president" racking up 40+Trillion national debt and made the entire country vote against him

fucking incompetent losers. they'll do nothing, and then blame obama, biden, tEh GaYs for all the damage they caused

Take it out of the ICE budget.

This guy voted against the 2021 infrastructure bill that included money to modernize the air traffic control system.

Where'd the data come from, Sean Duffy? Be VERY specific.

we fucked it up and want a bigger budget to keep fucking it up worse.

You know how AI is demanding all this compute hardware? You know how AI can do things superhumanly fast? Welp, all those AI agents running around are taxing the network infrastructure, not just bandwidth but also endpoints and servers. If we're going to have AI agents "force multiplying" humans 10x and more, they're likely to be using 20 to 100x as much computer/network resources to do those superhuman fast jobs.

In other words: the AI server datacenters are just the beginning - once AI really starts doing human-type work, the digital systems that are currently serving humans are going to be crushed under the tsunami of AI users. The increased demands for RAM and processor chips and datacenter space and electricity associated with AI are only just beginning.

The FAA may actually understand this, now that their SMART system has blown out their infrastructure capacity.

$50B? No problem. We'll just need an itemized list of expenses that accounts for every penny.

Lying thieves.

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg [explained] that “the system has many redundancies in it, so that normally, if there’s one point of failure, something else can catch it...it is not clear to me why that redundancy did not prevent an outage of this magnitude -- sabee on Twitter

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?

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.

They came up with that number pretty quick.

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.

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.

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.

"We should talk to our senators and our members of Congress to say 'we don't deserve this, America,'" Duffy said. "This is the greatest country — by the way, with the greatest president — let's give the money to fix this very real problem."

Under no circumstance should we allow Duffy access to any money. This guy is obviously delusional

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?

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.

Oh look, more Republican theft! Any bets on which relation of his owns the company that will get the $50B contract?

DOGE cuts everything to save money. Now they ask for more than ever to fix it

More no-bid contracts given to unqualified people and have more problems. This is what you get each time with maga so don't go back to them again.

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.

Done!

-Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer!

Ah...so it was nothing more than another indirect trump shakedown. Makes sense now.

So... it was the new AI system and they want another excuse to hand $50B to corrupt toadies with no-bid contracts. I was ready to not blame the new system, given that it was supposed to be limited in scope, but his dodge on the question says an awful lot.

Hm, right there in Project 2025:

Require the FAA to operate more like a business. The FAA has not made good use of the unique authority it has been given in areas like personnel and acquisition.

Ronnie Raygun had it wrong. The scariest words in the English language are "make $GOVERNMENT_AGENCY operate more like a business".

NO. Fuck no.

Why doesn't he take it from ice?

Take it from ICE.

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.

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.

I’m sure it had nothing to do with rolling out your AI start ups shitty software onto the aging system. A system that never had an outage like this in decades. Just a weird coincidence. 🙄

Once again, America is learning tyranny is partially about the malevolence and corruption, but mostly about the incompetence.

Take it from DHS.

No

Crumbling infrastructure. Looking forward to Post-American America.

Best I can do is bomb palestinian hospitals

50 BILLION!? Like with a "B"? The highest end 24 port switch and router is around $500 and $300 respectively. Let's just round that up to $1000 each to make it wven more expensive. Plus $1000 to do the install work for those two devices (which would be highway robbery). Let's say every single airport needs 100 each of these switch and router sets, which is also a ridiculous number. That is $200,000 per airport of were are overstocking and overpaying for routers and switches. For $1 Billion, then, you could fully supply and install 100 sets of brand new switches and routers to 5000 airports. There are only 3287 airports under the FAA's National Plan flof Integrate Airport Systems. So let's say the other 1713 airports worth is used in military airports, even though that is outside the FAA preview. So... where is the other $49 Billion going!?

That is such a ridiculously huge unrealistic number. There is no way that, if granted, this will just be used to line the pockets of some Billionaire donor(s) or friend of Duffy and/or Trump.

NOTE: My wife, who supplies technology needs to law firms for a living said that she might actually estimate the cost to upgrade routers and switches per airport at 500,000 each due to square footage. And maybe double that if they're upgrading dedicated internet circuits too. So her absolutely highest dollar is $1 million per airport. That's still only $3.3 billion. $46.7 billion still unaccounted for.

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?

Am I the only person who noticed this fucking jackass blaming it all on old analog hardware and subsequently explaining that this went South because data centers were overloaded?

What a fucking idiot!

Or else...

Busted fault somehow incoming…