The Trump administration has boosted its request for air traffic control funding to $50 billion, raising the figure late on Friday after a communications failure forced a nationwide ground stop that halted thousands of flights for hours.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and the White House had earlier on Friday asked for $30.1 billion to upgrade the country's ageing airports and air traffic control system. "This is an emergency," Duffy said. "What's more important than having an air traffic control system that actually works?"
The request from White House budget director Russell Vought and Duffy seeks $10.1 billion for air traffic control modernisation, including $7.2 billion for a common automation platform and controller workstations and $2 billion for cloud computing. The $30.1 billion package also includes $2 billion to replace and improve Federal Aviation Administration air traffic control towers and $18 billion for airport-related projects, including $10 billion to modernise or replace ageing terminals.
The failure hit the FAA's en route centres, which handle traffic between airports. The Republican-led Senate Commerce Committee said the incident showed the need to prioritise modernising those centres over other projects, noting Congress had approved $1.9 billion to replace outdated en route centres. Major airlines including American, Delta, United and Southwest have expressed support for the request.
Congress already approved $12.5 billion over five years in July 2025 to upgrade air traffic control and increase the hiring of controllers. The FAA relies on decades-old computers and replacement parts bought through auction websites; last week it said it would replace by the end of 2028 the floppy disks used for weather and other critical information at more than 400 air traffic control facilities. Vought and Duffy said in their letter that the FAA has replaced 68 per cent of its legacy copper telecommunications network with high-speed fibre infrastructure.
The administration has called for the Republican-led Congress to approve the funding in the final weeks of the year, before Democrats take control of Congress in January. The outage was the latest in a series of failures: in September, the dual failures of a circuit at a Philadelphia air traffic facility and a fibre-optic cable accidentally severed by a construction crew in New Jersey delayed or cancelled thousands of flights across the north-east. In January 2025, a midair collision at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport killed 67 people.
