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.
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.
Take it from DHS.
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. 🙄
Oh look, more Republican theft! Any bets on which relation of his owns the company that will get the $50B contract?
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.
Thats not true at all and you know it.
Those no bid contracts are going to real qualified people who can stomach being around Eric or Don Jr for more than a few hours and put up with the smell from Donny when they meet him. Being able to put up with that smell, and his idiot kids at thr same time and not slit your own wrists has to be some kind of qualification.
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.
The secret ingredient is graft
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.
bandwidth? there ain’t any bandwidth left once the secret data exfiltration connections are going.
Ah…so it was nothing more than another indirect trump shakedown. Makes sense now.
No doubt he divested from all the airlines first.
Majorly disrupt air travel, get $50 billion dollars to divide among you and your friends. That is indeed the MAGA playbook.
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.
Exactly. Came here to say this. I work for an ISP, That’s definitely bullshit he’s spouting. The 50 billion is mostly gonna go to fixing that shitty AI They implemented.
I love it. I guess we got “generational change” the conservative way.
Did assholes like Vought enable teenagers and twenty-somethings idiots who claim they “know how to code” (I don’t believe even that, though) to fuck with our ATC, too?
JFC. Why does everything have to be so goddamned stupid? We get something like huge powerful LLMs at the same time fuckwits voted in a disaster like donnie and the Project 2025 nuts and they use all these tools in the stupidest possible way - let people with zero experience and zero wisdom loose on our nation.
So they are patching the live ATC system. That sounds about right.
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.
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?
they’re just ‘guessing’ at this point. another digit or two will be tacked-on to that ‘50’ before a ‘solution’ is ‘found’.
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 description sounded exactly like a DDoS.
It could also be Ai bullshit though.
DOGE cuts everything to save money. Now they ask for more than ever to fix it
Also, they put in people with no experience and no qualifications who in some cases are half the age of the people they are managing.
Fucking braindead.
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.
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.
