The President of the United States, Donald Trump, has attributed responsibility for the recent collapse in the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to the management of his predecessor, Joe Biden, an incident that on Friday led to widespread delays and the cancellation of more than 9,000 flights throughout the day.
In a message shared on his social media, Trump attacked the previous White House by pointing out that "The Biden Administration was a disaster for the FAA. Everything they touched was worse. A lot of money was spent without judgment to make worse a system that was already old and failing."
The president also said that his Government is already working on a solution to modernize the air traffic control infrastructure. "We have a plan for flight control systems. We need the Congress to approve the money, fast! The FAA is doing a great job and is ready," he added, appealing directly to lawmakers so they unlock the necessary funding.
U.S. authorities explained on Saturday that the communications failure was linked to the contractor company for air traffic control link services, L3Harris, and to a possible "defective router."
According to the official version, the company was carrying out routine maintenance operations at a remote FAA facility to replace old copper lines, with several decades of use, with new-generation fiber optic cabling.
As part of those works, a router was also replaced, which ended up saturating other devices in the air traffic management network with thousands of simultaneous connection attempts, which triggered the system collapse. As a result, air controllers lost the ability to communicate with the aircraft and stopped receiving real-time radar data.
At the same time, the FAA has carried out the dismissal of about 400 employees from a total workforce of 45,000 workers, as part of the budget cuts promoted by the Trump Administration through the controversial Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE, for its acronym in English), led by the billionaire Elon Musk. From the Democratic ranks they have warned that this reduction in staff may have a direct impact on the country's air safety levels.