'Knew it was bad': Why a 'terrible idea' from Trump’s first admin is being blamed for air traffic woes

22 May

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy at a White House press briefing on January 30, 2025 (Joshua Sukoff/ Shutterstock.com)

During President Donald Trump's second term, Newark Liberty International Airport in northern New Jersey near New York City has been suffering delays and outages. The airport's system completely failed on April 28, and thousands of passengers have been inconvenienced by flight cancellations.

The problems at Newark Airport come at a time when the Trump Administration and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are drawing scathing criticism from Democrats for mass layoffs of federal workers that are affecting the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) and many other agencies as well.

MAGA Republican Sean Duffy, transportation secretary for the Trump Administration, is blaming the Biden Administration —including former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg — for Newark Airport's woes. Air traffic control for the airport was transferred to Philadelphia in July 2024, when then-President Joe Biden and then-Vice President Kamala Harris were still in office.

But according to CNN sources, problems with Newark Airport were brewing during Trump's first term.

In an article published by CNN's website on May 22, reporters Rene Marsh, Blake Ellis and Alexandra Skores explain, "Though the move to Philadelphia took place under President Joe Biden, internal FAA documents reviewed by CNN, which have not been previously reported, show the plan was well underway during the first Trump Administration, including an engineering plan that was done just one month before the 2020 election. Duffy has defended the plan but said the Biden Administration 'bungled this move' by failing to properly harden the telecom lines feeding radar and other flight data from Newark's airspace to the control facility in Philadelphia.

At a recent press conference, Duffy claimed, "Without addressing the underlying infrastructure, they added more risk to the system."

CNN, according to Marsh, Ellis and Skores, "spoke to nine current and former air traffic controllers familiar with the situation around Newark, all of whom said the real issue wasn't the execution of the plan, but the plan itself."

A former air traffic controller, interviewed on condition of anonymity, told CNN, "The problem isn't just aging equipment; the problem is the setup at this facility. Commercial telecommunications lines were never built for mission critical data like this, including radar data."

Another former air traffic controller told CNN, "It was a terrible idea. People on the ground knew it was bad,” said

Marsh, Ellis and Skores report, "One internal FAA document depicts an overview of the project, explaining that the FAA conducted a feasibility study for the plan on February 19, 2020. A separate document from the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, the union which represents air traffic controllers, shows just six months later, the Trump Administration’s FAA informed the union of its intent to relocate controllers to Philadelphia with 'an expected completion in Q1 2022.'"

Read the full CNN article at this link.

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