Author and biographer Michael Wolff spoke with Joanna Coles for the Daily Beast podcast on Saturday afternoon about the Microsoft outage and the complete ground stop across the U.S. and he doesn't buy either story.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin started his press conference Friday by promising it wasn't another Sept. 11 and urging the public not to panic.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy blamed the ordeal on poor technology and used the opportunity to ask for more money for the FAA.
"It felt chaotic," Coles said about Friday afternoon and into the evening.
"Well, I think Markwayne Mullin opened the news conference yesterday by saying that the Microsoft fail and the FAA fail were not related," Wolff recalled. "So, I think we can fairly say, they probably are related. If these guys say — we're at the point where logic tells us to assume whatever these guys say it has to be — it's a fair chance the opposite is the truth.”
After showing a clip of Mullin's press conference, Wolff mocked their claim, "We're built to handle crisis."
"We're built to create crises," Wolff shot back. "I mean, these two guys? This is who we're counting on? But even set the context here. And they seem to be essentially dismissing this problem or dismissing the crisis."
Duffy said that Trump asked for an additional $30 billion after they were already given $12.5 billion. At first they asked for an additional $15 billion. That evolved to $19 billion. Trump then said he wanted an additional $30 billion and now Duffy is saying he wants that to be $50 billion.
In August, Politico reported that three FAA officials had serious concerns about the contractor that took over the modernization: Peraton. One of the officials said that the company failed to manage other contractors at a work site and let schedules slip on a project in Alaska.
“The big issues here are threefold,” said the person familiar with discussions, adding that “Peraton has basically not done any work since they got in.”
They also blamed the agency as a whole for stonewalling Peraton’s work with the FAA.
"In one case, a Peraton manager showed up to a radar site that was being worked on, and instead of ensuring that the other contractors were carrying out their duties, brought doughnuts and sat in the corner the entire time," said an industry official who spoke with Politico.
Wolff mocked the idea that the issue was caused by "circuit overload."
"Alright, so what we have here is either they don't know what it is because they are uninformed, that dopey. The structure of air travel has been so disrupted and underfunded and so many people have been fired and jobs not replaced that they are really kind of at a loss here," Wolff suggested as one possibility. "Or they do have a sense of what happens, and they really don't want to fess up to it."
Regardless, he said, there's nothing good going on and no one "should have confidence about their explanation."
Coles referred to them as "a ship of fools."
