GoKawiilOn August 6th, the Minneapolis Air Route Traffic Control Center lost radar and communications for around two hours. The outage disrupted more than 1,100 flights across the center’s 330,000 square mile, nine-state airspace sector.
Two days earlier, on August 4th, President Donald Trump departed the White House inside his Marine One military helicopter. As Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) protocol requires, the pilots tried to contact Reagan National Airport to tell them to halt commercial traffic during the flight. But the air traffic controllers never heard the transmission and cleared a different airplane for takeoff — which came closer than the minimum safe distance allowed. (When this story first broke in The Wall Street Journal, the White House dismissed it, noting that Trump was never in “harm’s way.”)
The outages were surprising, given the administration’s stated ambitions to rebuild the nation’s air traffic control system. Last February, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy invited major Trump donor Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to overhaul the FAA. On X, Musk promised “rapid safety upgrades to the air traffic control system.”
But Musk ended up as more wrecking ball than problem solver. His agency did not help the FAA buy or implement any major system upgrades. He wrongly accused Verizon of running the FAA’s communications system, while also failing to turn Starlink into the agency’s telecom provider of choice. Its signature achievement was the termination of 400 FAA employees, including maintenance technicians at 18 different air traffic control centers.
Musk ended up as more wrecking ball than problem solver.
Meanwhile, the “rapid safety upgrades” Musk promised never materialized. The last few years have seen equipment failures in Dallas, Denver, and Houston. Unexplained fumes in Atlanta, Newark, and the Potomac air traffic control center. Chronic staffing shortages in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Orlando, and Philadelphia.
The nation’s unstable air traffic control system made 2025 the worst year for flight delays in over a decade, according to the US Public Interest Research Group. One in four flights was delayed, diverted, or canceled for a total of almost 1.7 million disruptions. Tarmac delays, where airplanes are held on the ground but passengers must stay on board, were up 64 percent compared to 2024. And an estimated 2.4 million checked bags were lost or damaged on domestic flights alone.
In July 2025, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act authorized $12.5 billion in supplemental funding for a complete overhaul of the FAA’s air traffic control system. Of that total, roughly $5 billion is dedicated for software upgrades. And since Elon Musk’s DOGE fell short of its promises, the administration has invited Peter Thiel, another Republican megadonor, to step in at the FAA. His company Palantir is deeply integrated with the FAA’s systems, making it a prime contender for many of those contracts, despite no significant prior experience with air traffic control.
According to air traffic controllers — several of whom spoke to The Verge on condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize their jobs — these moves will do little to alleviate the issues on the ground (and in the air). They say that the FAA’s most urgent needs remain on the personnel side.
None of the $12.5 billion in new FAA funding authorized by the One Big Beautiful Bill goes toward personnel. Instead, it seems destined for Palantir’s pockets.
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