On the evening of Novemnber 13, 2026, Markwayne Mullin & Sean Duffy briefed the press/public on the day’s FAA ground stop.
As is par for the course for this Administration, they lied alot, which warrants a fact check. Keep this handy as you either watch the linked video or read the transcript:
1. No national emergency was actually declared. No emergency declaration has been published. A cabinet secretary saying “national emergency” at a podium is not a legal declaration. And the actual request — emergency funding — needs Congress. The words alone give no new authority.
2. The two officials gave different explanations.
- Duffy said old analog phone lines “got overloaded with data.” But old phone lines don’t overload like internet networks do. They fail in other ways — losing signal or physical damage. Engineers say his description sounds more like a modern network problem.
- Mullin said new equipment and software updates overwhelmed the old system. In other words, the upgrade itself caused the failure, not age alone.
- CBS News reported that a software update to the FAA system run by L3Harris caused it to crash and reboot. The FAA and L3Harris haven’t confirmed this. But Mullin’s comment and CBS’s reporting point the same direction — and both contradict Duffy’s story that old equipment just broke. When asked directly if L3Harris was involved, officials didn’t answer.
3. “New equipment couldn’t have caused this” was stated as fact too early. Duffy said it was impossible for the new air traffic system (SMART) to be involved. He said this three days after SMART launched nationwide and hours into the investigation, before any root-cause report existed. Nothing points to SMART — but saying it was impossible went further than what anyone knew. Mullin had just said you “can’t rule out anything.” Both can’t be true.
4. “No evidence of cyberattack” was spun as “no cyberattack.” Officials said there was no indication of an attack so far and they weren’t ruling anything out. Nobody knew the actual cause yet. Saying “there was no cyberattack” as settled fact was spin. What they actually knew was: “we don’t know what happened yet, but nothing points to an attack.”
5. The dollar figures were made up on the spot.
- The day before the press conference, Duffy and the White House budget office formally asked for $30.1 billion. At the podium, Duffy said “I want $50 billion.” That’s a $20 billion jump announced live, with no published cost breakdown. It’s an opening bid, not an estimate.
- Saying “$15 billion over 25 years and almost nothing was done” is misleading. Most of the FAA’s roughly $20 billion yearly budget goes to running the system day to day, not capital projects. And the system did deliver real things — new radar displays (ERAM), a new control system (STARS), and ADS-B tracking, all finished around 2020.
- Blaming Congress also skips a fact: Republicans controlled both the House and Senate when they approved only $12.5 billion. No Democratic votes were needed. And the same administration is now asking for $30–50 billion weeks before the holidays, using the emergency as pressure.
- Duffy actually admitted this during the same briefing: “on that bill, I didn’t have Democrats that voted for it.” The “blame Congress” message targets a body his own party runs.
6. “The public was never in danger” contradicts their own reason for shutting down. Both officials admitted they grounded flights because they couldn’t reliably see or talk to aircraft. One said “we can’t immediately communicate… that’s a risk we’re unwilling to tolerate.” Reporters pushed back that this is a safety hazard. The accurate statement is: no accidents happened, but the system was not safe to operate, so grounding was the right call. “Never any danger” doesn’t square with that.
7. “A new system means no more outages” is patently false. New systems fix some failure modes. They don’t eliminate outages — look at the 2024 CrowdStrike crash or any number of brand-new systems that failed. And predicting that outages will keep happening without more money is just as unprovable. This was a funding pitch sold as engineering fact.
8. The New Orleans crash claims were partly speculation. Mullin called it a “major engineering defect” and implied the ship basically hit a bridge by accident. In reality, the tanker Atlantic Asphalt reportedly lost steering and hit the docked ship American Heritage. Investigators hadn’t determined the cause. No bridge was involved. Calling it an “engineering defect” was a guess stated as fact. His numbers — 195 people aboard, 32 hospitalized, none critical — matched early reports. The “defect” part didn’t.
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