Oh look, more Republican theft! Any bets on which relation of his owns the company that will get the $50B contract?
More no-bid contracts given to unqualified people and have more problems. This is what you get each time with maga so don’t go back to them again.
Thats not true at all and you know it.
Those no bid contracts are going to real qualified people who can stomach being around Eric or Don Jr for more than a few hours and put up with the smell from Donny when they meet him. Being able to put up with that smell, and his idiot kids at thr same time and not slit your own wrists has to be some kind of qualification.
Done!
-Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer!
No, they would bargain hard and insist on an additional $50 billion for ICE training.
Funny as Buttigieg spent less and kept things going while stymied by a Republican House. Duffy had carte blanche and a huge amount more funding and still managed to blame the past.
Buttigieg: Got $5 billion for air traffic control in the 2021 infrastructure law and had spent about $3 billion of it by the end of FY2024 (towers, power and comms gear, controller hiring), while his $9 billion facility replacement and radar modernization request went unfunded.
Duffy: Got $12.5 billion appropriated in July 2025 as the first tranche of a $31.5 billion “brand new” system he says finishes by the end of 2028, and is now back asking for $30 billion more through the Modern Skies Act, on top of the $50 billion request.
The secret ingredient is graft
I’d bet that the new AI system wasn’t set to rate limit and ate up all their bandwidth. If you’ve had to work with some of these types of systems from the networking side, you see how much data they try to suck in. I’ve heard of Palantir using an entire months bandwidth cap at a remote site in a day.
bandwidth? there ain’t any bandwidth left once the secret data exfiltration connections are going.
Ah…so it was nothing more than another indirect trump shakedown. Makes sense now.
Majorly disrupt air travel, get $50 billion dollars to divide among you and your friends. That is indeed the MAGA playbook.
Mmmmmmm I call bullshit. That’s just not how “old routers and switches” work. You don’t get thousands of them simply failing all at once unless there is some sort of systemic change, or a step-function jump in traffic. And they just fucking admitted that’s exactly what happened.
TL;DR: this was just fuckwitted DOGE wunderkind intern idiocy-level antics, which is par for the course for the regime.
I love it. I guess we got “generational change” the conservative way.
Did assholes like Vought enable teenagers and twenty-somethings idiots who claim they “know how to code” (I don’t believe even that, though) to fuck with our ATC, too?
JFC. Why does everything have to be so goddamned stupid? We get something like huge powerful LLMs at the same time fuckwits voted in a disaster like donnie and the Project 2025 nuts and they use all these tools in the stupidest possible way - let people with zero experience and zero wisdom loose on our nation.
So they are patching the live ATC system. That sounds about right.
That link takes me too a different reel every time.
Huh? It works reliably for me…
It takes me to a reel of a dog doing an impression of the Airbus hydraulic PTU, and I don’t mind one bit.
Every penny given in response to this request will go directly into the pockets of conservatives in charge. They’ve already stolen untold billions from taxpayers and they know the spigot will be turned off soon. Expect conservatives to demand money “to fix what Hillary/Obama/Biden broke” everytime their shitshow craps out another disaster.
DOGE cuts everything to save money. Now they ask for more than ever to fix it
Also, they put in people with no experience and no qualifications who in some cases are half the age of the people they are managing.
Fucking braindead.
The officials said they have seen no evidence that the failure was caused by a cyberattack or system failures linked to artificial intelligence, but added that they are still investigating the precise cause of the outage.
If they don’t know the cause of the outage, how can they say $50 billion will fix it?
they’re just ‘guessing’ at this point. another digit or two will be tacked-on to that ‘50’ before a ‘solution’ is ‘found’.
Never let a good crisis go to waste.
As my old chief enterprise architect boss would say, strike while the iron is hot.
Guy is basically trump deep down. The shit he used to say… but the line is just project management 101.
Guess how much they were defunded by dump
Civil aviation infrastructure has been tragically underfunded for decades. Maybe it kicked off when Reagan fired striking air traffic controllers, but a recent article was talking about how a lot of control towers still run off floppy disks.
But maybe that’s also partially explained by “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and tried-and-true is worth more than the latest technology. I mean, jeez, imagine if two planes collided because Windows 11 insisted on installing an update…
Sure, Trump’s probably been the worst of the lot since he’s a Russian plant out to destroy the country by all means possible, but he’s only the head of the pack.
The floppy disk thing is 100% because they had a system which worked, and replacing it would be difficult and expensive to do properly and safely.
Air traffic control has to be designed and built just as carefully as the aircraft themselves, and if a mistake is made it could kill hundreds of people. In that kind of environment, “if it ain’t broke” is a really strong argument.
The floppy disk thing is 100% because they had a system which worked, and replacing it would be difficult and expensive to do properly and safely.
A thumb drive with an emulator of the floppy protocol would be dirt-cheap, and almost certainly more reliable, since floppies are among the shittiest storage media that exist. This is instead the result of deliberate resource starvation and consequent accumulation of decades of technical debt.
Air traffic control has to be designed and built just as carefully as the aircraft themselves
Should be. I worked on ATC systems for over a decade in an earlier phase of my career. Your assertion is only true if the aircraft you’re referring to are DC10s. The languages used, the methodologies used, the protocols, and the hardware and comms systems were no better engineered than anything else from that era. The big difference is process: they test the hell out of those systems before deployment, and build in several layers of redundancy and failover capability. They also regression test any new software releases to an extreme degree, give major attention to rollback, and extensively test that too. And that’s also what drives up the cost of such systems.
At least, that’s what they used to do, and are supposed to do now.
In this case, my guess is that Trump and/or DOGE have cut the staff that did that validation, or may havereplaced them with engineers who didn’t know dick about safety-critical systems. This also may be another case of sabotaging an agency to create a pretext for its privatization.
Also, if they were trying to fit LLM-based AI into the ATC system, the people responsible for that decision should be jailed for life. LLMs are inherently unfit to be used in any decision affection people’s lives, health or livelihoods. If it’s ML, there are some cases where that might be OK, subject to the rigorous testing and process controls I’ve already mentioned.
A couple of facts I can give you, interpolate what you will:
The FAA comms network has been in place since 2013. Those routers were working fine yesterday.
AI gets released, routers no work anymore.
The AI SMART system does not “do” anything, it makes recommendations to ATCs.
My pretty well-informed opinions:
The AI system most likely uses the comm network to distribute those reccos.
It was probably overloaded, with cascading impacts.
Edit: Oh look, I was right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_FAA_ground_stop
The description sounded exactly like a DDoS.
It could also be Ai bullshit though.
You’d be surprised how often DDOSes (?) can be caused my misconfiguration.
Their newfangled AI toy probably flooded the network.
They came up with that number pretty quick.
Take it from ICE.
Bitch, what party controlled both houses, the presidency, and the Supreme Court the past two years?
Seems that they admitted they royaly screwed up a AI rollout.
It’s embarrassing how obvious it was. It felt like I was back in high school listening to someone read a book report on a book they never read. The “it’s not the new stuff. It’s the old stuff” from the white house press briefing.
Dude. They essentially plugged in 100 hair dryers, turned them on at full heat, and then complained that the wiring in the house was old when the circuit breaker tripped. “It’s not the hair dryers fault!”
“All the SI smart system does is send information”
“The outage was caused by the servers being flooded with too much data”
“They aren’t connected in anyway”
They fucking ddosed themselves dude. You can’t make this shit up.
Controlled? They still have a month and a half.
My primary concern is that this money is likely to be given out to no-bid contractors with personal ties to the administration officials handing them out.
The upgrades are actually necessary.
I don’t know. As someone that has worked for Cisco and Microsoft on both routing/switching and cloud/datacenters. I really would put my trust in a system that has been running perfectly fine for decades over anything these companies want to replace it with. There isn’t really any company in the US that doesn’t have ties to this administrations corruption.
The entire tech industry needs to be gutted and the criminals in it need to be rotting in prison before id trust anything to be done right.
I agree our infrastructure needs to be maintained and upgraded. But, holy shit, the flight industry does not need AI. It needs a massive jobs program funded by the government for training.
hard agree it needs to be done, also hard agree that the current administration isn’t competent enough to be able to
Not competent enough and too corrupt. Either would cause the upgrade to fail, but we’ve got the double whammy going on.
They sabotaged it with the new SMART ai systems, then demanded 50B to invest into the AI bubble. They were asking for 30B just before this happened. Shit is so fucked.
