this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2026
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50 BILLION!? Like with a "B"? The highest end 24 port switch and router is around $500 and $300 respectively. Let's just round that up to $1000 each to make it wven more expensive. Plus $1000 to do the install work for those two devices (which would be highway robbery). Let's say every single airport needs 100 each of these switch and router sets, which is also a ridiculous number. That is $200,000 per airport of were are overstocking and overpaying for routers and switches. For $1 Billion, then, you could fully supply and install 100 sets of brand new switches and routers to 5000 airports. There are only 3287 airports under the FAA's National Plan flof Integrate Airport Systems. So let's say the other 1713 airports worth is used in military airports, even though that is outside the FAA preview. So... where is the other $49 Billion going!?
That is such a ridiculously huge unrealistic number. There is no way that, if granted, this will just be used to line the pockets of some Billionaire donor(s) or friend of Duffy and/or Trump.
NOTE: My wife, who supplies technology needs to law firms for a living said that she might actually estimate the cost to upgrade routers and switches per airport at 500,000 each due to square footage. And maybe double that if they're upgrading dedicated internet circuits too. So her absolutely highest dollar is $1 million per airport. That's still only $3.3 billion. $46.7 billion still unaccounted for.
Son-in-law of Duffy.
Hm, right there in Project 2025:
Require the FAA to operate more like a business. The FAA has not made good use of the unique authority it has been given in areas like personnel and acquisition.
Ronnie Raygun had it wrong. The scariest words in the English language are "make $GOVERNMENT_AGENCY operate more like a business".
NO. Fuck no.
Once again, America is learning tyranny is partially about the malevolence and corruption, but mostly about the incompetence.
Take it from DHS.
I’m sure it had nothing to do with rolling out your AI start ups shitty software onto the aging system. A system that never had an outage like this in decades. Just a weird coincidence. 🙄
Oh look, more Republican theft! Any bets on which relation of his owns the company that will get the $50B contract?
Son-in-law.
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.
No doubt he divested from all the airlines first.
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.
Exactly. Came here to say this. I work for an ISP, That’s definitely bullshit he’s spouting. The 50 billion is mostly gonna go to fixing that shitty AI They implemented.
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.
This is one of the things that damages my calm the most - the bad guys aren’t even fucking competent, but nobody else is either so their plan is fucking working
So they are patching the live ATC system. That sounds about right.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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They came up with that number pretty quick.
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.
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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.
Upgrading the nation’s flight control system, 2 weeks before America’s biggest travel season, to an AI solution backed by a Real World: Season 6 cast member.
What could possibly go wrong?
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