Ari Emanuel Blames Buttigieg for FAA Failure as Flights Ground to a Halt

A nationwide FAA ground stop froze air traffic Friday, and Ari Emanuel went straight for Pete Buttigieg. The WME executive chairman posted on X that Buttigieg had four years as transportation secretary and infrastructure money, yet made zero progress modernizing the FAA. “You left a failing system in place. THANKS!” he wrote.

Buttigieg left the job at the end of the Biden administration. Current transportation secretary Sean Duffy addressed the public Friday evening, right after the stop was lifted, and pointed at Congress for modernization money. “I can’t build things if I don’t have money,” Duffy said. He added that people should tell their senators and members of Congress, “We don’t deserve this.”

Duffy conceded that upgrades already underway may have injected instability into air traffic control. Still, he argued the alternative is worse: “By doing nothing, you inject way more risk into the system.” And he admitted the outage caught him off guard. “I didn’t anticipate that we would have an outage like this.”

Emanuel’s tweet pulled more than 3,000 replies, most of them pushing back. One commenter wrote that the FAA has been “a burning dumpster fire since Duffy stepped into office.” Another asked whether his account had been hacked; a third accused him of attacking a rival of his brother Rahm Emanuel, who is seen as angling for a presidential bid.

Buttigieg, meanwhile, was stranded at Denver’s airport. After watching the press conference from Duffy and Markwayne Mullin, he told the New York Times, “You can just write down the comic book asterisk swearing characters.” He added, “I have questions.”