President Donald Trump on Sunday broke his silence on the nationwide ground stop that snarled airline travel over the weekend, using the incident to press Congress for money to fully upgrade America's air traffic control system. The Republican president had been conspicuously quiet on the stop since it began on Friday afternoon, instead posting on social media about unrelated topics while frustrated passengers were left stranded at airports and his government scrambled with airlines to restore normal travel.

In a new post, Trump said his administration has begun upgrading the system but that the task should not be done in "drips and drabs." He wrote that "if Congress approves the desperately needed money for Air Traffic Control, we can get it built quickly and efficiently," adding that much of the current system is 50 years old. Congress approved $12.5 billion for the Federal Aviation Administration last year as part of the party's sweeping tax cut package, but Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has repeatedly described that money as a down payment on a broader overhaul.S2

Trump also criticised the administration of his Democratic predecessor, Joe Biden, accusing it of making an "old and broken system worse." Biden signed a major infrastructure bill in his first year that set aside $25 billion for the FAA to improve airports and traffic control towers, according to the agency.S2

Duffy was the administration's public face on the stop across the Sunday news shows. He said contractor L3Harris Technologies Inc. had secured two routers from FAA facilities in Texas and Arkansas and was conducting "deep diagnostics" on the equipment. He has said the problem began when L3Harris was replacing old copper wire with new fiber wire at a site in El Dorado, Arkansas, which appeared to overload the system; after the router was turned on, a problem then emerged at a facility in Amarillo, Texas, cascading into the ground stop.S2

Speaking to CBS's "Face the Nation," Duffy said there were still some delays in the airspace, but that he expected operations to run at full capacity by the end of the day and into Monday.S2