Gov. Kathy Hochul called on U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to resign or be fired after a communications failure grounded all flights across the country Friday, leading to thousands of flight cancellations and delays that continued well into Saturday.
“Sean Duffy must resign, or President Trump must remove him immediately,” the governor said in a statement Saturday morning.
“From chronic air traffic controller shortages to repeated communications breakdowns, serious lapses in our aviation system have become a pattern on Sean Duffy’s watch.”
The governor, who has been battling Duffy for years over transportation funding, said the secretary has been “more focused on starring in his own reality show,” a reference to a YouTube series Duffy filmed that followed his travels across the country with his wife, Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy, and their nine children.
The Federal Aviation Administration halted flights nationwide Friday afternoon, citing a telecommunications outage. The stoppage was lifted later that evening, but still resulted in more than 7,500 flights being canceled and another 25,000 delayed, according to FlightAware.
On Saturday morning Duffy told reporters that a contractor working for the FAA was switching “telecommunications lines from old copper wire and they were bringing it over to fiber” at an undisclosed, “remote” location. The shutdown apparently flooded the system’s routers causing alarm at the FAA.
“When we see that, your safety is paramount,” Duffy said. “We shut down the airspace.”
Hochul called for a congressional investigation into the causes before the start of the holiday travel rush, but said Duffy had to go now.
New York’s Democratic leadership has been feuding with Trump’s transportation department for years over air safety and transportation funding.
The Trump Administration has repeatedly gone after public transportation funding in New York and been shut down in court. Duffy’s agency has moved to kill Manhattan’s congestion pricing program, funding for theSecond Avenue subway and funding for the construction of new train tunnels under the Hudson.
In May 2025 a shortage of air traffic control personnel led to delays, confusion and chaos at the region’s airports. Sen. Chuck Schumer said at the time that Duffy’s department had “has failed spectacularly” in regard to safety.
Just last month, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was among a group of 25 lawmakers who asked Duffy and the FAA to pause the rollout of a new AI-enabled air traffic management tool called “Strategic Management of Airspace, Routes, and Trajectories.” The new tool was built through a “12-year, $875 million contract,” according to the lawmakers’ letter, but they argued “there has been little transparency” about how the tool was tested.
Duffy said Friday that the tool had nothing to do with the outage, calling the two “completely disconnected.”
The White House referred questions to the transportation department Saturday. The Department of Transportation did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
