'This Week' Transcript 11-15-26: Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy & Sen. Chris Van Hollen

A rush transcript of "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" airing on Sunday, November 15, 2026 on ABC News is below. This copy may not be in its final form, may be updated and may contain minor transcription errors. For previous show transcripts, visit the "This Week" transcript archive.

MARTHA RADDATZ, ABC “THIS WEEK” CO-ANCHOR:

“The Wall Street Journal” is saying this morning that this began at a remote site in Arkansas. You have explained that a contract worker was replacing old copper wire and bringing it over to fiber and that the replacement router they installed started flooding other routers in our air traffic control system.

How can one single error or faulty piece of equipment at a remote location flood all these other routers?

SEAN DUFFY, TRANSPORTATION SECRETARY:  Yeah, so that's what we're investigating right now. We didn't think that should or would happen. And so, we have that router in the L3Harris lab down in Florida, our FAA team is on site as well. We've been partnering with the FBI and other law enforcement. I want to take a look at what happened there.

But what we've now done, we have 69 of these routers in the national airspace. We've stopped their ability to broadcast, and it was -- this router was broadcasting data from this this radio facility into the whole network. Once we shut the -- shut the ability to broadcast down on the routers, the issue is resolved. So, we're going to take a hard look at it and when I have more information, I'm going to tell the American people what we found in the labs down in Florida.

RADDATZ:  But these were in this remote location was Arkansas and also possibly Texas?

DUFFY:  So, the work was being done in El Dorado, Arkansas. This was -- we were replacing an old copper wire, which by the way, was going to be discontinued. They were going to shut the line down, so we had to do this work.

When we turned that router on, we saw that in Amarillo, Texas, a system we had replaced about three weeks earlier, that started to flood our system as well. So, we're looking at those two issues and trying to find the root cause of what happened. And I don't want to give information before we're certain. That's why we have to go through this investigation and determine why this happened in our network.

But, Martha, I think it's critical just to note that we did have an extraordinary ground stop on Friday. And I want the American people to know that my number one job is to keep them safe. They have to get from point A to point B and without incident. And so, if we see these inconsistencies in the network, whether it's communication with air traffic controllers and pilots or with data feeds, we're going to keep you safe.

And we did the ground stop. We were able to isolate the issue, shut it down. Our network came back online, and from there we opened up the airspace thereafter.

RADDATZ:  You said this definitively was not a cyberattack, which DHS Secretary Mark Wayne Mullen said Friday could not be ruled out. At that point Friday, did you still think it could be a cyberattack?

So, the president had brought a whole-of-government approach to this issue. We had DNI, NSA, CISA, FBI like everybody was on a call together. And our intelligence partners were saying, listen, we're not seeing any of the chatter or the footprints that we would normally see if this was a cyberattack. And so, we felt pretty comfortable that this was an internal network issue that's owned and operated for us by L3Harris, not an outside factor.

We feel pretty good still today that it is -- it's not a -- this is not a hacking event. But if the FBI comes in and says, no, we find something. Obviously, we'll share that with the American people, but we have no indication that this was -- was a hack.

And listen, I get a lot of --

(CROSSTALK)

RADDATZ:  Have you ruled out sabotage?

DUFFY:  -- the Microsoft issue.

RADDATZ:  Have you ruled out sabotage of some sort?

DUFFY:  Well, what we're doing is we're looking at a full suite of issues with the -- with the -- with the router and with the installation. Now, we know who did the install. A good American patriot, we believe, a veteran.

So, we don't think that someone tried to sabotage the network on the install at all. But we don’t -- we don't -- we don’t actually have the root cause, which is why we do the investigation with our L3Harris partner on the network and the FBI and the FAA.

RADDATZ:  Can you give us any sort of possibility how this would happen? I know you're not certain, but it leaves all of us saying, give us some idea how something like this could spread through the entire system.

DUFFY:  Yeah, we're doing that investigation, Martha. But I want to be clear, the world, every institution, every company, they've all switched over from an old copper wire network. They've all gone to digital fiber networks, everybody but the FAA. And so, for decades, there's been underinvestment or no investment in the FAA and the architecture of our infrastructure.

So, we're stuck with an old network. that by the way costs hundreds of millions of dollars to operate because it's so obsolete, and what I'm doing is saying, hey, Congress, this is old. There's issues with how it operates. Let's build a brand-new system.

And this is, by the way, Martha, this will be the one great bipartisan bill that can pass in an era of great partisanship. Everybody agrees that we want to have the best system in the world. We just -- we just need funding to get that done. And I think the Congress can find a way to find the to invest in the economy and air travel and safety. And I hope that before the end of the year, they'll see what happened on Friday and make the critical investment to make sure that we don't see these disruptions again in the future.

RADDATZ:  You know you had an old system. You said that again and again.

DUFFY:  Yeah.

RADDATZ:  Yet you said you didn't anticipate an incident of this nature could happen at this scale. Are you concerned that you and your department do not fully understand what the vulnerabilities are in this system?

DUFFY:  Well, we understand the age of the network. And we -- the work that was done on Friday, that's been done thousands of times by L3Harris in our network. It's been done thousands of times by other companies, and these issues haven’t -- haven’t -- haven't arisen, and so that's why we have to figure out, you know, what went wrong here.

Now, on these routers. this router was broadcasting. And when it broadcast, it was shooting off this data to all of our other routers in the system, which, by the way, Martha, the routers that were experiencing issues, those routers were purchased in 2001, they were obsolete in 2006, and we still use them in 2026, just to underscore how old the network is.

And the mission we have is to fix it. So, again, not knowing -- it's okay to say, let's not get ahead of ourselves. Let's not get over our skis. Let's -- let's be honest and transparent with the American people when we have the information.

But I can tell you this, as of Friday night, we had the network up and running. We -- when we shut down this El Dorado, Arkansas facility, the network came back online and operated like it was supposed to.

RADDATZ:  So how long --

(CROSSTALK)

DUFFY:  -- to say, well, what was the issue with the router? And this worked.

RADDATZ:  Mr. Secretary, just to close out here, how long will it take before things get back to normal?

DUFFY:  So, in the airspace, we're going to see things come back to normal today, but probably fully normal tomorrow. We had airplanes and crews out of position because of Friday, so it takes a little bit of time to do that.

But I'll tell you this, I have AT&T, Verizon and Lumens, the greatest telecom companies in the world. I have an architecture ready to go. We've designed it. They're ready to start working tomorrow.

All we need is the money to say, go build a new network. That would be done by the end of 2028 or possibly the first quarter of 2029. So, we're ready. We've done the work. I just need the money to make the investment to make sure this never happens again.

RADDATZ:  And you know that some members of Congress are saying they already approved $12.5 billion and you haven't used it all. If you can be quick here.

DUFFY:  Let me answer that, Martha. You're right. I'll be quick.

The Congress was very specific on how we spend the money. They gave me money for tower -- for radios, money for radar, money for systems. But I don't have any money in that $12.5 billion for a new architecture for telecom. I don't have any money given by Congress to build a new software system to manage the airspace.

They’re very specific on how we spend the 12.5 and none of the money goes to this telecom that I have to build. So, they need to give me additional money to finish that project. By the way, the 12.5 billion will all be spent and deployed by the end of 2028. We're building at an amazing speed that's happening safely, but 12.5 billion is not nearly enough to fix a system that has been neglected for decades.

RADDATZ:  Okay. Thanks for joining us this morning, Mr. Secretary. We appreciate it.

DUFFY:  Thanks, Martha.