COMMUNITY United States Politics Thread: Trump's Second Term

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It'll Cost About $31 Billion To Fix America's Airports And It All Might Go To Elon Musk - Jalopnik

In three years, air traffic controllers will move from tracking planes with handwriting on paper strips to computer terminals.
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Despite the Trump administration's obsession with reducing federal spending and recklessly gutting the government, the White House is seemingly willing to spare no expense to get this done and is successfully begging Congress for the money. According to Politico, the House Transportation Committee approved $12.5 billion to modernize air traffic control. However, Committee Chair Sam Graves stated that the massive sum was only a "down payment." The Modern Skies Coalition estimates that it will cost $31 billion. The group advocates for industry modernization and includes nearly the entire industry in some capacity, from aerospace giant Boeing to the Teamsters.
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There's a plan and there's a vague price tag, so who's going to do the work? President Donald Trump phoned into Duffy's press conference to state that the administration wants to award only a single contract for the entire project. According to FlightGlobal, He said through Duffy's smartphone:

"The ancient infrastructure is buckling. We'd like to give out one big beautiful contract, where they are responsible for everything from digging ditches to the most-complicated stuff."
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It seems like a recipe for disaster to hand out a single contract for this massive project. Trump said that they were already in talks with multiple bidders, so it's not out of the realm of possibility that SpaceX is bidding for the $31 billion contract. Elon Musk's private space company was tasked by the President in January to diagnose the problems with air traffic control. In February, the FAA also awarded a contract to Starlink to be its new backbone for weather information transmissions. This just seems like another opportunity to shovel money into Musk's bank account.
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