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Duffy Highlights the One Big Beautiful Bill at Duluth's Air Traffic Control Tower, Aug. 10, 2025

August 10, 2025 · US Department of Transportation · 0:24:05

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy visited the air traffic control tower at Duluth, Minnesota, in the Department of Transportation’s August 10, 2025 upload, highlighting how the One Big Beautiful Bill delivered a critical down payment to begin building an all-new air traffic control system, as the department’s description states the occasion. Duffy — who opened by congratulating NASA’s Crew-10 on its safe splashdown, noting his dual role — said he had flown out of the airport often as a northern Wisconsin native but had not realized how old the tower was: a facility built in the 1950s, still working with technology from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, as he described it.

He restated the funding frame as he stated the figures: Congress gave $12.5 billion as a down payment; the full need is $31.5 billion, covering new radar, voice switches, radios, and telecom — copper wire replaced by fiber — with much of the balance in the bricks and mortar of towers, TRACONs, and centers. On the current replacement pace, he said, rebuilding every tower, center, and TRACON would take 360 years, as he stated the figure. For Duluth itself, he committed the department to partner with state and local government to find the resources to build the airport’s planned new tower — potentially, as he put it, one of the first state-of-the-art towers in the country. On staffing, he put the controller shortage at about 3,000, described the academy’s shift to highest-scored applicants first to cut the 35 percent washout rate toward 20 to 25 percent, and repeated the 20 percent upfront bonus for retirement-age controllers who stay on, as he stated the measures.

Why it matters

Duluth is the local face of the modernization argument Duffy carried all summer: one 1950s tower standing in for a national system whose replacement pace he priced at 360 years, a named partnership commitment to replace it, and the staffing pipeline — academy washout rates and retention bonuses — treated as part of the same build.

Scoreboard watch

Scoreboard watch: the department’s commitment, stated at Duluth on August 10, 2025, to partner on funding the airport’s planned new control tower. Flagged for the scoreboard editor; no entry is published from this page.

Sources: U.S. Department of Transportation, “Secretary Duffy Hosts Press Conference on One Big Beautiful Bill and Air Traffic Control” (official upload, embedded above; description places Secretary Duffy in Duluth, Minnesota). Remarks and figures as delivered by Secretary Duffy at the event.