As Pete Buttigieg attempts to stand up a 2028 presidential campaign by growing a patchy beard, he might want to consider that his record could be a major liability. 

On Wednesday, it was revealed that a key hotline between the Pentagon and the air traffic control at Washington National Airport has been inoperative since 2022. But what would have been a mundane failure turned deadly in January when a military helicopter collided with a regional airliner, killing 67 people. That phone line would have typically been used by the Department of Defense to report when its aircraft were in the vicinity and what their intentions were.

SEE: What the Latest, Shocking Video of the DCA Mid-Air Collision Appears to Show

A hotline connecting air traffic controllers at Reagan National Airport and their counterparts at the Pentagon has been “inoperable” since March 2022, a Federal Aviation Administration official confirmed Wednesday, further evidence of poor safety coordination between federal agencies responsible for the airspace where a midair collision in January killed 67 people.

The line is maintained by the Defense Department, and the aviation agency was not aware of the outage during the three years it was down, Franklin McIntosh, the FAA’s deputy head of air traffic control, testified at a Senate hearing Wednesday. Aviation officials discovered the hotline wasn’t working after May 1, when controllers at National ordered two passenger jets to abandon landings because an Army helicopter was circling nearby at the Pentagon.

Hotlines between adjoining air traffic control sectors and airport towers are common across the national airspace to help with coordination, and the line to the Pentagon would have served the same purpose. Who was in charge in 2022 when it went offline and then spent the next three years not being repaired? That would be Pete Buttigieg, whose most notable action as transportation secretary was taking a long "paternity leave" without letting the public know he was leaving his job as a cabinet official for several months.

Now, we know why Buttigieg rushed to blame the Trump administration after the January crash. 

Despicable. As families grieve, Trump should be leading, not lying. We put safety first, drove down close calls, grew Air Traffic Control, and had zero commercial airline crash fatalities out of millions of flights on our watch.
President Trump now oversees the military and the…

— Pete Buttigieg (@PeteButtigieg) January 30, 2025

Was putting "safety first" allowing something as simple as a coordination line to remain down for three years without even attempting to fix it? It was also a complete falsehood to insinuate that the people Trump put on leave had anything to do with air traffic control and the crash at DCA. The former mayor turned do-nothing cabinet official was desperately trying to shift the narrative before revelations like the above.

What Buttigieg even did in his position is a total mystery. I can't think of a single accomplishment, but he sure did spend a lot of time on television defending Biden on political grounds. And he wants to be president? Not in this lifetime. If anything, there's a lot left to expose about him, so he'd best buckle up.

As to getting this important hotline fixed, the Trump administration was made aware of the outage on May 1st, and the Pentagon has decided to cease all flights in the corridors around DCA until the repairs are done. Why is it this complicated to get what is essentially a phone line up and running? Well, that's the federal government for you.

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