Those of us who teach classes in public administration routinely include lessons on what is called “regulatory capture.” That’s jargon for the “coziness” that often develops between regulators and those whom they regulate.
The more technical and “exclusive” the area being regulated, the easier it is for employees of the government agency charged with oversight, and the representatives of enterprises they are overseeing to become comfortable with each other, and to develop a trusting relationship.
The concern, of course, is that it gets too trusting, and that the oversight intended to protect the public becomes too lax.
Regulatory capture is generally not intentional–familiarity leads to comfort, and things slip between the cracks. But of course, there are also situations in which lax enforcement is, shall we say, more calculated. The question being asked in the wake of two Boeing aircraft crashes, and reports that the FAA allowed Boeing to “self-certify” the safety of its aircraft, is: which kind are we dealing with?
According to the Washington Post, Boeing and the government have long had a “special relationship.”
As a top economic adviser to President Bill Clinton, Dorothy Robyn was charged with advancing America’s aerospace industry.
Part of the job was not choosing sides between companies. But there was one exception: Boeing.
“It was the one company for which I could be an out-and-out advocate,” Robyn said Thursday. In competitions between American companies, the administration as a rule remained neutral. But Boeing’s commercial airplane division employed tens of thousands of Americans and its prime competition, Airbus, was in Europe.
“In the engines business, you can’t choose between GE and Pratt & Whitney. With Boeing, that’s it. They’re ours. It is the only sector where we have a de facto national champion and you can be an out-and-out advocate for it.”
That “special relationship” has existed for decades. Boeing makes the planes that fly as Air Force One. A former Boeing executive, Patrick M. Shanahan, was tapped by Trump to be acting defense secretary after the resignation of Jim Mattis, despite the fact that he had no prior government experience. Boeing’s business is so dependent on federal government policies that the company spent $15.1 million last year on approximately 100 Washington lobbyists.
Boeing booked a record $101.1 billion in 2018 revenue, up 13 percent from the year before, and analysts say about a quarter of that was from government contracts. In 2017, Boeing received an estimated $23.3 billion in taxpayer-funded contract awards, not including classified military funding. And its joint ventures with Lockheed Martin and Bell Helicopter Textron received $2.2 billion and $2.5 billion, respectively, in federal contract funding in 2017….
Daniel Auble, a senior researcher at the Center for Responsive Politics, called Boeing “an excellent illustration” of the “the undue influence of money in our political system.”
In the wake of the two crashes, Congress has demanded answers about FAA oversight of Boeing, including why the FAA didn’t ground the company’s planes until regulators in Europe, China, Australia and elsewhere had done so.
Some FAA personnel have complained that the agency has given Boeing too much responsibility for its own safety checks. Concerns about a lack of rigorous oversight–especially as reports have emerged about Boeing’s “rush” to beat a rival and deliver these aircraft–is only the most recent evidence that warnings about the company’s “cozy” relationship with the government are not misplaced.
The close relationship between the Pentagon and Boeing is part of a long-standing revolving-door culture in which senior defense officials move back and forth between jobs in government and with defense contractors.
In 2004, Darleen Druyun, a high-ranking Air Force procurement official, was sentenced to prison after she admitted that she approved a purchase of 100 refueling airplanes from Boeing at an inflated price of about $20 billion to enhance her job prospects with the company. She also leaked proprietary pricing information from a competitor and helped Boeing secure a separate $4 billion as a thank you for hiring her daughter and future son-in-law.
According to Bloomberg (link unavailable)
In one previously unreported case involving a separate aircraft program, a Boeing engineer sued three years ago, claiming he was fired for flagging safety problems that might have slowed development. Boeing has denied the claims.
If the investigations now underway find evidence that regulatory oversight was lax–whether due to an excess of trust or something worse–it will be yet another item on the growing list of reasons other countries no longer feel they can trust us.
As airlines cancel several billion dollars of orders for Boeing airplanes, and the company’s stock tanks, the livelihoods of Boeing’s 153,027 employees are at risk. The economic consequences for the whole country could be very ugly.
America is about to get a lesson that our anti-government Republicans won’t like: effective regulation and oversight are essential to economic stability and growth, and only government can provide it.
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