I’ve been looking at a variety of articles on Trump’s latest Tweetstorm about cancelling Boeing’s contract to build two new planes for the Air Force One program, and I can’t find any corroboration for his claim that the contract has ballooned to the four billion dollar range.
Boeing is building a brand new 747 Air Force One for future presidents, but costs are out of control, more than $4 billion. Cancel order!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 6, 2016
His tweet makes it sound like Boeing is building a single plane, but they’re actually looking to replace both of the Air Force One planes. They won the contract back in January, which surprised no one because the only other bidder was Airbus. Does Donald Trump want to make America great again by having the French build our president’s planes?
One requirement is that the planes have four engines for added safety, but even Boeing is phasing out four-engine planes due to lack of sales. They’re basically only used for cargo flights these days because the two-engine models are more fuel-efficient.
Once Boeing won the bid, they received an initial contract for $25.8 million to investigate ways to increase safety and reduce costs. Then in July, Boeing was awarded a second contract for $127.3 million to “reduce the risk of delays and cost overruns before the USAF commits to full-scale development and procurement.” Prior to that, the Air Force announced an overall budget of $1.65 billion for the two planes. Bloomberg took an initial look at Trump’s claim and came up empty: “Trump didn’t specify where the $4 billion figure came from. The Air Force has budgeted about $1.6 billion through 2019.”
Maybe Trump has information that is unavailable to our best news sources, but the planes are supposed to cost about $800 million each, not $2 billion each, as Trump’s tweet suggests. It’s hard to see how there could have been cost overruns this significant in so short a time, especially since the deliverable date isn’t until 2024 and the contracts that have been awarded so far add up to barely more than $150 million.
JUST IN: Boeing issues statement on Air Force One. https://t.co/TGMGUaWBm7 pic.twitter.com/havQhrxOeY
— CNBC Now (@CNBCnow) December 6, 2016
Of course, the contract could well be cancelled now that the president-elect has recommended it. Boeing’s stock began to plummet immediately. But, again, the only alternative to Boeing is Airbus, and Airbus is already looking to poach Boeing business from China if Trump follows through with belligerant anti-Chinese polices (as he has already begun to do).
They could scrap the plan to replace the planes altogether. But there are reasons that they are being replaced.
“Parts obsolescence, diminishing manufacturing sources and increased downtimes for maintenance are existing challenges that will increase until a new aircraft is fielded,” Col. Amy McCain, manager of the Presidential Aircraft Recapitalization program, in a statement at the time.
The current planes will be almost 35 years old by 2024. Trump’s fleet of planes are also reaching old age:
The New York Times reported last April that four of Trump’s five aircraft are more than 20 years old, which is rare for someone of the president-elect’s wealth. According to the Times, Trump’s largest, and favorite, aircraft from the fleet is his 1991 Boeing 757, which has brushed 24-karat gold fixtures and leather toilet seats.
I suspect that Stephen Bannon is behind Trump’s attack on Boeing, but, per usual, it doesn’t seem to be reality-based.
It looks like pablum for the hoi polloi. In Trumpworld, corporate stocks are playthings that are easily sacrificed for the opportunity to play at faux-populism.
Makes sense to me.
Boeing is Washington State. Washington state is Seattle + North Alabama. Seattle is $15/hr minimum wage and making it stick. Trump and Bannon and the rest of the right wing crew firmly believe that the minimum wage is unconstitutional/bad for business.
If Bannon can emasculate Seattle they can claim “see? Too high wages hurt business. Seattle brought it on themselves”
Kill the economy for political expedience.
Boeing is headquartered in Chicago these days. Of course it still manufactures stuff in Washington, as well as plenty of other places.
Booman,
If you truly believe that Trump and Bannon know (or care) where Boeing is headquartered NOW, I’ve got land in SE Louisiana I’d like to talk to you about.
Including China.
Good catch. He’s punishing that local economy because he got least votes there.
How dare they not recognise the Trumperor!
“In Trumpworld, corporate stocks are playthings that are easily sacrificed for the opportunity to play at faux-populism.”
I gotta talk to my broker.this shit is nuts.
Militarist America is not too used to seeing Prezes rip on defense contractors, if for nothing else AG’s Permagov(tm) theory applies. So here we have Der Trumper conflating traditional welfare claims of waste fraud and abuse with our beloved MIC, apparently for reasons of rightwing populism, as you conjecture. Or perhaps as a route to demanding concessions at some later date over much bigger defense contracts.
Der Trumper is going to find out at some point that federal procurement regs do not easily permit “cancel order!” for bogus reasons, as he as spent his fraudulent bizness life doing to Mom n’ Pop suppliers. Boeing’s lawyers have protected Boeing well, I will bet.
To the extent Der Trumper suspects that his Government-By-Tweet can fraudulently affect the stock price of his daily target (chosen for God knows what reason), this is government blackmail—and about what we can expect from a political criminal, which is what Der Trumper is increasingly looking like. (Note: this was the term that Hitler’s brave journalist opponents applied to the Fuhrer wannabe before they were all jailed and killed; we can’t expect this sort of bravery by our useless village lapdogs).
As we watch the insanity with the nauseating offspring of our new nutball National Security Advisor over “Pizzagate”, the first recourse that comes to mind is libel law, as this is certainly malice. Suits for slander will be something that private citizens (even corporate ones) will have to examine in dealing with the lying blackmail regime of Der Trumper and Gruppenfuhrer Bannon. The subject of Pizzagate, Podesta, needs to sue this reckless tweeting Gen’l Flynn Jr for defamation, today. It has the added bonus of being something that Der Tweeter hisself yapped about while on campaign, so hard for Team Fascist to complain about it now.
We need some of these early victims of Trumperism to start fighting before the mold is set in stone.
You write:
Actually, the “mold” is already set in stone, apparently. In the stone of the permanent government, and not the mold that you meant.
This kind of mold.
Here:
And here, too:
At best, Trump ias trying to shake that mold up. Maybe even trying to lessen it.
At worst, he is trying to replace it with his own mold.
We shall see, soon enough.
Meanwhile…he is certainly doing some effective shaking and he isn’t even in office yet!
Watch.
More to follow.
Every news cycle.
Watch.
AG
Is that third photo supposed to be the White House? It isn’t.
My error. The idea still stands, though. Maybe even better. A faux White House, maybe?
Sorry…
AG
He really zeroed in on the key part of your argument, AG. Yep, faking a pic, nothing worse than that.
If Trump himself doesn’t know (and who could tell, really), there might be someone on his transition team who is feeding stuff to Trump in order to enrich themselves. Bad-mouthing from the president-elect is a pretty sure way for a company’s stock price to go down; did anyone on Team Trump borrow a few thousand shares of Boeing to sell at the pre-tweet price and buy it back at the post-tweet price? Would anyone know? Would anyone care?
Yeah, I thought something like that as well when I read this. I have no clue how tuned in Trump, himself, is to securities, the values, rigging the system for his own benefit. But as these tweets keep rolling, some of them seem pretty specific. Makes me wonder if some of Trump’s (really, Bannon’s) shadow cabinet have their heads together figuring out various ways and means to cash in this grift.
Nothing would surprise me.
Bannon and Mnuchin both know how to short stock. Are either of them engaged in trading these days?
those are certainly important, valid and obvious questions.
A responsible, functional Fourth Estate would obviously be looking into them strenuously.
Therefore (since we currently lack such a Fourth Estate), I’d be pleasantly surprised to see any media followup of those obvious questions at all.
Is Trump doing his Congressional buddies a favor? Remember, it’s perfectly legal for Congress to engage in insider trading.
Bingo — that’s exactly what I thought when I saw this story. It’s:
FWIW, NBC says Trump is likely correct about the final price tag.
http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/trump-threatens-cancel-air-force-one-order-boeing-stoc
k-slips-n692511?cid=sm_fb
are beyond comprehension.
Specification creep. Inability to deliver on time on budget. Development of insane weapons like the new cannon on the warship that cannot be used because it costs $1 million per round to fire the piece of crap.
Cancel all weapons. Respecify and redesign the design process.
EVERY SINGLE RECENT WEAPON has been a total fail.
F-35 – loses in dogfights to previous planes, the “joint strike fighter” notion is a total fail, its a horrible blunder.
The million dollar round for the Zumwalt? “The move comes just two weeks after the Navy commissioned the U.S.S. Zumwalt, the next generation of the Navy’s guided missile destroyer program. The scrapped Long Range Land-Attack Projectile (LRLAP) fired from the Zumwalt would be capable of hitting targets up to 80 miles away. Lockheed Martin claims the rounds are so accurate they can “defeat targets in the urban canyons of coastal cities with minimal collateral damage.”
They can’t fire the fucker. So they can’t practice. It’s so accurate that it can’t be used.
So much criticism for Trump. Thus far, he is making smart decisions, because the conventional “wisdom” shows that wise men are morons.
This has been going on for a long, long time, dataguy.
Military waste, incompetence and outright corruption. Up and down the entire system.
It’s what happened in Korea.
It’s what happened in Viet Nam.
It’s what happened in Iraq.
In Afghanistan, too.
It’s what hapened during the time that Mao Zedong called the U.S. a “Paper Tiger.”
It was beginning to happen during W.W. II…that’s what “Catch 22” was all about.
Eisenhower saw it…up close and personal as a commanding general during W. W. II. He tried to warn us in his “Military Industrial Complex” farewell speech..
He failed.
And now here we jolly well are, aren’t we.
Time to wake the fuck up or go sleep with the fishes.
Yes it is.
Bet on it.
AG
P.S. Trump is a paper tiger as well.
Watch.
All growl and no real teeth, even as president.
Cry and sulk? He wins
Meanwhile…he rules the schoolyard.
Effectively resist?
He crumbles.
Just like every other bully.
Yeah, true. But recently, in the last 10 years, the dysfunction, schlerotic stupidity, venality, built-in bribery, are entirely out of control.
During WWII, weapons were designed and built in a very short time. The weapons were primitive compared to today. But they did the job.
Today, it takes decades to build a plane. The costs go from insane to unfathomable.
The process is today insane. Consider the F-35, the joint strike fighter. For political purposes, parts are constructed in each and every congressional district. Thus, the time to fix a problem in a part is huge, and no one knows who is running the process.
The design specs have been downloaded and stolen by enemy agents. Thus, not only is is a fucking boondoggle with huge excessive costs, it may already be vulnerable to countermeasures. This probably happened because we use foreign agents like H-1Bs in many corporations.
Washington (CNN)Sen. John McCain slammed the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter’s troubled history Tuesday, saying it “has been both a scandal and a tragedy with respect to cost, schedule and performance.”
The development of the Joint Strike Fighter, a fifth-generation stealth jet, has been beset by spiraling costs and schedule delays. The program’s price tag is nearly $400 billion for 2,457 planes — almost twice the initial estimate.
Each plane costs $163,000,000.
The US budget for schools is about 500 billion dollars. We are spending about the same for 2437 planes that we spend to educate all children in the US K-12.
And remind me again why we should continue this process?
You write:
Dunno about why we should continue this process. We shouldn’t, of course.
But why we do continue it?? (If “we”is the operative word here, of course.)
“We” have no choice in the matter. As Tonto is rumored to have replied to the Lone Ranger when under attack by Native Americans…”Who ‘we,’ white man?”
Who “we,” Big Government? That question is now being asked throughout the so-called “developed” world.
Massive graft is spent to make the problem disappear. No one really knows how many trillions of dollars have magically “disappeared” from various U.S. federal entities…Defense Department included…over the past 50 years.
No one knows. Not the accusers and not the debunkers. But where there’s smoke, there’s fire, without a doubt.
The CIA’s entire budget is “secret.” How secret? Do you think Obama got the real lowdown? Please!!! Plausible denial is the tactic.
The Federal Reserve has apparently never been audited. Certainly not by anyone outside of its own system. Would you use a bank that consistently refused to be audited? Of course not!!! But…as I said…we have no choice in the matter.
The Defense Department? How many $300 wrenches and $400 toilet seats does it take before people begin to wonder about multi-million dollar airplanes and billion dollar…oh, SO Top Secret!!!…technologies?
And so it goes…
Right down the multi-trillion dollar toilet.
Trump?
He’s just trying to get in on the real money. The big game action.
Bet on it. (He is.)
Trump will go down in history as one of the most successful grifters to ever fleece a population.
Watch.
AG
Criticizing Der Trumper is hardly defending the Pentagon–they can both be in the wrong, and likely this will be the default position! Here, the Madman is engaging in ambush stock manipulation by tweet, and proto-government by tweet. No one can ask any questions of a tweet, it’s just a unilateral pronouncement from the Office of Strongman to reinforce the “Shakin’ It Up!” meme. This is abusive and likely does portend his future “management” methods. A tweet, of course, cannot usually demonstrate whether a claim is right or wrong. And peddling inaccuracies and falsehoods is Trumper’s stock in trade.
I doubt that many here will be standing up to defend actual executive efforts to cancel the bloated spending on any of the needless and wrongheaded weapons systems you detail. But of course, Der Tweeter is not challenging any of them–if that’s what the American Madman actually plans to do, I will wish him well.
But since he ran on a massive buildup of American military power, including absurdities like a 350 ship navy (and this is also exactly what the party controlling Congress wishes to do as well), I have to say I have my doubts, haha. And since the American military is also a (very) high cost jobs program for “working people”, any serious cuts will run counter to Der Trumper’s promises on that front as well.
Booman’s post highlights the danger should Trump actually be the anti-corporatist he pretends to be.
Are we really talking about poor victim Boeing, a company that has made ten’s of billions on defense contracts?
I wrote a post about how Trump exposed a fault line on China.
This post highlights another one.
Because if this is our response to moves like this we are going to get our clocks cleaned.
ANYone is defending the Pentagon is beyond my comprehension.
From today’s WP:
“The Pentagon has buried an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste in its business operations amid fears Congress would use the findings as an excuse to slash the defense budget, according to interviews and confidential memos obtained by The Washington Post.
Pentagon leaders had requested the study to help make their enormous back-office bureaucracy more efficient and reinvest any savings in combat power. But after the project documented far more wasteful spending than expected, senior defense officials moved swiftly to kill it by discrediting and suppressing the results.”
Billions of dollars in cost overruns. Weapons that don’t fucking work. Sending our weapons technology to India. WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON THERE?
And why did it take a total idiot like Trump to call them on this bullshit? If he is such a fucking moron, why is this such a smart move?
the Pentagon here?
Nothing like that’s jumping out at me in this thread.
Instead, what’s jumping out at me looks like a classic threadjack.
By you.
Pentagon waste on weapons systems is certainly a worthy topic.
Just hard (for me anyway) to see what it’s doing in a sub-thread to this particular top-post.
But probably I just missed some obvious relevance!
And beyond that, the report that the Pentagon “buried” was a fucking clown show. I’m sure there’s plenty of waste in the Pentagon. Insufficient actualization of on-demand cloud best practice monitoring via TPS report is not the source.
Honestly, nobody bothers to fucking read anything anymore as long as it lets them mount up on their little hobby horses. We wonder why there’s such a problem with viral fake news?
Boeing must have done something to piss Donny Short Hands off….. or he’s trying to negotiate a big discount on his next personal plane.
The MSM is burying the real story, except it’s leaked out in the Washington Post and on Jake Tapper’s program. Neither credited, the original source, Talkingpointsmemo.
In short, 23 minutes before that Tweet the Chicago Tribune published an article with a headline that had the Boeing CEO expressing concern about Trump’s China policy, since Boeing sells a LOT of aircraft to China.
Now you get it?
Of course, the MSM will perform whatever unnatural act is needed to rationalize Trump. This is being sold as a “cost cutting” measure. Trump has complained that AF One isn’t as nice as his planes. Actually, AF One has state of the art communications (upgraded since the pair of jets that alternate as “AF One” were built) as well as a wide range of special defensive weaponry. However, the gold and gilt are lacking. Trump doesn’t want to use AF One any more than he wants to sleep in the White House.
Nice little company you got here. It’d be a shame if anything happened to it….
The first Trump rule….always look for the grift.
His administration will be full of grifters, and now they have been shown a tweet makes a stock tumble.
.
Boeing has also offshored to China parts of the construction of their planes.
I can’t believe liberals are actually defending poor little Boeing.
Unbelievable.
The Trump Insanity Factor is pretty much the explanation. Whenever Trump does something, liberals begin to froth at the mouth, and the thought process goes out the window.