Show Notes
Boeing Co. has had more than its share of struggles in the past few years. The airplane and aerospace manufacturing giant has become a national joke owing to quality problems on its commercial aircraft that resulted in bolts missing or loose on cabin doors and other mishaps. Most recently, Boeing is being called to account by Congress for problems related to the Starliner, which recently got stuck at the International Space Station.
For Peter Schweizer, host of The Drill Down, Boeing’s problems are personal. He grew up in the Seattle area, where his father, an immigrant from Switzerland, worked as an engineer at Boeing for more than 30 years designing wing flaps and the hydraulic components that operate them. Boeing in the 1970s and 1980s was a different company, before its merger with aerospace company McDonnell-Douglas, but he remembers a proud company pursuing excellence and innovation in everything it did.
Co-host Eric Eggers also comes from a family that counts three men who worked for both NASA and Lockheed Martin.
The story of how Boeing and NASA have lost sight of the drive for excellence is a cautionary tale for an America obsessed with “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) policies that are imposed by the federal government, the hosts discuss on the most recent episode.
Astronauts are currently stuck at the space station because of hydrogen leaks on the Starliner craft that is there to bring them back to Earth. Last-minute computer problems were blamed for an earlier launch that had to be scrubbed.
A Wall Street Journal story on June 18th reported on Boeing CEO Daniel Calhoun’s appearance before Congress to apologize for his company’s role in safety problems that led to two crashes of the company’s 737 MAX jets.
“We were told engineers at Boeing and NASA were ‘racing’ to fix the problems on the Starliner… but then they took the day off for Juneteenth,” Eggers said.
What has happened?
According to Schweizer, two things are causing the loss of focus on safety and producing the highest possible quality of products. First is cronyism and corruption within the world of defense contractors. Boeing is a major defense contractor, which requires the company to invest heavily in “government relations” work to manage its federal contracts and influence important policy makers and legislators in negotiations over its many government contracts.
Second is the government’s policies since the Obama administration that force all government contractors to meet diversity hiring goals or risk losing their contracts. “Boeing’s problems are because they’re focused on things other than safety,” Schweizer said.
The company’s own performance metrics for its senior executives, as late as 2021, were “product safety, employee safety, and quality.” In 2022, according to a filing by the company, “we will add two other focus areas critical to our long-range business plan: climate and diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&l).” Boeing also noted in a separate filing that executive compensation is tied directly to these new goals.
The problem becomes apparent when you understand that the federal government is requiring this focus. Large companies like Boeing can better comply with these intrusive hiring regulations than smaller competitors, and so it happens that, as Schweizer says, “big business and big government are not enemies – they’re business partners.”
The hosts compare Boeing’s compliance with these government requirements to Elon Musk’s SpaceX company. Musk has sharply criticized his competitor Boeing for its priorities.
“Do you want to fly in an airplane where they prioritized DEI hiring over your safety? That is actually happening,” Musk said on X on Wednesday.
“We’re seeing this kind of thing happening in other places as well,” Schweizer said, “…in medical schools and other places… The problem is… if you make a diversity hire of a third-grade teacher or a sociology professor, it won’t kill anyone. But at Boeing, you’re talking about something that can result in deaths.”
The hosts worry, too, that affirmative action policies are unfair to those members of minority groups that were hired on their own merits. “It’s unfair to the people who are doing the job. It’s a disservice to them, too,” said Schweizer.
Meanwhile, Boeing’s shareholders, which include some of the largest and most “woke” institutional investors like Black Rock, just approved a 45% increase in pay (to $33 million) for outgoing CEO David Calhoun, on whose watch these problems have occurred.
