How Trump let Boeing off the hook for the 737 MAX crashes

On July 18, a Federal Judge of Texas provided for what will probably be the last hearing in the case of United States c. The Boeing Company. After five years of dispute, the final result can only be described as a victory for Boeing – and a permanent setback for those who hoped that the company would be held responsible for a decade of security violations.

Last year, Boeing’s prospects seemed much darker. In 2021, the Ministry of Justice accused the conspiracy company to defraud the government about the software of the maneuvering characteristics (MCAS) on the 737 max, which was linked to the death of 346 people in the accidents of Lion Air 610 and Ethiopian Airlines 302. (The penis First covered this story in 2019.)

After years of legal maneuver, the company agreed to plead guilty to the accusation of conspiracy in July 2024 in order to avoid a criminal trial. Depending on the conditions of advocacy negotiations, Boeing would pay nearly $ 2.5 billion to airlines, families of accident victims and government, and would accept three years of supervision of an independent security consultant. This agreement was thrown by a federal judge in December, and a date of trial was set for June 2025.

If he is convicted, Boeing would not be able to simply pay his troubles. As a business criminal, the company should permanently accept an increased government examination of the government on all parts of its activities – a return to a regulatory model that Congress repealed in 2005, after a significant lobbying by the aviation and defense industries. According to a legal reflection group, United States c. Boeing had the potential to be one of the most important judgments of compliance for decades.

But then Donald Trump returned to the White House. Many of Trump’s strongest political allies have benefited from major policy changes under the new administration: cryptographic industry, industrial polluters and Elon Musk, to name only a few. Boeing also spent a considerable sum of money by establishing a relationship with Trump. He donated $ 1 million to his inauguration fund, and his CEO accompanied Trump during his recent trip to Qatar.

His payment came last May, when the chief of the Criminal Division of DoJ, Matthew Galeotti, announced a change in application strategy. Galeotti ordered its division not to continue “overboard and uncontrolled companies and white collars [that] BUARD US companies and affects American interests. Instead, he wanted it to focus on a closer set of crimes, including terrorism, price, drug trafficking and “Chinese money laundering organizations”.

“All the unconscious of companies do not guarantee federal criminal proceedings,” said the note. “It is essential for American prosperity to recognize … companies that are ready to learn from their mistakes.”

Two weeks later, the Doj agreed to drop the charges against Boeing. Instead of pleading guilty, Boeing is now responsible for a reduced monetary sentence of approximately $ 1.2 billion: $ 235 million in new fines, plus $ 445 million in a fund for families of the 737 victims of the maximum accident. It should also invest $ 455 million to improve its “compliance and security programs”, part of which would pay an “independent compliance consultant” for two years of surveillance. He avoided an accusation of crime, and more importantly, he was authorized to continue in auto-auto-audit of his own products.

The justification of the DoJ for change was that it expects companies to be “ready to learn [their] Errors. “It is not a skill that Boeing seems to have.

The company makes a lot of mistakes. His 737 Max was plagued by computer errors that go far beyond MCA. Its strategy of outsourcing production to third -party suppliers has been a coherent source of errors and manufacturing delays for almost a decade. Its lack of investment in quality control in its factories has caused the delivery of new aircraft with a variety of serious defects: excessive gaps in plane fuselages, metallic debris near critical wiring beams or fuel tanks inside and door caps installed without safety bolts. The latter issue led to the explosive decompression of Alaska Airlines 1282 in January 2024, an incident which became viral thanks to the video of dramatic passengers taken from the interior of the cabin.

But Boeing does not seem to be able to learn from his mistakes. According to the Doj, Boeing has known all this and has always “failed[ed] To design, implement and apply a program of conformity and ethics. “Although the company has invited two new CEOs in the past six years, each promised to clean things, the central culture of Boeing always remains – which is the deep cause of all its technical problems.

As I wrote in my book out of the 737 maximum accidents, Boeing is so large and so firmly rooted that one of the two main manufacturers of the world’s commercial aircraft that is functionally sheltered from the invisible hand of the market. It is so strategic and economically important that it will always be bailout, even in the face of a global crisis such as the Pandemic COVID-19. And that earns so much money every year that even fines of several billion dollars that the DoJ is willing to impose a small part of its annual income.

“Boeing has become too big to fail,” said the former president of the FTC, Lina Khan, in a speech in 2024. “The worst quality is one of the damages that most economists expect monopolization, because companies that face with little competition have limited incitement to improve their products.”

If the regulators do not intervene and will not force Boeing to change, it will continue to prioritize the benefits on security – the only rational choice in an environment without consequences. It could be a good deal for its shareholders, but not for passengers.