NYT: ‘Cancel Order!’ Donald Trump Attacks Plans for Upgraded Air Force One
Michael D. Shear and Christopher Drew

President-elect Donald J. Trump took a shot on Tuesday at one of the nation’s largest manufacturers, Boeing, sharply criticizing a pending order for a new Air Force One and suggesting that the company was “doing a little bit of a number” with the cost of the next generation of presidential aircraft.

“Boeing is building a brand new 747 Air Force One for future presidents, but costs are out of control, more than $4 billion,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter. “Cancel order!”

Although his post attracted attention because it was about the most famous airplane in the world, the significance may be broader: For perhaps the first time since President John F. Kennedy took on the steel industry in the early 1960s, the heads of big American companies are being confronted by a leader willing to call them out directly and publicly for his policy and political aims.

Although President Obama forcefully criticized Wall Street and the financial industry after Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, he tended not to single out individual companies. But Mr. Trump is now targeting Boeing a week after he pushed Carrier and its parent company, United Technologies, to keep about 1,000 manufacturing jobs in Indiana, and three weeks after he singled out a Ford plant in Kentucky.

Executives who give him what he wants may also be rewarded. On Tuesday afternoon, the president-elect escorted the billionaire Japanese businessman Masayoshi Son to the lobby of Trump Tower to announce that the technology conglomerate SoftBank Group would be investing $50 billion in the United States. He called Mr. Son one of “the great men of industry.”

Mr. Son promised the investment, which will come from a previously announced $100 billion fund, as he is pressing to merge the wireless company Sprint, which his firm owns a controlling interest in, with T-Mobile: a merger that Mr. Obama’s regulators have blocked.

What is motivating Mr. Trump is not always clear. His transition team is receiving information about major federal programs, and Mr. Trump received a briefing on Monday that included the cost of the Air Force One project, according to a person familiar with the discussion. But he also made his post about the Air Force One upgrade just minutes after The Chicago Tribune published comments from Boeing’s chief executive, Dennis Muilenburg, suggesting that the president-elect’s trade policies could hurt the company, which does substantial business in China.

But Mr. Trump did not focus on Boeing broadly. Instead, he focused on the Air Force One upgrade, telling reporters at Trump Tower, “The plane is totally out of control.”

“It’s going to be over $4 billion for the Air Force One program, and I think it’s ridiculous,” he said. “I think Boeing is doing a little bit of a number. We want Boeing to make a lot of money, but not that much money.”

In a statement after Mr. Trump’s Twitter post, Boeing said it had a $170 million contract to study the equipment that a redesigned Air Force One might need. That project has just gotten underway, so billions of dollars in cost overruns at this point appear to be impossible.

“Some of the statistics that have been, uh, cited, shall we say, don’t appear to reflect the nature of the financial agreement between Boeing and the Department of Defense,” the White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, said.

Air Force officials said they were proposing to spend $2.7 billion over the next five years to research, develop and test communications technologies and other advanced systems. The Air Force would then buy two 747-8 aircraft, which normally cost airlines $350 million to $400 million apiece, and refit them to include all the new systems and handle extra weight.

The planes would not be ready to fly until 2024, so Mr. Trump’s $4 billion estimate may ultimately be about correct. However, since nothing but the basic study contract has been awarded yet, his administration could cut back or reshape the Air Force proposal in any way it or Congress wanted.

“We look forward to working with the U.S. Air Force on subsequent phases of the program, allowing us to deliver the best planes for the president at the best value for the American taxpayer,” Boeing said.

Aviation analysts were more blunt.

“This is getting ridiculous fast, when an important policy and acquisition decision is being made by Twitter,” said Richard L. Aboulafia, an aviation consultant with the Teal Group in Fairfax, Va.

Mr. Trump’s willingness to intervene at the individual corporate level is a stark departure from Republican orthodoxy, which has long objected to the government’s picking winners and losers. Greg Hayes, the chief executive of United Technologies, seemed to imply on CNBC on Monday that he felt pressured.

“There was a cost as we thought about keeping the Indiana plant open,” he said. “At the same time,” he added, “I was born at night, but not last night. I also know that about 10 percent of our revenue comes from the U.S. government.”

Some of the jobs saved from Mexico will probably fall to automation. Carrier will invest $16 million in the Indianapolis plant to automate its operations and “drive the cost down so that we can continue to be competitive,” Mr. Hayes said. “What that ultimately means is there will be fewer jobs.”

Mr. Trump’s Air Force One post came out of the blue: He had not focused in the campaign on the cost of Boeing’s plans for a next-generation presidential plane.

Last week, Mr. Muilenburg, Boeing’s chief executive, said that one-fourth of all the commercial airplanes it sold were for use in China, where Boeing is in a tense competition with Europe’s Airbus, its main rival. Like other major exporters, it is concerned that if Mr. Trump offends Chinese leaders or imposes tariffs against imports, China could retaliate by buying more planes from Airbus, which would reduce jobs at Boeing.

Mr. Trump certainly understands that as president, he will no longer be flying his own, well-appointed Boeing 757. The Secret Service and the Defense Department would object.

Beyond convenience, Air Force One carries an array of top-secret communications gear for conducting everyday business and for managing a global crisis — even wartime operations, if required — while aloft. It is also equipped with a number of never-discussed security features.

The communications systems on the planes now in use were designed in the 1980s. The new ones would incorporate the latest advances, as well as anti-hacking defenses. The planes would also need other highly classified systems to protect the president that the Air Force will not discuss. But among the proposals considered several years ago for a new presidential helicopter were technologies to help prevent terrorist attacks and to resist the electromagnetic effects of a nuclear blast.

Mr. Aboulafia said Air Force One needed to have antimissile defenses like jamming and electronic countermeasures to keep the president safe.

Mr. Trump could eliminate some of these features to cut costs. But “talk about the ultimate in penny wise and pound foolishness,” Mr. Aboulafia said. “We’re talking about Pentagon weapons accounts that are going to $200 billion a year, and you’re going to nickel and dime the survivability of the president’s jet. That is about as dysfunctional as it gets.”

Mr. Trump could make good on his threat and cut the project from his budget request for the fiscal year that begins in October 2017, the first budget year of his presidency. But ultimately, Congress controls the federal purse strings, and lawmakers with parochial interests are already weighing in.

“Replacing the 26-year-old Air Force One aircraft will support good-paying jobs throughout northwest Washington and is important to ensuring the safety and security of future presidents,” Senator Patty Murray, Senator Maria Cantwell and Representative Rick Larsen, all Democrats of Washington, said in a joint statement; Boeing’s largest factories are in the Seattle area. “The president-elect’s tweet does nothing to change those basic facts.”

###