Trump attacks Boeing over ‘out of control’ costs for Air Force One

WASHINGTON— President-elect Donald 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,” 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 Barack Obama forcefully criticized Wall Street and the financial industry after Lehman Bros. collapsed in 2008, he tended not to single out individual companies. But 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.

What is motivating Trump is not always clear. His transition team is receiving information about major federal programs, and 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 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.”

He added: “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, Boeing said it had a $170-million contract to study the equipment that a redesigned Air Force One might need. That project has just got 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 Defence,” said the White House press secretary, Josh Earnest.