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

The Verge

14 hours ago

On July 18th, a federal judge in Texas scheduled what will likely be the final hearing in the case of United States v. The Boeing Company. After five years of litigation, the end result can only be described as a victory for Boeing — and a permanent setback for those who hoped that the company would be held accountable for a decade of safety violations.
Last year, Boeing's prospects looked far bleaker. In 2021, the Department of Justice charged the company with conspiracy to defraud the government about the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) software on the 737 MAX, which has been linked to the deaths of 346 people in the crashes of Lion Air 610 and Ethiopian Airlines 302. (The Verge first covered this story in 2019.)
After years of legal maneuvering, the company agreed to plead guilty to the conspiracy charge in July 2024 in order to avoid a criminal trial. Under the plea bargain's terms, Boeing would pay nearly $2.5 billion to airlines, families of crash victims, and the government, plus accept three years of monitoring from an independent safety consultant. That agreement was thrown out by a federal judge in December, and a trial date was set for June 2025.
If convicted, Boeing would not be able to simply pay its way out of trouble. As a corporate felon, the company would have to permanently accept increased government scrutiny over every part of its business — a return to a regulatory model that Congress repealed in 2005, after significant lobbying by the aviation and defense industries. According to one legal think tank, United States v. Boeing had the potential to be one of the most significant corporate compliance judgments in decades.
But then Donald Trump returned to the White House. Many of Trump's strongest political allies have benefited from significant changes in policy under the new administration: the crypto industry, industrial polluters, and Elon Musk, to name a few. Boeing has spent a considerable amount of money building a relationship with Trump, too. It donated $1 million to his inauguration fund, and its CEO accompanied Trump on his recent trip to Qatar.
Its payout came last May, when the head of the DOJ's Criminal Division, Matthew Galeotti, announced a change of enforcement strategy. Galeotti directed his division to no longer pursue 'overboard and unchecked corporate and white-collar enforcement [that] burdens U.S. businesses and harms U.S. interests.' Instead, he wanted it to focus on a narrower set of crimes, including terrorism, tariff-dodging, drug trafficking, and 'Chinese Money Laundering Organizations.'
'Not all corporate misconduct warrants federal criminal prosecution,' the memo stated. 'It is critical to American prosperity to acknowledge …companies that are willing to learn from their mistakes.'
Boeing has spent a considerable amount of money building a relationship with Trump.
Two weeks later, the DOJ agreed to drop the charges against Boeing completely. Instead of pleading guilty, Boeing would now just be liable for a reduced monetary penalty of around $1.2 billion: $235 million in new fines, plus $445 million into a fund for the families of the 737 MAX crash victims. It would also have to invest $455 million to enhance its 'compliance and safety programs,' part of which would pay for an 'independent compliance consultant' for two years of oversight. It avoided a felony charge, and more importantly, it was allowed to continue self-auditing its own products.
The DOJ's rationale for the change was that it expects companies to be 'willing to learn from [their] mistakes.' This is not a skill that Boeing seems to possess.
The company makes plenty of mistakes. Its 737 MAX has been plagued by computer errors that go far beyond MCAS. Its strategy of outsourcing production to third-party suppliers has been a consistent source of manufacturing errors and delays for almost a decade. Its lack of investment in quality control in its factories have caused new airplanes to be delivered with a variety of severe defects: excessive gaps in airplane fuselages, metal debris near critical wiring bundles or inside fuel tanks, and door plugs installed without security bolts. The latter issue led to the explosive decompression of Alaska Airlines 1282 in January 2024, an incident that went viral thanks to the dramatic passenger video taken from inside the cabin.
But Boeing does not seem to be able to learn from its mistakes. According to the DOJ, Boeing has known all of this and has still 'fail[ed] to design, implement, and enforce a compliance and ethics program.' Although the company has brought on two new CEOs in the last six years, each of whom promised to clean things up, Boeing's core culture still remains — which is the root cause of all of its technical problems.
The DOJ's rationale for the change was that it expects companies to be 'willing to learn from [their] mistakes.' This is not a skill that Boeing seems to possess.
As I wrote in my book about the 737 MAX crashes, Boeing is so large and so firmly entrenched as one of the world's two major commercial airplane makers that it is functionally immune from the market's invisible hand. It is so strategically and economically important that it will always get bailed out, even in the face of a global crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic. And it makes so much money every year that even the multibillion-dollar fines that the DOJ is willing to impose amount to just a small portion of its annual revenues.
'Boeing became too big to fail,' former FTC chair Lina Khan said in a 2024 speech. 'Worse quality is one of the harms that most economists expect from monopolization, because firms that face little competition have limited incentive to improve their products.'
If regulators won't step in and force Boeing to change, then it will continue to prioritize profits over safety — the only rational choice in a consequence-free environment. This might be a good bargain for its shareholders, but not for passengers.
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