The President, Boeing, the FAA, and What the Heck does Trump Want?
In light of the unexplained crashes of two Boeing "737 Max" aircraft, the Federal Aviation Administration has grounded the fleet of these aircraft operating in the United States. This comes days after the planes were grounded in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Experts I have heard on various sources say it's surprising that it took the FAA longer than its counterpart organizations to take action. However, part of the confusion probably can be traced back to President Donald Trump. The grounding of the jets was made by executive order. Trump's executive order was around 2:30 pm Eastern time, and the FAA announcement was around 3:00 pm Eastern time. So did the FAA ground the fleet (that is the FAA's job) or did Donald Trump.
A couple of days ago the Trump tweeted this:
"Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly. Pilots are no longer needed, but rather computer scientists from MIT. I see it all the time in many products. Always seeking to go one unnecessary step further, when often old and simpler is far better. Split second decisions are needed, and the complexity creates danger. All of this for great cost yet very little gain. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want Albert Einstein to be my pilot. I want great flying professionals that are allowed to easily and quickly take control of a plane!"
Then the Trump White House essentially re-released the tweet with very few changes, once again legitimizing the "policy by Twitter" routine of this White House.
Let's first admit that the FAA seemed to be slow on the uptake. There were two crashes of the same jet months apart. The Lion Air crash in October killed 189 persons. The Ethiopian Airlines crash on Sunday, March 10 killed 157 persons. In both cases, the airplanes were fairly new. The FAA needed to be concerned. That said, it is unclear what caused the two crashes that killed everyone on board, though the initial reports are that both experienced flight control problems.
Back to Trump. Let's get beyond the substance of Trump's tweet. It's dumb.Yes, airplanes are complicated to fly. Perhaps that is why it takes the U.S. military a couple of years to train a pilot. Perhaps that is why to become a captain of a commercial jet aircraft, a pilot has to have about 3,000 hours of flight time. That hours requirement is one of the reasons commercial airlines like to hire pilots from the military. In both cases, pilots must continue to show proficiency in check rides, spend many hours in simulators, and constantly participate in academic learning on features of their aircraft. In fact, pilots are smart, and they are trained to react to emergency situations.
As with all things Trump, it is difficult to understand the point of the tweet. Is he saying aircraft should be less complex? Is he saying he wants aircraft manufacturers to go back to the days of having a flight crew of four or five--two pilots, a navigator, a flight engineer, and a radio operator? In fact, technology has made aircraft safer, more reliable, and much more efficient to fly. Nearly all commercial aircraft need only a flight crew of two pilots. The same applies to the military. A World War II B-17 had a crew of 10, about half of whom were required to defend the bomber against enemy fighters. It could drop up to 4,000 to 8,000 pounds of ordnance, depending on the length of the mission. By contrast, an F-16 (nowhere near the newest aircraft in the U.S. arsenal) can carry a much more versatile range of weapons, can deliver about the same amount of bombs (more accurate bombs, by the way) as the B-17, has better weapons to defend itself against surface-to-air munitions, and is crewed by one pilot.
The crash of two identical Boeing 737s a few months apart is cause for concern. But there are other concerns. One of these is that the FAA appeared to be waiting for direction from Trump. Donald Trump might not want a pilot who needs to be Albert Einstein. On the other hand, I do not want an agency of flight safety experts being improperly influenced by a president who knows essentially nothing about what makes airplanes fly. But this leads to the more insidious issue, and that is that this president consistently likes to discredit the experts who staff agencies in federal departments. At the same time, he operates from a position of anti-intellectualism. His tweet essentially can be read like this: "I don't want some smart engineers designing airplanes I don't understand, and while I am at it, let me just say I want fewer smart engineers."
A related danger is that this president wants to discredit the agencies themselves. Right now he is essentially saying the FAA does not know what it is doing. To the extent that the FAA waited to take the lead from Trump, they seem to be unfortunately proving him right. That is a problem. Trump unloaded Steve Bannon from his administration early on, but we should not forget that Bannon was the guy who said he wanted to "deconstruct the Administrative State." It is not clear what Bannon meant by that. Did he want to dismantle the Welfare State, where government steps in to provide a safety net that it did not provide in the imagination of someone's "good old days"? Did he mean he wanted to get rid of the National Security State? Trump has made increased military spending a priority, but it is important to note that a large standing military has been a reality in this nation since the end of World War II. And in fact, a very large part of our current Administrative State is the National Security State. Did Bannon mean he wanted to get rid of regulations? Trump has pursued that goal. Honestly, I do not know what Bannon meant, but I think I know what Trump wants here. He wants a civil service responsive only to him.
I really do not believe Trump wants a smaller state. Bannon might want that. But Trump seems to indicate that his goal is disruption of agencies. "Drain the swamp" means understaffing agencies like the State Department (remember Trump famously tweeted that filling ambassador positions was unimportant because only his view mattered), while appointing family members and cronies to paid government positions. But there is no real strategy for making government smaller, if that is Trump's goal. There is no plan to make government more efficient. He just wants to employ "seagull management": land on the beach, make a bunch of noise, drop crap all over the place, then move on to the next beach.
In terms of staffing agencies themselves, it is not enough to say he wants a civil service responsive only to him. I believe he also wants the military, intelligence agencies, and the civil service responsive only to him. The prototype of Trump's direction on this is the FBI. Trump has gone out of his way to discredit FBI leadership as well as rank-and-file investigators. His proxies and supporters have actually accused FBI leadership of treason, and typically portray members of the agency of being part of some "Deep State" which wants to secretly control the government, and which will fight any elected leader who challenges them. Weirdly, most of the people who repeat fears about this originally liberal thinking, related to suspicions about the military-industrial complex, the FBI, the CIA, and other intelligence agencies.
Trump's prescription for curing the Nation of the Deep State seems to be making it accountable to him. Instead of a Deep State, it will be a Loyalist State. It is telling that Trump displays a portrait of Andrew Jackson in his office. It was Jackson who gave the name "spoils system" to the method of hiring federal appointees through the 1880s. Jackson is famously linked to the saying that "to the victor go the spoils," even if he didn't say it first. In 1830, most federal employees worked for the Post Office, or were employed as customs and ports officials. Jackson believed no special skills were required for federal workers, so why not hire loyalists? And while the spoils system is linked to Jackson, it was in fact the model that endured under many presidents, until the Pendleton Act of 1883 created the first merit system for the federal civil service.
By 2019, we are all used to civil service systems at federal, state, and local levels that strive to hire workers based on qualifications, while retaining a number of executive-appointed positions. At the federal level, there is something of a hybrid system where federal agencies are led by political appointees, whose tenure is often brief, but whose core workforce is comprised of permanent employees hired based on established qualifications. Many observers have written about the inevitable tension between these two groups, notably the scholar Hugh Heclo, who wrote A Government of Strangers in 1977. That tension is between the appointees of new administrations, who seek to exert control and the senior civil service employees, who seek to maintain agency continuity.
As Heclo has noted, this is a struggle that is on-going and is common to all new presidential administrations. However, Trump has added a new wrinkle to this tension, and that is his focus on loyalty. Trump infamously asked then-FBI director James Comey for "loyalty," which according to Comey, was shocking. But then, Trump went on to assert that loyalty is truly the essential characteristic of what he expects from government officials. He routinely derided Attorney General Jeff Sessions (he even used a phony Southern accent to belittle Sessions during a speech to the Conservative Political Action Committee meeting) for Sessions' action in recusing himself from oversight of the Mueller investigation. In other words, what Trump wanted from Sessions was for Sessions to act as the personal lawyer to the President.
Trump's initial infatuation with military officers seems to have waned some since the early days of his presidency. He had to fire Michael Flynn, he let go of Chief of Staff John Kelly, and Defense Secretary James Mattis resigned in protest. As some commentators have alluded to, Trump found out that career military officers do not fit the image Trump had of them. Everything Donald Trump knows about the military comes from movies like "Patton" and he thought senior officers were cowboys and tough guys he could objectify. Instead, he found out that most senior military officers are thinking persons, who do not think going to war is a game.
But mostly what Trump discovered about career military officers is probably the same thing he has discovered about career FBI people, or career civil servants--all of these people took an oath to the Constitution, and most of them are not about to sacrifice that oath to someone who confuses service to Nation with service to the Leader.
A couple of days ago the Trump tweeted this:
"Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly. Pilots are no longer needed, but rather computer scientists from MIT. I see it all the time in many products. Always seeking to go one unnecessary step further, when often old and simpler is far better. Split second decisions are needed, and the complexity creates danger. All of this for great cost yet very little gain. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want Albert Einstein to be my pilot. I want great flying professionals that are allowed to easily and quickly take control of a plane!"
Then the Trump White House essentially re-released the tweet with very few changes, once again legitimizing the "policy by Twitter" routine of this White House.
Let's first admit that the FAA seemed to be slow on the uptake. There were two crashes of the same jet months apart. The Lion Air crash in October killed 189 persons. The Ethiopian Airlines crash on Sunday, March 10 killed 157 persons. In both cases, the airplanes were fairly new. The FAA needed to be concerned. That said, it is unclear what caused the two crashes that killed everyone on board, though the initial reports are that both experienced flight control problems.
Back to Trump. Let's get beyond the substance of Trump's tweet. It's dumb.Yes, airplanes are complicated to fly. Perhaps that is why it takes the U.S. military a couple of years to train a pilot. Perhaps that is why to become a captain of a commercial jet aircraft, a pilot has to have about 3,000 hours of flight time. That hours requirement is one of the reasons commercial airlines like to hire pilots from the military. In both cases, pilots must continue to show proficiency in check rides, spend many hours in simulators, and constantly participate in academic learning on features of their aircraft. In fact, pilots are smart, and they are trained to react to emergency situations.
As with all things Trump, it is difficult to understand the point of the tweet. Is he saying aircraft should be less complex? Is he saying he wants aircraft manufacturers to go back to the days of having a flight crew of four or five--two pilots, a navigator, a flight engineer, and a radio operator? In fact, technology has made aircraft safer, more reliable, and much more efficient to fly. Nearly all commercial aircraft need only a flight crew of two pilots. The same applies to the military. A World War II B-17 had a crew of 10, about half of whom were required to defend the bomber against enemy fighters. It could drop up to 4,000 to 8,000 pounds of ordnance, depending on the length of the mission. By contrast, an F-16 (nowhere near the newest aircraft in the U.S. arsenal) can carry a much more versatile range of weapons, can deliver about the same amount of bombs (more accurate bombs, by the way) as the B-17, has better weapons to defend itself against surface-to-air munitions, and is crewed by one pilot.
The crash of two identical Boeing 737s a few months apart is cause for concern. But there are other concerns. One of these is that the FAA appeared to be waiting for direction from Trump. Donald Trump might not want a pilot who needs to be Albert Einstein. On the other hand, I do not want an agency of flight safety experts being improperly influenced by a president who knows essentially nothing about what makes airplanes fly. But this leads to the more insidious issue, and that is that this president consistently likes to discredit the experts who staff agencies in federal departments. At the same time, he operates from a position of anti-intellectualism. His tweet essentially can be read like this: "I don't want some smart engineers designing airplanes I don't understand, and while I am at it, let me just say I want fewer smart engineers."
A related danger is that this president wants to discredit the agencies themselves. Right now he is essentially saying the FAA does not know what it is doing. To the extent that the FAA waited to take the lead from Trump, they seem to be unfortunately proving him right. That is a problem. Trump unloaded Steve Bannon from his administration early on, but we should not forget that Bannon was the guy who said he wanted to "deconstruct the Administrative State." It is not clear what Bannon meant by that. Did he want to dismantle the Welfare State, where government steps in to provide a safety net that it did not provide in the imagination of someone's "good old days"? Did he mean he wanted to get rid of the National Security State? Trump has made increased military spending a priority, but it is important to note that a large standing military has been a reality in this nation since the end of World War II. And in fact, a very large part of our current Administrative State is the National Security State. Did Bannon mean he wanted to get rid of regulations? Trump has pursued that goal. Honestly, I do not know what Bannon meant, but I think I know what Trump wants here. He wants a civil service responsive only to him.
I really do not believe Trump wants a smaller state. Bannon might want that. But Trump seems to indicate that his goal is disruption of agencies. "Drain the swamp" means understaffing agencies like the State Department (remember Trump famously tweeted that filling ambassador positions was unimportant because only his view mattered), while appointing family members and cronies to paid government positions. But there is no real strategy for making government smaller, if that is Trump's goal. There is no plan to make government more efficient. He just wants to employ "seagull management": land on the beach, make a bunch of noise, drop crap all over the place, then move on to the next beach.
In terms of staffing agencies themselves, it is not enough to say he wants a civil service responsive only to him. I believe he also wants the military, intelligence agencies, and the civil service responsive only to him. The prototype of Trump's direction on this is the FBI. Trump has gone out of his way to discredit FBI leadership as well as rank-and-file investigators. His proxies and supporters have actually accused FBI leadership of treason, and typically portray members of the agency of being part of some "Deep State" which wants to secretly control the government, and which will fight any elected leader who challenges them. Weirdly, most of the people who repeat fears about this originally liberal thinking, related to suspicions about the military-industrial complex, the FBI, the CIA, and other intelligence agencies.
Trump's prescription for curing the Nation of the Deep State seems to be making it accountable to him. Instead of a Deep State, it will be a Loyalist State. It is telling that Trump displays a portrait of Andrew Jackson in his office. It was Jackson who gave the name "spoils system" to the method of hiring federal appointees through the 1880s. Jackson is famously linked to the saying that "to the victor go the spoils," even if he didn't say it first. In 1830, most federal employees worked for the Post Office, or were employed as customs and ports officials. Jackson believed no special skills were required for federal workers, so why not hire loyalists? And while the spoils system is linked to Jackson, it was in fact the model that endured under many presidents, until the Pendleton Act of 1883 created the first merit system for the federal civil service.
By 2019, we are all used to civil service systems at federal, state, and local levels that strive to hire workers based on qualifications, while retaining a number of executive-appointed positions. At the federal level, there is something of a hybrid system where federal agencies are led by political appointees, whose tenure is often brief, but whose core workforce is comprised of permanent employees hired based on established qualifications. Many observers have written about the inevitable tension between these two groups, notably the scholar Hugh Heclo, who wrote A Government of Strangers in 1977. That tension is between the appointees of new administrations, who seek to exert control and the senior civil service employees, who seek to maintain agency continuity.
As Heclo has noted, this is a struggle that is on-going and is common to all new presidential administrations. However, Trump has added a new wrinkle to this tension, and that is his focus on loyalty. Trump infamously asked then-FBI director James Comey for "loyalty," which according to Comey, was shocking. But then, Trump went on to assert that loyalty is truly the essential characteristic of what he expects from government officials. He routinely derided Attorney General Jeff Sessions (he even used a phony Southern accent to belittle Sessions during a speech to the Conservative Political Action Committee meeting) for Sessions' action in recusing himself from oversight of the Mueller investigation. In other words, what Trump wanted from Sessions was for Sessions to act as the personal lawyer to the President.
Trump's initial infatuation with military officers seems to have waned some since the early days of his presidency. He had to fire Michael Flynn, he let go of Chief of Staff John Kelly, and Defense Secretary James Mattis resigned in protest. As some commentators have alluded to, Trump found out that career military officers do not fit the image Trump had of them. Everything Donald Trump knows about the military comes from movies like "Patton" and he thought senior officers were cowboys and tough guys he could objectify. Instead, he found out that most senior military officers are thinking persons, who do not think going to war is a game.
But mostly what Trump discovered about career military officers is probably the same thing he has discovered about career FBI people, or career civil servants--all of these people took an oath to the Constitution, and most of them are not about to sacrifice that oath to someone who confuses service to Nation with service to the Leader.
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