Boeing said Tuesday its CEO Dennis Muilenburg will remain on President Trump’s national manufacturing council while fellow defense giant Lockheed Martin remained mum after a series of defections by other corporate executives this week.
Muilenburg still hopes to make progress on important manufacturing issues by working on the council, which was formed in January during the early days of the Trump presidency to tap top business leaders on ways to stimulate industry, Boeing spokesman John Dern said.
“Dennis feels and the company feels staying engaged with business leaders and policymakers is important,” Dern said.
A spokesman for Lockheed Martin, the country’s largest defense contractor, and its CEO Marilynn Hewson, who sits on the council as well, said the company had no comment.
Executives with other companies that do significant contracting with the military were staying on the council. General Electric, which makes components for military aircraft and vehicles, said it has no tolerance for “hate, bigotry or racism” and condemned the violence in Charlottesville, Va., but said its Chairman Jeff Immelt will remain. CEO Michael Dell, head of Dell Technologies, which supplies hardware and components for defense, would continue to engage with the Trump administration on “policy issues that affect our company, customers and employees,” Dell said in a released statement.
Six members of the manufacturing council — executives with Intel, Merck, Under Armour and the Alliance for American Manufacturing and the head and former deputy chief of staff of the AFL-CIO labor federation— have departed following deadly racist violence in Charlottesville over the weekend and controversy over Trump’s handling of it.
“Politics and political agendas have sidelined the important mission of rebuilding America’s manufacturing base,” Intel CEO Brian Krzanich wrote in a blog post Monday. “I resigned to call attention to the serious harm our divided political climate is causing to critical issues, including the serious need to address the decline of American manufacturing.”
Trump went to Twitter to criticize executives who were leaving, saying the CEO of Merck, a pharmaceutical company, would have more time to focus on lowering “rip-off” drug prices.
“For every CEO that drops out of the Manufacturing Council, I have many to take their place. Grandstanders should not have gone on. JOBS!” Trump tweeted Tuesday.
Boeing is one of the top U.S. defense contractors with a portfolio that includes the planes used for the Air Force One mission, the tilt-rotor V-22 Osprey aircraft, and F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jet. It does billions of dollars in business with Trump’s Defense Department.
Trump slammed Boeing on Twitter in December for its Air Force One replacement program, saying costs were out of control and it should be cancelled.
Muilenburg met multiple times with Trump after the tweet and said in January that he made progress with the president in reducing the costs. The Air Force now plans to purchase two Boeing planes that were to be acquired by a Russian firm and then later abandoned.
Besides Boeing, Trump also singled out Lockheed Martin over the rising cost of the F-35 program, and personally got involved in negotiations for the program’s tenth batch. He credited himself with lowering costs, but experts said the prices were lowering before he got involved.
Lockheed Martin and Boeing are the top country’s top two defense contractors, according to this year’s Defense News Top 100 list.
