New Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg has a full plate: his Seattle-area assembly workers are on strike; customers and regulators are breathing down his neck to fix manufacturing quality problems with the company’s commercial airplanes; and his defense and space division is bleeding red ink. But if voters return former President Donald Trump to the White House in the Nov. 5 election, he could face a plane-load of new problems.
On the campaign trail, Trump has promised to enact sweeping tariffs on imports that would ignite trade wars that could make those waged in his first administration look like a water gun fight. Defense spending and exports could be threatened, analysts say, and conservative ambitions to overhaul the Federal Aviation Administration could cause turmoil at a time when the agency is deeply engaged in trying to diagnose and fix systemic problems at Boeing.
The Republican presidential nominee has proposed tariffs of 10% to 20% on every country that trades with the U.S., and 60% tariffs on China.
Trump and his supporters claim doing so would bring manufacturing back to the United States. The Coalition for a Prosperous America, an industry-supported group that has lobbied for more trade protections, projects that a 10% universal tariff would create 2.8 million jobs.
For Boeing and the rest of the U.S. commercial aerospace industry, which generated a $47 billion trade surplus in 2023, the tariffs and the retaliation they might inspire would be “absolutely ruinous if enacted as planned,” said Richard Aboulafia, a managing director at AeroDynamic Advisory. “Tariffs might work assuming the other guy does nothing, and history says that’s the dumbest assumption ever.”
A renewed trade war with China would be a punishing setback for Boeing, which has longed to resume sales in one of the most lucrative airliner markets in the world after they trickled to a virtual halt when the Trump administration slapped tariffs on a wide range of Chinese products. In 2018, 24% of Boeing plane deliveries were to China. But from 2019 till December 2023 it didn’t make any.
Tariffs would mean higher parts prices for Boeing, which has a global supply chain. On the 787, about 30% of the widebody’s 2.3 million parts come from overseas. That includes wing components from Japanese and South Korean companies, rudders made in China and landing gear and engines from the United Kingdom. Sourcing parts in other countries has helped Boeing ink sales to airlines there, including in Japan and China, where it has tried for decades to build what it touts as a mutually beneficial partnership. Chinese companies supply parts for every one of Boeing’s commercial airplanes.
The U.S. got a taste of the damage that tariffs wreak after the Trump administration imposed a 25% tariff in 2018 on most steel imports and a 10% levy on aluminum. The pain they inflicted on businesses that used those metals outweighed the benefit to U.S. steel and aluminum producers, according to a study by the U.S. International Trade Commission. Domestic steel and aluminum production rose by $2.3 billion by 2021, but the tariffs depressed output by $3.5 billion at U.S. makers of things like tools, auto parts and machinery, the ITC found.
Those and other tariffs the Trump administration imposed on $350 billion worth of Chinese imports in 2018 and 2019 may actually have led to a net loss in U.S. manufacturing employment, economists have estimated, because foreign retaliation and higher costs destroyed more jobs than the barriers to imports created.
Congress has delegated authority to the executive branch to impose tariffs and could potentially rein Trump in. “At the very least, there’s going to be a profound period of uncertainty between what Trump says he wants to do and what Congress may allow him to do,” said Byron Callan, an aerospace and defense analyst with Capital Alpha Partners.
Another area of uncertainty for Boeing and other defense contractors: what a second Trump administration would mean for defense spending. Trump’s last acting defense secretary, Christopher Miller, has claimed the defense budget could be cut by half, while Trump has promised to bring billionaire Elon Musk into his Cabinet to slash federal spending. “Put aside the rhetoric on, ‘oh, the GOP is strong on defense’ and look at the reality of what people are saying,” said Callan. “There’s a pretty profound gap between those two points of view.”
On the plus side for Boeing, as it explores divesting non-core assets, including in its underperforming space business, a second Trump administration could relax restrictions on mergers and acquisitions and taxes on private-equity firms. “You could have a supercharged M&A environment,” said Aboulafia.
But the Pentagon is likely to still object to large combinations that could impede competition, said Callan. “Could you see Boeing merge with Northrop Grumman? No,” he said.
If Trump were to halt U.S. support for Ukraine if he regains the White House, leaving Europe threatened by a mobilized Russian military, it would further boost European military spending, said Callan, but it would likely increase urgency to do so with its own defense contractors. “There’d be all sorts of questions about how reliable the U.S. is going to be as a defense supplier.”
Another potential threat for Boeing could be a renewed attempt to kill the Export-Import Bank, which provides federally subsidized financing for overseas sales by U.S. manufacturers. Critics have labeled it Boeing’s Bank for the large share of its loans that have gone to the plane maker. Project 2025, a Heritage Foundation blueprint for a second Trump administration, calls for abolishing the bank. Its congressional mandate expires at the end of 2026.
Conservative aspirations to radically make over the Federal Aviation Administration could create turmoil at the agency at a time when it’s deeply engaged with Boeing to improve the plane maker’s manufacturing quality. Project 2025 proposes privatizing the air traffic control system and increasing user fees to raise money for the chronically underfunded agency.
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