[WAPO] When Donald Trump occupies the White House in January, he will be a lot closer to the senior leaders at Boeing running the Air Force One program he has threatened to cancel. The company announced Tuesday that about a dozen of its senior defense leaders are moving from St. Louis to Boeing’s Washington-area headquarters.The company has been discussing moving its defense unit to the Washington area for months, and it is not related to Trump’s recent vow, officials said. Rather it is "all driven by being closer to the customer," Boeing spokesman Todd Blecher said.
Earlier this year, Boeing appointed Leanne Caret to take over its Defense, Space and Security unit, a $30 billion business with 50,000 employees across the globe. Caret "puts a premium on personal engagement with senior leaders of the Pentagon, NASA and the Hill," Blecher said. "And so this has been under consideration for some number of months."
Many of the nation’s largest defense contractors -- including the likes of Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics -- are already in the Washington area. Northrop Grumman was one of the most recent to join, moving to Falls Church, Va., from Los Angeles in 2011. Federal contractor SAIC relocated its headquarters in San Diego to McLean, Va., two years earlier.
In all, about a dozen Boeing senior executives will make the move from St. Louis to Washington in January, and eventually about 50 staff members would join them. The company’s Washington operation center has its headquarters in a new, gleaming building in Crystal City, near the Pentagon.
The company’s corporate headquarters is in Chicago, but it has run its defense business out of St. Louis, where it builds the F/A-18 Super Hornet, ever since it merged with McDonnell Douglas in 1997.