A2 eZ su THE WASHINGTON POST.SATURDAy, MARCH 7 , 2020
At a White House meeting with
Trump, P ence and chief e xecutives
of major airlines earlier this week,
mulvaney stood off to the side,
even as other senior administra-
tion officials sat at the table.
Trump has b een displeased gener-
ally w ith the administration’s h an-
dling of the n ovel coronavirus a nd
has grown angry with mulvaney
on several occasions, aides s aid.
In a recent talk at the oxford
Union in England, mulvaney
seemed at p eace with the i dea that
his days could be numbered.
“Generally speaking, this job
does not last that long. Who
knows how much l onger I’m going
to last?” m ulvaney said during the
february remarks.
meadows prides himself on be-
ing an operator in Washington. He
is often at some of the city’s
swankiest parties and galas, in-
cluding the meridian Ball, and at
the British Embassy and other
black-tie events. He also main-
tained close relationships with
key congressional Democrats,
such as the late representative
Elijah E. Cummings (md.), who
was chairman of the House over-
sight and reform Committee.
[email protected]
[email protected]Dawsey reported from Washington.
Jeff stein and Philip rucker in
Washington contributed to this report.CorrECTIonSl An article about millennials
and inherited wealth in this
weekend’s Washington Post
magazine, which was printed in
advance, misidentifies Louis
Blaustein, founder of American
oil Co., or Amoco, as David
roswell’s great-grandfather. He
was roswell’s great-great-
grandfather.
l An article about artist Gayle
Kabaker and her portraits of
female leaders in this weekend’s
Arts & Style section, which was
printed in advance, misstates
how long movie executive Donna
Langley has been chairman of
Universal filmed Entertainment
Group. She has held the post
since 2019, not 2013.
l A march 4 Style article
a bout the Trump campaign’s
defamation lawsuit against
T he Washington Post incorrectly
said that former defense
secretary Jim mattis claimed in a
recent memoir that President
Trump interfered in the
contracting process for a
$10 billion Pentagon cloud-
computing project in order to
exclude Amazon Web Services.
The claim was made by mattis’s
former speechwriter Guy
Snodgrass in a recent book, not
by mattis himself.
the Washington Post is committed to
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In CASE YoU MISSED ITsome reports that you may have
missed. read more at
washingtonpost.com.Trump speaks
with Taliban leader
President Trump said h e s poke
with the Ta liban’s top political
leader, A bdul Ghani Baradar,
apparently the first direct verbal
communication between a U.S.
president and the Afghan
insurgent force since the more
than 18-year-old war in
Afghanistan began.
washingtonpost.com/national
Montgomery officials
pause policing bill
montgomery County elected
officials delayed votes on a
community policing bill and
funding for more school police
officers Tuesday, bowing to
pressure from activists who say
the presence of law enforcement
can be more threatening than
safe.
washingtonpost.com/local
‘Hardball’ host Chris
Matthews quits on-air
Chris matthews, the long-
running host of “Hardball” on
mSNBC, announced monday that
he is resigning from the program
following recent gaffes and
controversies. matthews, 74,
made the announcement at the
start of his weeknight program.
washingtonpost.com/lifestyle
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BY IAN DUNCAN
AND MICHAEL LARISA “culture of concealment” at
Boeing and “grossly insufficient”
federal oversight of the 737 max
jets contributed to two crashes
within months of each other that
killed 346 people, according to a
report released friday by House
Democrats.
The r eport, based on internal
company documents, testimony
from whistleblowers and public
hearings, sets up a push in com-
ing weeks to overhaul how the
federal Aviation Administration
ensures the safety of new aircraft
designs.
In the report, leaders on the
House Transportation Commit-
tee concluded a half a dozen ways
in which Boeing and the fAA
failed the public.
reps. Peter A. Defazio (D-
ore.) and rick Larsen (D-Wash.)
have said for months that the
oversight system for airplane
safety is badly broken. They will
use the findings to help bolster
their case that significant reform
is needed to strengthen the gov-
ernment’s hand in dealing with
Boeing, one of the nation’s big-
gest companies.
The report concludes that the
fAA’s initial certification review
of the plane was “grossly insuffi-
cient” and the agency “failed in
its duty” t o uncover critical safety
problems and make sure Boeing
fixed them.
“The combination of these
problems doomed the Lion Air
and Ethiopian Airlines flights,”
the report found.
The fAA declined to addressthe findings but said it is open to
outside recommendations.
“Today’s unprecedented U.S.
safety record was built on the
willingness of aviation profes-
sionals to embrace hard lessons
and to seek continuous improve-
ment,” the agency said in a state-
ment. “While the fAA’s certifica-
tion processes are well-
established and have consistent-
ly produced safe aircraft designs,
we are a learning agency and
welcome the scrutiny.”
In recent months, the fAA has
taken public steps to demon-
strate that it is holding Boeing
accountable and on friday the
agency announced new action
against the company. The fAA
said it was proposing to penalize
Boeing $19.7 million for install-
ing improper sensors on almost
800 of its max 737 jets.
Boeing said in a statement that
the company’s thoughts were
with the crash victims’ families
and that it would review the
House report. The company said
the sensors did not present a
safety risk and that it had imple-
mented changes to address the
fAA’s concerns.
Tuesday will mark the anniver-
sary of the second crash, which
killed 157 people aboard Ethio -
pian Airlines flight 302 when it
plunged into the ground shortly
after leaving Addis Ababa. That
crash followed a similar one that
killed 189 people on oct. 29,
2018, in Indonesia, which the
report calls “extraordinary and
unprecedented in modern
times.”
The report concluded that the
fAA didn’t do enough to sharpenits oversight following the first
crash and it wasn’t until after the
second that agency officials
joined international aviation reg-
ulators in grounding the max 737
jets.
The aircraft remains ground-
ed, and the decision has rocked
Boeing, leading to the ouster of
its chief executive in December
and the halting of production of
new max jets earlier this year.
The report traces the o rigins of
the crashes back years, to Boe-
ing’s desire to compete with a
new plane being developed by
European manufacturer Airbus.
That led to efforts to cut costs,
follow a strict schedule and
maintain high production num-
bers, even after a factory manag-
er warned of problems on the
shop floor, according to the re-
port.
“The desire to meet these goals
and expectations jeopardized the
safety of the flying public,” the
report concludes.
The planes that were coming
off the p roduction line i n renton,
Wash., contained hidden flaws in
a new feature called the maneu-
vering characteristics augmenta-
tion system, or mCAS, which was
implicated in both crashes be-
cause of its power to drive the
planes’ noses down in ways pilots
struggled to counteract. Boeing
made poor assumptions about
how the feature would work —
something company leaders now
acknowledge — that led to it
receiving a less thorough safety
review, according to the report.
In other instances, the report
concludes, Boeing concealed
“crucial information” from itscustomers, pilots and the fAA —
including not telling pilots about
the existence of mCAS.
The fAA, for its part, did too
little to scrutinize Boeing’s work
and operated under a safety sys-
tem that the report found set up
“inherent conflicts of interest.”
That system, known as the
organization designation autho-
rization, or oDA, gives Boeing
the power to name engineers
who conduct safety work on
behalf of the fAA. And it is the
focus of legislative efforts to
prevent crashes.
A trio of Democratic senators
introduced legislation last week
that would make changes to the
system, giving the fAA’s leaders
new authority, but family mem-
bers of the crash victims say they
want it replaced altogether.
“The oDA system killed my
daughter,” said michael Stumo,
whose daughter Samya was on
the Ethio pian Airlines flight.
“We’re all unified t hat oDA has to
go.”
republican leaders in Con-
gress have shown less appetite
for sweeping changes, and a
report compiled for Transporta-
tion Secretary Elaine Chao ex-
plicitly warned against overhaul-
ing the safety review system.
reps. Sam Graves (mo.) and
Garret Graves (La.), republican
leaders on the House committee,
said in a statement friday that
any legislation should be ground-
ed in the “unbiased findings” of
the safety experts who have re-
viewed the crashes.
“None of these expert reviews
or investigations have come to
the conclusion that our safetycertification system is broken or
in need of wholesale dismantle-
ment,” they said.
The Democrats’ report points
to recurring problems with fAA
oversight that continued even
after the Indonesia crash.
following the Lion Air crash,
the fAA missed the critical im-
portance of information it was
seeing about the max and that
Boeing was telling it privately,
the report said.
The fAA learned, for example,
that Boeing had not fixed a n alert
that didn’t work on roughly
80 percent of the max fleet, and
the company failed to tell the
agency or airlines about the
problem for more than
14 months, “which should have
raised concerns about Boeing’s
transparency with the fAA.”
The report also cites a briefing
Boeing gave fAA officials in De-
cember 2018. The company ac-
knowledged during that session
that its simulator tests didn’t
evaluate what would h appen if “a
combination of failures” caused
mCAS to malfunction or how
pilots would react in the cockpit
when faced with multiple prob-
lems at once, the report said.
That should have raised “addi-
tional red flags,” investigators
said. But the fAA failed to act
swiftly or decisively enough.
“The fAA permitted the 737
mAX to continue flying anyway
while Boeing and the fAA
worked on designing and validat-
ing a fix to the mCAS software,”
the report found. “That judg-
ment proved tragically wrong.”
[email protected]
[email protected]H ouse report faults Boeing, FAA in crashes
BY ABIGAIL HAUSLOHNERThe Trump administration
could soon begin collecting DNA
samples from hundreds of thou-
sands of migrants apprehended
along the U.S.-mexico border, in-
cluding legal asylum seekers, un-
der a new rule that stands to
dramatically expand a federal
database of individual genetic
information used by law enforce-
ment.
The new rule, which will prob-
ably draw legal challenges, modi-
fies the terms of the 2005 DNA
fingerprints Act, which broadly
authorized the federal govern-
ment to collect DNA samples
from people arrested and
charged with federal crimes. The
DNA profiles collected by law
enforcement agencies under that
law are funneled into the fBI’s
Combined DNA Index System
(CoDIS), a repository of the ge-
netic information of criminal
suspects, which law enforcement
can search for matches to DNA
evidence obtained at crime
scenes.
The Department of Homeland
Security, which oversees U.S. im-
migration authorities, was previ-
ously exempted from having to
collect DNA from detained immi-
grants, many of whom are appre-
hended after crossing the
U.S.-mexico border and have no
previous criminal history.
The Trump administration,
which proposed the rule last
october, argues that the measure
will expand the identifying tools
available to law enforcement offi-
cers to help them better identify
criminals now — and later.
“regardless of whether an im-migration detainee, at the time
he is booked, has previously com-
mitted a crime in the United
States, the benefits of DNA-sam-
ple collection include the cre-
ation of a permanent DNA record
that may match to DNA evidence
from a later crime, if the detainee
remains in or later reenters the
United States and commits such
a crime,” the Justice Department
wrote in the rule published fri-
day.
Civil rights advocates warned
that forced collection of DNA
information from non-criminals
would foretell an orwellian fu-ture “and would constitute a big
step toward a mass database for
full population surveillance,” in
the words of public comments
submitted on behalf of the Amer-
ican Civil Liberties Union last
fall.
“With this vast amount of sen-
sitive information in the govern-
ments hands, the potential for
abuse is too great,” the ACLU
wrote in public comments sub-
mitted to the federal register in
the weeks after the administra-
tion proposed the rule in october.
Human rights groups and oth-
er critics have charged that therule will further stigmatize immi-
grants; divert a hefty sum of tax
dollars toward a logistical effort
of questionable value; and pave
the way to other types of govern-
ment abuse, including the misuse
of genetic data for other purposes
than solving crime, as well as
wrongful convictions deriving
from mistakes in DNA collection
and analysis.
Physicians for Human rights
called the rule “a dangerous mis-
application of biotechnology,” ar-
guing that it “would populate the
CoDIS DNA forensic database
with information of highly ques-tionable value while stigmatizing
immigrants and subjecting them
to risks when inevitable mistakes
in DNA forensics are made.”
“Issues of lab contamination,
statistical errors, errors by lab
technicians, and contamination
during the collection process can
reduce the accuracy of DNA test-
ing, especially when collected
under field (rather than laborato-
ry) conditions,” the group wrote
in a public comment submitted
to the federal registry last year
while the rule was under consid-
eration.
“finally, the costs and resource
demands of this proposed task
will certainly exceed the capacity
of agencies already struggling to
provide basic services like water,
food, and soap for those in custo-
dy,” the group added.
U.S. Customs and Border Pro-
tection repeatedly came under
fire last year for the harsh condi-
tions of its Border Patrol stations
and other facilities, where thou-
sands of migrants — including
very young children and preg-
nant women — were held, at
times, for weeks in packed con-
crete cells, and with limited ac-
cess to basic medicine, nutrition
and sanitation.
DHS in January began collect-
ing limited DNA samples from
detained migrants under a pilot
of the rule, and the agency will
gradually work to expand that
collection, officials from DHS
and the Justice Department told
reporters Thursday.
They said the DNA collected
would inform the CoDIS data-
base and would not be used for
other purposes.
[email protected]DHS to collect DNA from detained migrants for crime database
LArry W smItH/ePA-eFe/sHutterstocK
U.s. Border Patrol agents apprehend people suspected of crossing the Rio Grande River near mcallen,
Tex. Human rights groups say a new rule allowing dNa collection will further stigmatize immigrants.has no experience leading such a
large operation.
“The president, and I’ve heard
him say this, sees mark as very
good politically,” said the person,
who spoke on the condition of
anonymity to discuss private con-
versations. “But the president is a
political animal. He needs some-
one who will actually take care of
the store for him while he’s out
running for reelection. And
there’s a question in my mind
whether mark can do that.”
meanwhile, mulvaney often
seemed out of the loop and some-
times even blissful about it.
He regularly traveled away
from the president on weekends.
When Trump c lashed with nation-
al security adviser John Bolton
last year and fired him, mulvaney
was in North Carolina, politicking
for members of Congress.
At times in recent months, one
close Trump a dviser said, the pres-
ident would say there w as no need
to loop mulvaney into a particular
discussion.
mulvaney did not accompany
the president friday to Te nnessee
to survey storm damage, Atlanta
to visit the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, or South
florida f or the weekend.best yet to come — and I look
forward to helping build on that
success and staying in the f ight for
the forgotten men and women of
America.”
He has recently been at the
White House nearly every day, ad-
visers say, meeting with the presi-
dent and others, particularly
Kushner. He was seen last week
having lunch with marc Short,
Vice President Pence’s chief of
staff, i n the White House mess.
Aides had spoken of the two
men having a deal for several
months, and Trump began telling
people on Thursday evening and
friday morning that he was going
to tap meadows, a person familiar
with the c hoice said.
T rump did not have a volcanic
falling-out with mulvaney but
never fully trusted him and kept
him in the job in an acting capaci-
ty.
Like mulvaney, meadows is un-
likely to prove as stiff a discipli-
narian as Kelly, who encouraged
the president when leaving to find
someone who would challenge
him or else he would find himself
impeached.
one longtime Trump adviser
said it was a questionable choice
to install meadows, given that hethe director of the White House
office of management a nd Budget
and as the interim head of the
Consumer financial Protection
Bureau. russ Vought is now the
acting omB chief and could be
nominated for the permanent
post, according to two White
House o fficials.
Trump sees meadows as a fierce
political operator who can be
helpful to him as he goes into a
stretch where his reelection cam-
paign is likely to take him on the
road three, and perhaps more,
days per week.
The president recently had din-
ner with meadows and his wife at
the Trump International Hotel in
Washington, a White House aide
said. And at t he recent m arriage of
White House aides Stephen miller
and Katie Waldman, meadows sat
next to Trump at the head table,
attendees said, although mulva-
ney did not.
meadows thanked Trump in a
statement friday night. “It’s an
honor to be selected by President
Trump to serve alongside him and
his team,” he said. “This President
and his administration have a
long list of incredible victories
they’ve delivered to the country
during this first term. With theearly in the morning and late at
night, after growing distrustful of
House r epublican leadership and
developing an appreciation of
meadows’s appearances on cable
television.
mulvaney was given advance
notice of the tweet, a senior White
House official said, but did not
learn about the job change until
the president had already offered
meadows the job.
mulvaney’s departure is likely
to mean broad changes in the
West Wing. He also had been a
member of Congress and of the
freedom Caucus before joining
the administration, and he in-
stalled in government posts a
number of die-hard loyalists and
conservatives who often bragged
about getting things done below
the radar.
Some o f those aides, particular-
ly his principal deputy, Emma
Doyle, had already seen their re-
sponsibilities shrink in recent
months. meadows has developed
close ties with senior adviser Jar-
ed Kushner, the president’s son-
in-law, who advocated for putting
him in the post.
mulvaney had also served asmeadows from aRep. Meadows to replace Mulvaney at White House