Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | C | Crain's Chicago Business

Tight with the Beltway; In the nation's capital, contacts, contracts, lobbying all in a day's work.

Article Excerpt
WASHINGTON-With all that Boeing Co. has going on in the nation's capital, it's a wonder it didn't move the headquarters here instead of Chicago.

The appeal of a central location won out in the end, but it also would have made sense to locate near two of its largest customers: the Department of Defense (DOD) and NASA.

Boeing already occupies its own 13-story office building just across the Potomac River, and it has more than 300 employees in the Washington area, almost as many people as its new downtown Chicago headquarters will have.

All told, the company spent $8.2 million on in-house lobbying and outside lobbying firms in 1999, according to the latest available lobbying disclosure reports. That ranked Boeing 14th in lobbying expenditures nationwide, well above the nearly $6.8 million spent by North Chicago-based Abbott Laboratories, the biggest spender among Chicago-area companies that year.

Boeing's far-flung interests are intertwined with many of the leading national and international economic and national security issues of the day, from missile defense and trade with China to broadband access, air traffic control modernization and the trade deficit.

Obviously, Boeing is on intimate terms with the Federal Aviation Administration on issues related to safety and the certification of new plane

designs.

And with nearly 70% of Boeing's commercial airplane sales overseas, Washington is prime territory for interacting with foreign governments through the many embassies...