By exposing the Boeing Tanker Deal Scandal in 2003, National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) saved taxpayers billions and sent two former Boeing executives to prison.

The tankers are flying gas stations that refuel fighters and bombers on long-range missions. The original plan was for the Air Force to lease, rather than buy, a hundred 767s to be used as tankers from Boeing. Eventually, the government would outright purchase the planes.

The central figure in the scandal was Darleen Druyun, the former Air Force official who negotiated the deal with Boeing and soon after took a job with Boeing. Druyun was prosecuted criminally after NLPC filed a complaint on October 6, 2003 with the Pentagon Inspector General and the Defense Department Criminal Investigative Service. It was the basis for a front-page Wall Street Journal article the next day.

The Complaint detailed how Druyun, while still at the Pentagon, sold her house to a Boeing executive who was also working on the tanker deal and how her daughter had worked for Boeing since 2001. These facts were dug out in the course of original research by then-NLPC Chairman Ken Boehm, who passed away in 2018.

The Complaint specifically raised the possibility that Druyun had negotiated employment with Boeing while still at the Pentagon, which would have been flatly illegal. A subsequent Boeing internal investigation determined it to be true. On November 24, 2003, Druyun and Boeing Chief Financial Officer Michael Sears were fired. One week later, Boeing Chief Executive Officer Phil Condit resigned.

In a comment that proved prescient, then-NLPC President Peter Flaherty told Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s Scarborough Country, on September 3, 2003, “There’s no telling how high it will go. We believe there is a culture of corruption at Boeing, leading perhaps to the very top.”

As Boehm charged in another front-page Wall Street Journal story during 2003, “Boeing can no longer assert that its ethical problems are the result of a few corrupt middle managers.” More to the point, Boehm was quoted in the Denver Post, “They had people who put rivets in planes taking ethics classes when the problem was with the No. 1 and No. 2 executives.” 

Subsequently, Air Force Secretary James Roche and Air Force Assistant Secretary for Acquisition Marvin Sambur also would resign as a result of the scandal.

Described as “unusual and secretive” by Business Week, the original deal was engineered by Boeing lobbyists on Capitol Hill. Boeing employed a small army of lobbyists, including Linda Daschle, wife of then-Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle. Congress created a customer for the 767, orders for which had all but dried up after September 11. Wording was slipped into a spending bill in 2001 allowing for negotiation of the lease-deal by then-House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL), in whose state Boeing is headquartered, and then-Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK), Chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Both liberal and conservative groups criticized the deal as corporate welfare, but it was only after NLPC exposed Druyun that there was any hope of stopping it. In response to the controversy, the plan was scaled back. The Air Force instead would lease 20 tankers and buy 80, saving taxpayers $4-5 billion, but even that plan was eventually killed as the scandal unfolded.

In 2004, Druyun accepted a plea bargain and was sentenced to nine months in jail. Although the media described Druyun’s incarceration as the culmination of a “spectacular fall,” she was actually lucky to be sentenced to only nine months.