US Sen Patty Murray (D-WA), the most vocal critic of the USAF contract award to Northrop Grumman for the KC-45A, struck out in her request to have the US Commerce Department shoot down the Northrop claims of 48,000 jobs for the program. This compares with the 44,000 jobs claimed by Boeing for the KC-767.

Murray, along with Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and two other Senators, wrote Commerce on May 9 asking the Department to confirm–or debunk–Northrop’s claim of 48,000 jobs. The Senators correctly noted that Northrop claimed 25,000 jobs prior to the February 29 contract announcement and upped this a few weeks later, after the award, to 48,000 jobs.

The question was indeed a fair one, and one that we raised as well in this column on our Corporate website. We questioned the nearly doubling of jobs creation as well as how Northrop’s KC-30, with a stated US content of 58%, could generate more direct and indirect jobs than Boeing’s KC-767, with a stated US content of 85%.

Northrop, in our report, explained itself–something that Boeing never did–until a liberal think tank did a 15 page study we linked to in a previous report on this website. The think tank interviewed Boeing but not Northrop and came to the conclusion that both Boeing and Northrop overstated the jobs creation but that Northrop did a greater job of overstating than did Boeing.

Of all the jobs data we’ve seen, we tend to believe the think tank’s analysis more than any other, even if the report is open to criticism for failing to talk to Northrop.

That being said, Murray’s gambit to have Commerce debunk Northrop’s claim failed. Why is this significant? Because Murray has long challenged a 2003 Airbus claim that its US-sourced work supported 100,000 direct and indirect jobs. In 2003, Murray asked Commerce to verify the claim and, according to Murray, Commerce could not–inferring, if not outright suggesting, that Commerce studied the matter and could not confirm the Airbus claim.

The facts appear to be somewhat different.

In Murray’s May 9 letter, she refers to her 2003 inquiry of Commerce. Commerce, in its reply, acknowledges the 2003 inquiry and writes:

“As the Department stated in its 2003 letter…, estimates of the total job impact require a variety of assumptions about the direct and indirect impacts of production performed in the United States. Predicting the full impact…is extremely complicated…. Therefore, the Department of Commerce is not in a position to investigate the assumptions…especially when those claims are made in connection with the award of a US government contract by another Department.”

The correspondence between Murray and Commerce may be found here (Murray-Commerce), a three page PDF file.