Jay Inslee: “And just to back up what Mrs. Boyda said, she's not just whistling Dixie--or Kansas in this case--she has backed up what…”

“And just to back up what Mrs. Boyda said, she's not just whistling Dixie--or Kansas in this case--she has backed up what the GAO said. They said specifically, in finding number four of seven deadly sins, they said, ``The Air Force conducted misleading and unequal discussions with Boeing by informing Boeing that it had fully satisfied a key performance parameter objective relating to operational utility, but later determined that Boeing had only partially met this objective. And then there's a bunch of other language that's pretty technical. But what happened here is, for some reason that I don't know for sure--I have some suspicions of what happened here, and that doesn't really matter--but for some reason the Air Force decided bigger was better. And they went and in their original decision opted for a bigger airplane and violated, in several different ways, the procurement rules in order to reach that conclusion. Now, we've said that the Air Force has already recognized that their life cycle cost decisions were in error. But we really hope in this rebidding that they will not be persuaded that bigger is always better. And what we have found, and some of the things we've talked about tonight, why bigger is not better, it's actually worse in this particular case because when you build a plane that's that much bigger, that exceeds your real requirements, you end up spending a quarter more fuel and you end up spending $2 billion on construction costs.”