Two years ago, Congress overwhelmingly passed the Aircraft Certification, Safety, and Accountability Act (ACSAA), legislation drafted as a response to the two Boeing 737 MAX crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia that left 346 dead. The bipartisan legislation strengthened the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) aircraft certification process with more stringent transparency requirements.

But the key provision relevant today is a December 27 deadline, requiring airplane manufacturers to upgrade their cockpit safety system, as approved by the FAA. In the MAX crashes, Boeing concealed the changes to their plane using software and disabled a cockpit light that would have alerted pilots to a faulty sensor reading. The congressional provision was specifically created to rectify this, the very issue that caused the fatal accidents in late 2018 and early 2019, which led to a 20-month grounding of the 737 MAX.

With that deadline around the corner, Boeing has upped its lobbying game to request an extension from Congress. Even as other aircraft manufacturers have met the deadline, Boeing claims that a so-called “commonality” alerting system for pilots, which would bridge between the older and newer alert systems, is preferable.

William McGee, a senior fellow for aviation and travel at the American Economic Liberties Project, told the Prospect in response to Boeing’s argument, “It’s very weak … The bottom line is, this is a safety issue and it’s incumbent on the FAA to ensure that we don’t have any kind of a repeat of what happened with those two fatal crashes.”

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IN THE DWINDLING DAYS of the lame-duck session, with only a must-pass government spending bill on the docket, the company is again trying to jam a deadline extension. Exacerbated by outside business pressures from the airline industry, Boeing is working double time to secure a congressional reprieve. “I don’t underestimate the huge cost factor here,” McGee said. “Boeing is saying they can’t make it, well, that’s on Boeing.”

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As Congress considers kicking the can down the road, pressure from within the federal government can be exerted. So far, that has not been the case. “The fact is the FAA [acting] administrator, and therefore the [Department of Transportation] secretary,” McGee said, “have tremendous authority and leeway to act on safety issues.” That could be as simple as Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg using the bully pulpit, calling on Congress to not allow a deadline extension. McGee continued: “[Secretary Buttigieg] can speak out on this and he hasn’t to my knowledge.”

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“How much this is gonna cost [Boeing], that’s irrelevant to the safety issue,” McGee said. “The bottom line is the deadline is the deadline. It was supposed to be done, and it hasn’t been.”