Boeing reports progress on containing Starliner costs

He did state that NASA and Boeing continue to study the Starliner anomalies from the CFT mission, with that work planned to continue into the summer. That work includes several teams looking into why those problems were not detected in earlier in design and development of the spacecraft or in analysis from its two previous uncrewed flights.

One issue he said the panel raised was that NASA considered the companies working on commercial service contracts like the commercial crew program to be “partners” rather than “vendors,” which he said “leads to a very strong bias to be supportive” of the company. That could have kept problems from being detected earlier “and could have influenced better contract performance.”

I don't think I'd heard this issue raised before. What does he mean by "supportive" in this context? It can't be financial support, as Starliner is a fixed-price contract.