*By Carlo Versano*
Boeing announced on Monday that Dennis Muilenburg, the aerospace giant's CEO, was resigning effective immediately. David Calhoun, Boeing's chairman, will replace Muilenburg as chief executive on Jan. 13. Until then, Boeing CFO Greg Smith will be elevated to interim CEO, the company said.
Boeing's board reportedly decided over the weekend that it was time for Muilenburg to leave, nearly 14 months to the day since a Boeing 737 Max operated by Lion Air crashed off the coast of Indonesia, sending the company into the biggest crisis in its corporate history. Less than six months after that Lion Air flight crashed, another Max jet operated by Ethiopian Airlines crashed. The two accidents, believed to be a combination of pilot error and faulty software, killed a combined 346 people.
Muilenburg was faulted for Boeing's early response to those two crashes, the second of which led to an unprecedented global grounding of the entire 737 Max fleet earlier this year. Since then, he became the face of the chastened company, testifying to Congress and apologizing to family members while Boeing technicians worked around the clock on a software fix to the system, known as MCAS, that's believed to have caused two otherwise routine commercial flights to fall from the sky.
Just last week, Muilenburg made the decision to temporarily stop production of the 737 Max entirely, at least until the FAA gave the go-ahead for the software fix. Then, over the weekend, the company took another morale hit when its Starliner space capsule had to abort an unmanned mission to the ISS because its internal clock was set wrong.
Shares of Boeing rose nearly 3 percent on the announcement of Muilenburg's departure.
The Trump administration has ordered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to stop nearly all its work, effectively shutting down the agency that was created to protect consumers after the 2008 financial crisis and subprime mortgage-lending scandal. Russell Vought is the newly installed director of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought directed the CFPB in a Saturday night email to stop work on proposed rules, to suspend the effective dates on any rules that were finalized but not yet effective, and to stop investigative work and not begin any new investigations. The agency has been a target of conservatives since President Barack Obama created it following the 2007-2008 financial crisis.
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