March 29 (Bloomberg) -- General Motors Corp. Chief Executive Officer Rick Wagoner will step down after more than eight years running the largest U.S. automaker, people familiar with the situation said.

The Obama administration asked Wagoner, 56, to leave the company and he agreed, said an administration official who declined to be identified before the move was announced. The likely replacement, unless the government hires from outside the company, would be Chief Operating Officer Fritz Henderson, said John Casesa, managing partner at New York-based consulting firm Casesa Shapiro Group.

“If they go to someone inside, Fritz is the obvious choice,” Casesa said. “He’s run every region, he’s been number two and he knows where all the bodies are buried.”

Wagoner had said March 19 that he didn’t plan to resign. His departure comes as President Barack Obama prepares an address tomorrow morning on his plans for the future of GM and Chrysler LLC. GM is surviving on $13.4 billion in U.S. loans and is asking for as much as $16.6 billion in additional aid to survive. Wagoner was asked to step down as part of the company’s restructuring, the official said.

“It’s very hard for the government to write a big check without giving some evidence of change,” Casesa said. “This will also give the government moral authority with the other stakeholders to make them sacrifice.”

Members of Congress, including lawmakers in the leadership and on the banking committees, will be briefed by administration officials on details of the plan this evening, according to a leadership aide who asked not to be identified discussing the private meeting.

Chrysler’s Nardelli

Chrysler CEO Bob Nardelli, whose company has received $4 billion and is asking for $5 billion more, hasn’t been asked to resign, people familiar with the talks said.

The longtime GM chief, who has been lampooned on satirical television program Saturday Night Live and vilified for his central role in the auto-industry collapse, said this month that he hadn’t been asked by the government or his own board to quit and his plan was to finish the restructuring.

“I do it because it’s important and I feel like I have a responsibility to do it,” Wagoner said in a March 19 interview. “I plan to stay here until we get things well in shape and on track and beyond that, we’ll see.”

GM has said it will shed 47,000 jobs globally in 2009 and plans to close five assembly plants. Executives said the Detroit-based automaker will focus on four U.S. brands, down from eight, and eliminate thousands of dealers. The company’s shares tumbled 87 percent last year.

Recent Rally

GM has rallied 66 percent since March 12, when Chief Financial Officer Ray Young said it wouldn’t need a $2 billion payment by the end of this month to survive as originally forecast. The biggest U.S. automaker is benefiting from increased cost-cutting, Young said.

Wagoner has run GM since June 2000, presiding over $82 billion in losses since the end of 2004, its last profitable year. Wagoner weathered the losses and activist investor Kirk Kerkorian’s 2006 push for an alliance with Renault SA and Nissan Motor Co.

Wagoner has repeatedly argued he knows the company better than most who could take his job. He joined GM in 1977, as U.S. automakers were fending off Japanese competitors who recognized the need a decade earlier to build fuel-efficient vehicles.

As CEO, the former Duke University freshman basketball player and Harvard University MBA bet early against gasoline- electric hybrid vehicles, focusing research on hydrogen technology. GM offered its first full-scale hybrids in 2007, a decade after Toyota introduced the Prius.

Trucks, Not Hybrids

Wagoner kept GM focused on pickups and sport-utility vehicles, only to press for development of the Volt plug-in electric car when gasoline prices soared.

He used the purchase of South Korea’s Daewoo Motor Co. to expand GM’s overseas sales 51 percent to 5.5 million cars and trucks by 2007. He wrung concessions from labor unions in 2007, including cutting wages in half for new hires and offloading retiree health care to a union-run trust by 2010.

The U.S. government has previously requested the replacement of chief executive officers at American International Group Inc., Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac when they received aid.

Then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson replaced Fannie Mae CEO Daniel Mudd and Freddie Mac’s Richard Syron when he put the two mortgage-finance companies into government conservatorship in September. AIG chief Robert Willumstad left after a government rescue the same month.

In 1984, federal regulators replaced the board chairman and CEO of Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Co. after taking an 80 percent ownership stake.

‘Good Guys’

Steven Rattner, the lead adviser for the U.S. Treasury on Obama’s car task force, said March 20 that the future of Wagoner and Nardelli hadn’t yet been decided.

“They’re good guys really trying hard to run those companies and I have nothing bad to say about them,” Rattner said in a Bloomberg television interview. “The decision about what we do about management will get wrapped up, ultimately, in the configuration of these companies.”

He acknowledged the precedent in other bailouts.

“That’s not a decision we’ve made yet and it’s certainly not one we would make in the context of saying that Rick or Bob had done anything wrong or somehow misled us or anything of that sort,” he said on March 20. “They’ve been really stand-up guys, and they deserve to be treated fairly.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Doron Levin in Southfield, Michigan, at dlevin5@bloomberg.net; Jeff Green in Southfield, Michigan at jgreen16@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: March 29, 2009 20:40 EDT