Not to whip up political conspiracy theories or anything, but in addition to the obvious consequences for NASA, it would be unhelpful to the chairperson of the National Space Council to have any sort of safety issue overtly manifest itself with the return of Starliner. Boeing's going to take another (deserved) one for the team.
Of course, Boeing could have done proper engineering and end-to-end testing and likely avoided all of this mess.
One also wonders if Boeing's "two week" process of reconfiguring flight software for automated re-entry might spawn more embarrassing problems.