Mary Barra has an unsung talent her fawning corporate media admirers prefer to keep under wraps: a powerful throwing arm she’s repeatedly used during her more than 10-year tenure as GM’s CEO. Indeed, if Barra could throw a football with the precision she’s thrown subordinates under the bus, she’d make legendary quarterback Tom Brady look like a rank amateur.
Barra’s precision throwing skills likely helped her ascend to GM’s top job, and she demonstrated them almost immediately upon moving into the corner office. GM’s ignition scandal — a defect that killed more than 100 people and that GM had buried for years — gave Barra the chance to charm the media with her supposed transparency, accountability, and vow that the automaker had found religion when it came to automotive safety.
In fact, Barra ensured that GM and its top executives, including herself, were never held accountable. GM’s victim-compensation program under Barra’s appointee Kenneth Feinberg was structured in ways that shielded the company. Victims who accepted payouts had to agree not to sue GM and accept Feinberg’s determinations as final. By giving victims fast payouts, Feinberg shielded GM from the courtroom discovery that could have exposed what senior executives knew — and when they knew it.
Barra fired fifteen employees — most of them technical staffers and middle managers with no meaningful power — and declared that she had surgically removed GM’s rot. But she made certain that no senior GM executives were ever held accountable for the culture that prompted lower-level employees to perceive that covering up a potentially deadly design defect was what their bosses expected of them.
Notably, Barra was head of HR during some of the critical years when GM’s culture of fear and concealment remained firmly in place. HR determines whether employees feel safe reporting problems. If HR doesn’t own a culture of retaliation and silence, who does?
GM in 2015 reached an agreement with the Justice Department allowing the company to pay a $900 million fine and avoid criminal prosecution, provided it would take measures to reform its culture and never again lie to regulators.
Cruise DOJ Settlement
Fast forward to 2024, when GM’s Cruise driverless-taxi subsidiary agreed to pay a $500,000 fine to avoid criminal prosecution for deceiving safety regulators. Barra was chair of Cruise’s board and given that she was crowing to Wall Street that by 2030 the business would be generating $50 billion a year in revenue, presumably she was keenly aware of Cruise’s culture and the mindset and behaviors of its top executives.
A law firm GM hired to investigate Cruise concluded the company had a cowboy culture; Barra fired all the top executives, including Cruise’s CEO and co-founder. But Arden Hoffman, who was Cruise’s chief people officer and conceivably played a role in Cruise’s toxic culture, was promoted by Barra to oversee GM’s global human resources management.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom can also speak with great authority about Barra’s throwing arm, having publicly accused her of leading the charge to get Congress to overturn California’s aggressive tailpipe-emission and EV mandates.
“Mary Barra sold us out, eliminating Ronald Reagan’s work, eliminating the progress we made under the California Air Resources Board in 1967,” Newsom charged. “The Republicans rolled that back this year under Donald Trump’s leadership, but the American automobile manufacturers allowed that to happen. GM led that effort.”
There are even more examples, and Barra’s leadership pattern is undeniable and unmistakable. When GM is under fire, someone else is at fault. Engineers. Middle managers. Cruise executives. Regulators. Governors.
Anyone but Mary Barra.
And last week Barra threw her longtime friend and EV political benefactor under the bus: President Joe Biden.
While onstage at the New York Times DealBook Summit — an event Barra attended instead of a White House meeting of top auto executives with President Trump — she blamed Biden’s fuel-economy rules for GM’s EV fiasco, claiming the standards were so strict that GM was going to have to start shutting down gas-engine plants to meet them.
It was a startling claim from a CEO who spent years promising that GM would meet, if not exceed, those same standards.
It was Barra who promised GM would be all electric by 2035 and that by 2025 it would be selling more EVs than Tesla.
It was Barra who told Congress and Wall Street that GM was leading the EV transition.
It was Barra who dismissed hybrids — the technology Toyota correctly embraced and is printing money manufacturing — as little more than compliance tools.
Now, suddenly, Barra claims to be a victim of the Biden administration’s aggressive EV mandates despite compelling evidence that she helped shape them.
Barra’s Way or the Highway
In September 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported that sometime between 2015 and 2017 — the actual timing was vague — Barra held a meeting of GM’s top 300 executives at the company’s proving grounds where she laid out her vision of transforming GM into an all-EV company.
“We all have to sign up for this plan,” Barra reportedly said. “If you don’t believe in it, then see (HR chief) John (Quattrone) and we’ll find a landing spot for you.”
Donald Trump was elected in 2016 and took office in January of the following year. Barra was envisioning an all-EV future years before Biden was elected.
Politico reported that Barra was close with Biden, and by fall 2023 she had already visited the White House eight times. Politico credited her with leading the auto industry in “embracing Biden’s electric vehicle agenda.” “The president has spent years cultivating a tight relationship with [Barra],” Politico reported.
One of Biden’s closest aides was Steve Ricchetti, a former GM lobbyist whose brother remained a GM lobbyist during Biden’s presidency. Both Ricchettis lobbied the Senate for GM while Biden was still representing Delaware.
One year after Biden took office, GM named his niece, Missy Owens, as director of global sustainability reporting — working under an Obama NHTSA alumnus. Politico noted that Barra’s chumminess with the Biden administration even rankled fellow CEOs on the Business Roundtable.
The Inflation Reduction Act, which provided lucrative tax rebates on EVs, was written in ways that benefited GM, including rebates on electric vehicles assembled in Mexico — where GM is already the country’s largest automaker with roughly 25,000 employees. In June of last year, with Trump’s reelection already plausible, GM announced it would build its Cadillac EV Optiq in Mexico.
GM’s EV sales were predicated on U.S. taxpayers indefinitely subsidizing them, and Trump derailed Barra’s gravy train. But Trump gave her something better: a free pass to manufacture gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs with abandon. No more pesky emissions regulations to worry about and no more paying Tesla billions in carbon credits to offset the billions they make selling their problem-plagued vehicles.
Barra told the DealBook Summit that GM will continue to develop motors that are fuel-efficient and cleaner even if federal standards no longer require automakers to do so. Actions speak louder than words, and GM’s during Trump’s first term were deafening.
According to the EPA’s 2023 annual report that’s curiously no longer available online, GM’s carbon emissions during Trump’s first term increased more than any automaker except Honda. The EPA blamed the shift on Barra’s increased focus on more profitable gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs, which more than offset emission improvements in GM’s other vehicles.
By comparison, during the same period, Toyota’s carbon emissions decreased more than any other automaker, and the company’s overall fuel economy improved. What makes these results so remarkable is the EPA said Toyota during this period increased its share of the truck and SUV market to 38% from 27%.
Yet the media bashed Toyota, not GM, for being indifferent to climate concerns.
At the end of the day, Barra made a big bet on EVs that didn’t pan out. To suggest that Biden was responsible for GM’s EV debacle is but another example of Barra’s Orwellian efforts to continuously rewrite history. She does so with abandon knowing full well she can count on the media not to call out her failures or hold her accountable.
Mary Barra’s failed EV ambitions weren’t driven by Joe Biden, and they didn’t fail because of him. They failed because of Mary Barra’s poor judgment and leadership.