Chevrolet

The "Government Motors" Legacy

No event shapes how GM is perceived politically more than its 2008 to 2009 federal rescue. As the financial crisis hit, the Treasury spent roughly $49.5 billion bailing out GM, a process begun under President George W. Bush in December 2008 and expanded under President Barack Obama in 2009. The company passed through a government-orchestrated bankruptcy in 2009 that left the U.S. Treasury holding a 61 percent equity stake, and out of that period came the nickname "Government Motors," which conservative critics used as shorthand for federal overreach and which still colors the brand for many on the right. The Treasury sold its last GM shares in December 2013, and the Office of the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (SIGTARP) later put the final loss to taxpayers at about $11.2 billion. Defenders of the rescue, including the Center for Automotive Research, credit it with saving more than a million jobs across the industry. More than fifteen years later, the bailout remains the reference point many readers reach for first when they think about GM and Washington.

Where the Political Money Goes

General Motors maintains one of the longest-running corporate PACs in the country, registered with the FEC since 1977, funded by employee contributions. In December 2024, GM donated $1 million, along with a fleet of vehicles, to President-elect Donald Trump's inaugural fund, matching Ford and Toyota; CEO Mary Barra said at the time that the company and the incoming administration were "goal-aligned" on a strong economy and manufacturing base. Like Ford and most legacy automakers, GM spreads its candidate giving across both parties rather than concentrating on one, a pattern industry analysts attribute to the company's need to maintain working relationships with whichever party controls policy levers that affect manufacturing, trade, and emissions. GM's hourly workforce is heavily represented by the United Auto Workers, whose 2023 strike against the Detroit automakers and subsequent contract, plus the union's push to organize GM's joint-venture battery plants, keep the company tied to labor politics that do not map neatly onto either party. GM is also one of the heaviest federal lobbyists in the country, an activity driven by the same exposure: fuel-economy standards, EV incentives, tariffs, and trade rules all directly affect the company. GM reported spending nearly $11.4 million on federal lobbying in the first quarter of 2026, a record quarter for the company that surpassed its own roughly $8.2 million record set in early 2025; per NOTUS, only a few trade associations, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Realtors, and the pharmaceutical industry group PhRMA, spent more that quarter. Readers who want the precise current partisan dollar split can consult GM's OpenSecrets profile, linked below, which reflects the latest FEC filings.

The DEI Language Change

In early 2025, General Motors quietly removed direct references to diversity, equity, and inclusion from its annual report to investors. Where the company's January 2024 10-K filing had listed a commitment to "promote diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)" among its workplace goals, the January 2025 filing replaced that language with a pledge to "foster an inclusive work environment in which all employees can perform at their best." An NPR analysis identified GM as one of at least a dozen large public companies that softened or deleted DEI language from investor disclosures in that period, following more public rollbacks by Ford, Walmart, Target, Meta, and others.

GM did not publicly announce the change, and the company did not respond to NPR's request for comment on it. Observers noted that GM had particular incentive to align with the prevailing political mood in Washington because of GM Defense, the division that holds a 10-year State Department contract with a ceiling value of $300 million to produce armored vehicles. Unlike Ford, GM did not issue a memo or frame the shift as a values decision; the signal was sent through what disappeared from a regulatory filing.

The EV Reversal and the Newsom Fight

In August 2021, GM joined Ford and Stellantis in a joint statement backing an aspiration of 40 to 50 percent electric vehicle sales by 2030, issued alongside a non-binding Biden executive order at a White House event that GM attended; GM spent the years that followed branding electric vehicles as its "North Star," in Barra's words, and pledged an all-electric future. That posture changed sharply as demand cooled and federal policy turned. After the Trump administration rolled back fuel-economy rules and the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed in July 2025, ended the $7,500 federal EV tax credit for vehicles purchased after September 30, 2025, GM scaled back billions in planned EV spending, leaned back into gas-powered trucks and SUVs, and recorded large EV-related charges. GM has also long opposed California's stricter state-level emissions standards in favor of a single national standard, and in 2025 the company drew direct fire from California Governor Gavin Newsom, who accused GM and Barra by name of having "sold us out" by helping enable the federal rollback of EV policy. Reporting has documented tension between GM's Washington lobbying and the aggressive EV targets the company had earlier embraced. Barra has continued to call EVs GM's long-term goal while acknowledging the path is now slower and more complicated.

This places GM, and therefore Chevrolet's product lineup, at the center of one of the most partisan-coded policy fights in the country, with the company landing on the side of fewer mandates and more flexibility.

A Detail Worth Knowing

The same General Motors that scrubbed diversity language from its 2025 investor report still spent paragraphs in that very document promoting the diversity of its vehicle lineup, including its EVs, even as the word "diversity" vanished from its description of its workforce. And GM Defense, the quiet government-contracting arm most people never associate with the Chevy badge, builds a purpose-built armored SUV, officially named the Suburban Shield, for the State Department's Diplomatic Security Service; it uses GM's commercial SUV architecture on a unique reinforced chassis rather than a stock Suburban with armor added, putting a militarized cousin of a familiar Chevrolet body style into the federal motor pool.

Footnotes

1. OpenSecrets, General Motors organization profile (2024 cycle): https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/general-motors/summary?id=D000000155
2. FEC, General Motors Company Political Action Committee overview: https://www.fec.gov/data/committee/C00076810/
3. NPR, "GM and Disney scrub some DEI references from annual reports" (Feb. 7, 2025): https://www.npr.org/2025/02/07/nx-s1-5288947/trump-dei-disney-pepsi-diversity
4. GM Authority, "GM Removed DEI Language From Its Annual Investor Report" (Feb. 2025): https://gmauthority.com/blog/2025/02/gm-removed-dei-language-from-its-annual-investor-report/
5. Fox Business, "Newsom says GM's Mary Barra 'sold us out' on electric vehicle policies" (Sep. 26, 2025): https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/newsom-says-gms-mary-barra-sold-us-out-electric-vehicle-policies-federal-subsidies
6. WardsAuto, "GM CEO: ICE and EVs can both thrive under the GM tent" (Jan. 2026): https://www.wardsauto.com/news/gm-ceo-ice-and-evs-can-both-thrive-under-the-gm-tent/809680/
7. Trellis, "Why General Motors lobbied against its own EV goals" (Apr. 2026): https://trellis.net/article/general-motors-electric-vehicles-lobbying/
8. Sustainability Magazine, "Has General Motors Taken a Subtle Step Back from DEI?" (Feb. 2025): https://sustainabilitymag.com/articles/has-general-motors-taken-a-subtle-step-back-from-dei
9. Reuters, "Ford, GM donate $1 million and contribute vehicles to Trump's inauguration" (Dec. 23, 2024): https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/ford-donates-1-million-fleet-vehicles-trumps-inauguration-2024-12-23/
10. GM Defense, "GM Defense awarded U.S. State Department contract for next generation armored heavy-duty SUV" (Nov. 30, 2023): https://pressroom.gm.com/gmbx/us/en/pressroom/home/news.detail.html/Pages/news/us/en/2023/nov/1130-gmdefense.html
11. NOTUS, "General Motors Posts Record Lobbying Spending in Early 2026" (Apr. 2026): https://www.notus.org/money/general-motors-lobbying-spending-tariffs-autonomous-vehicles
12. The White House, "FACT SHEET: President Biden Announces Steps to Drive American Leadership Forward on Clean Cars and Trucks" (Aug. 5, 2021): https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/08/05/fact-sheet-president-biden-announces-steps-to-drive-american-leadership-forward-on-clean-cars-and-trucks/
13. CNBC, "Biden pushes for electric vehicles to make up half of U.S. auto sales by 2030" (Aug. 5, 2021): https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/05/biden-pushes-for-evs-to-make-up-40percent-or-more-of-us-auto-sales-by-2030.html
14. Reuters, "U.S. Government Lost $11.2 billion on GM Bailout" (Apr. 30, 2014): https://www.aol.com/finance/2014-04-30-us-government-lost-11-billion-gm-bailout.html
15. CNN Money, "Treasury closes the book on GM bailout with final stock sale" (Dec. 9, 2013): https://money.cnn.com/2013/12/09/news/companies/gm-bailout-stock-sale/