Please support a legislative fix in H.R. 5331 that will finally bring justice to the accident victims left behind in the GM bailout

• The legislation provides just compensation due to hundreds of accident victims scattered across nearly every state who died or suffered serious injury from defective GM cars yet were left behind by the federal government when it bought General Motors out of bankruptcy in the 2009 auto bailout.

• These accident victims were paid pennies on the dollar for the approximately $936 million that Old GM estimated at the time of the bailout would be owed them. By comparison, the government agreed that once it took control of “New GM,” the $60 billion in claims due to corporate vendors, senior executives, unions, pension plans, and retirees would be paid in full. Twenty of the 26 Senators on the Committee of Commerce, Science, and Transportation signed a strongly worded letter at the time urging assumption of these claims by New GM, but to no avail. 

• Please reach out to your U.S. House and Senate representatives and encourage them to support the legislative fix contained in this bipartisan legislation, recently introduced by Congressmen Barry Moore (R-LA) and Troy Carter (D-LA), that remedies the injustice dealt the accident victims by the federal government when it unfairly targeted their claims against New GM for extinguishment in the bailout. 

• The Treasury’s “Judgment Fund” is available to fully fund the victims’ liquidated, Court-approved bankruptcy claims through a Court-approved settlement process. A comparable fix was enacted legislatively to enable the 1998 settlement of black farmers’ discrimination cases against the USDA in Pigford v. Glickman. This settlement was also paid through the Judgment Fund.

• A Q&A executive summary of the legislation can be found here.

• Here is a link to “The Book of Letters“, a comprehensive 213-page plea (compiled in 2022) to support passage of the AVRA (based on the predecessor H.R. 7016 introduced in the 117th Congress). This bookmarked PDF contains an Executive Summary (Tab 1), a summary of the proposed legislation and the Pigford precedent (Tab 2), key statistics along with a state-by-state analysis of victims’ claims (Tab 3), and letters from nearly 100 accident victims across the country in support of the AVRA to 31 select members of the U.S. House (Tab 4) and 28 select members of the U.S. Senate (Tab 5). Some of the letters tell of lives cut short and uncompensated losses that shattered the families left behind. Others tell of the daily struggles of victims and their families in trying to cope with permanent disabling injuries with inadequate resources.