U.S. Transportation Secretary Federico Pena's recent turnaround on his previous decision to recall some 6 million General Motors trucks that critics charged were unsafe came as a surprise. GM had faced the prospect of spending $1 billion for a recall effort if it lost a costly and prolonged legal battle in the courts.
Instead, Mr. Pena announced an agreement between the government and GM that lets the company off the hook for a piddling $51 million in payments for various auto safety programs unrelated to the trucks.
Predictably, consumer advocates cried foul, charging the White House with putting political pressure on Mr. Pena to back off at time when the administration was wary of making any more vTC powerful enemies. White House officials deny they had anything to do with Mr. Pena's turnaround, although President Clinton admitted being surprised by Mr. Pena's October decision to seek a recall and his top aides were openly cool to the plan.
Mr. Pena said he reversed himself because proceeding with the recall process would have taken years in court and the safety and research programs GM had agreed to pay for would begin saving lives immediately. He also apparently heeded warnings by his own experts that there were serious weaknesses in the government's case and that if it lost, the precedent could make it more difficult to enforce future recall orders. Justice Department officials were equally leery of taking such a flimsy case to court.
The issue involved Chevrolet and GMC trucks from model years 1973 to 1987. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration began investigating the trucks two years ago after consumer groups petitioned for a recall, claiming the trucks are prone to catch fire in side collisions because their gas tanks are mounted outside the trucks' steel frame and that the design had caused 150 deaths since 1973. Yet the NHTSA staff recommended against taking action, in part because the GM trucks had met federal safety standards at the time they were produced. Also, the testing methodology was flawed. Yet Mr. Pena rejected the recommendations of his own staff and unilaterally declared the trucks unsafe.
He should have listened to his own experts.