Biography | Mary Barra — The April Hearing That Opened Her First Year as Chief

Her first months as chief executive were not a product launch. On 1 April 2014 she testified before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. The hearing title was The GM Ignition Switch Recall: Why Did It Take So Long? NPR's contemporaneous timeline and Reuters both place her under oath that day, weeks after she had taken the job on 15 January. The defect was an ignition switch that could slip from run to accessory or off, stalling the engine and keeping airbags from deploying in some crashes. By the April sitting, GM had recalled 2.6 million small cars in the United States. Reporting at the time linked the defect to at least 13 deaths. That count later rose as compensation cases were added; the April figure is the one the committee had in front of it. Reuters recorded that she called the company's slow response unacceptable and said the switch problem had reached her desk only on 31 January. She returned to the same subcommittee on 18 June 2014 after Anton Valukas delivered a 315-page internal report describing more than a decade of missed connections. The Energy and Commerce Committee keeps its offices in the Rayburn House Office Building at Independence Avenue and South Capitol Street. Hearings of this kind are held in Rayburn rooms, not on the Senate floor. The building photograph attached is a 2007 view from the Capitol dome. The portrait is a United States government photograph from August 2014, four months after the first sitting. Photo: Rayburn House Office Building, RebelAt, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: U.S. government, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.