GM Still Government Motors

General Motors today announced it will pay back the full $6.7 it borrowed from the U.S. government before the end of June, earlier than originally forecast.

“We’ve made significant progress in the past couple of months,” said GM chairman and CEO Edward Whitacre Jr., who also had the word interim removed from this title today. “This represents a significant milestone on our journey back to being a profitable and viable company.”

Ron Bloom, a senior adviser at the Treasury Department, said the decision to pay back the debt early is good for taxpayers and for GM.

“We’re glad to hear that,” he said.

GM is doing better than expected, and the debt repayment shouldn’t endanger its financial health. Bloom knows that because the Treasury Department keeps close tabs on the company’s financial performance.

“We have regular dialogue with General Motors,” Bloom said.

One would hope so—the U.S. government owns 60.8 percent of the company’s common stock. Overall, taxpayers provided $30 billion to the automaker to keep it afloat. The government may be able to sell some of its shares when the restructured GM makes an initial public offering of its stock, perhaps as soon as the end of this year, Bloom said. But it won’t be practical for the government to sell all of its stock in “one fell swoop,” he said.

Taxpayers could be stuck with GM for a long time, depending on the condition of the stock market and the company’s progress on its restructuring. This means the federal government will continue to have a say on how much GM pays its executives. But it doesn’t have a say on who those executives are, apparently.

Bloom wished Whitacre well in his new job as GM’s permanent CEO, but he said the company’s board, not the U.S. government, made the decision to give him that role.

“We were not involved in that decision,” Bloom said.

The federal government was involved in the decision to make Whitacre the chairman of GM’s board last July. Whitacre, the former chairman and CEO of AT&T, raised some eyebrows then by saying, “I don’t know anything about cars.”

Let’s hope he’s learned something about cars since then. It’s nice GM is repaying its debt, but most of the government’s investment in the company is in stock. For now at least, what’s good for General Motors is good for America.