This admission comes from former V.P. Dick Cheney, who said in a Fox News interview that the Bush-Cheney administration knew of G.M.'s problems and knew the company should file for bankruptcy, but that President Bush didn't want to be the one to "pull the plug."
“I thought that, eventually, the right outcome was going to be bankruptcy,” Cheney said, referring to GM. “It had to go through such a dramatic restructuring to have any chance of survival that they had to be able to renegotiate labor contracts and so forth, and the president decided that he did not want to be the one who pulled the plug just before he left office.”
Cheney said that rather than acting on GM, the Bush administration “put together a package that tided GM over until the new administration had a chance to look at it.”