Obama to visit Ford plant today, celebrate auto rebound

DETROIT — President Barack Obama will visit the Ford Michigan Assembly Plant on Wednesday to talk about the government's successful rescue of the U.S. auto industry even though Ford was the only automaker to forgo emergency loans during the recession.

The White House said Obama plans to "deliver remarks highlighting the workers in the resurgent American automotive and manufacturing sector now that the auto rescue has been completed."

While Ford was the only one of Detroit's three automakers not to receive government assistance as part of the 2009 rescue effort, former Ford CEO Alan Mulally and other Ford executives have frequently said the Dearborn automaker and its own supplier base would have been decimated if GM and Chrysler had gone under.

Since 2011, Ford has added 24,000 jobs in the U.S. and now employs 73,000.

Ford has also been the beneficiary of other government efforts, including a $5.9-billion loan from the Department of Energy to help upgrade factories in several states across the country to build advanced technology vehicles.

So far, Ford has repaid about $1.5 billion of the loan.

The automaker used some of that money from the loan to retool Michigan Assembly so it could build the Focus Electric, C-Max Hybrid and the C-Max Energi. The Ford Focus also is produced at the plant.

The plant has been shutdown since Dec. 24. However, the shutdown is part of Ford's normal business cycle. All of Ford's plants in North America were shut down for two weeks, or from Dec. 24 to Jan. 4.

All of the plants 5,000 workers are scheduled to return to work next week.

Last month, the government said it lost $9.26 billion on the U.S. government's automotive industry rescue program.

The government said it recovered $70.42 billion of the $79.68 billion it gave to General Motors, Chrysler, Ally Financial Inc., Chrysler Financial and automotive suppliers through the federal Auto Industry Financing Program. The program was part of the larger Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.

That program was never designed to be profitable.

"This program was a crucial part of the Obama administration's effort to stop the financial crisis and protect the economy from slipping into a second Great Depression," U.S. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said on Dec. 19.