Former President Donald Trump has warned in recent rallies and speeches that the federal government could face bankruptcy if the United States moves forward with plans to create a network of electric vehicle chargers.
The dire warning — backed by bombastic rhetoric and questionable math — adds a new chord to Trump’s long-running riff on EVs. How much it moves voters is unclear, but it underscores the likelihood that if reelected, Trump would torpedo the Biden administration’s efforts to put more American drivers in EVs.
“They built eight chargers for $9 billion and two of them don’t work,” Trump said at a North Carolina rally last week. “That’s a big problem. And if we were going to charge up the entire country for the electric car, if we were going to charge up, it would cost $5 trillion. That’s more money than we would have — we would have to file for bankruptcy.”
The Biden administration wants to put the U.S. on the path of building a half-million EV chargers — a critical piece of its larger goal of making EVs at least half of new vehicle sales by 2030. To support those ambitions, the bipartisan infrastructure law of 2021 included $7.5 billion to help pay for the construction of tens of thousands chargers.
Just 15 charging locations have been installed since the measure’s passage, according to the White House’s infrastructure tracking website, Invest.gov. They received an average of $770,000 in federal funding apiece, according to analysis published in June by the research firm Atlas Public Policy — excluding four stations Atlas didn’t have the costs for.
Administration officials have put some blame on state programs, which have been slow to set up and award funding. And they have pledged to do better.
In June, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm told Reuters that she expected about 1,000 new public EV charging stations to be opened by the end of the year. A total of $3.2 billion has been tentatively awarded so far, according to Invest.gov.
If Trump’s calculations “sound too ridiculous to be true, it’s because they aren’t true,” said Pete Gould, senior vice president at the lobbying firm Boundary Stone Partners, whose clients include companies in the EV and charging industry.
He added that a construction boom for EV charging stations is coming.
“We have only just begun to see these projects rapidly completed, and the next few months and years will see reliable EV charging along corridors across the U.S.,” he said.
Though Trump can’t repeal the bipartisan infrastructure law, the Inflation Reduction Act and other Biden-backed legislative actions without congressional approval, Trump said he would “redirect” any unspent money, such as unused funding, from EV charging stations.
“All of the trillions of dollars that are sitting there not yet spent, we will redirect that money for important projects like roads, bridges, dams, and we will not allow it to be spent on meaningless Green New Scam ideas,” Trump said last month at the Republican National Convention.
The sluggish pace of building EV chargers isn’t unique to that effort.
A recent POLITICO/E&E News analysis found that, as of April, only 17 percent of the $1.1 trillion in congressionally appropriated energy, climate, technology and infrastructure investments had been spent. The slow rollout is due to regulations, government agencies overseeing large amounts of funding for new types of projects and other causes, the analysis found.
The campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris, now the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, defended the Biden administration’s efforts and warned the country would take a step backward if her Republican opponent recaptures the White House.
“In a second term, Trump would give handouts to his Big Oil cronies and undermine hundreds of thousands of good paying energy and manufacturing jobs that the Biden-Harris administration helped create,” said Harris campaign spokesperson Joseph Costello.
