Since President Donald Trump reentered the Oval Office, it’s been clear he wants to stop a $5 billion effort to build electric vehicle charging stations. Last week, his administration made clear how he’ll do it.
In essence, Trump’s new secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy, issued an order that attempts to turn back the clock on the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program as if none of the rules or decisions made by the prior president ever existed.
Experts said that while the administration will likely face lawsuits and have to pay for charging stations anyway, the move would dampen consumer enthusiasm for EVs and send an ice storm through a program that was just starting to gain momentum after years of frustrating delays.
“The majority of Americans will read this and pick up that ‘Trump has killed EV charging,’” said Loren McDonald, a principal at the EV-charging data firm Paren. “For people that are on the fence on getting an EV, this means ‘I shouldn’t get one because I won’t be able to take that road trip.’”
In related news, a company that intended to make battery cells for EVs said Friday that it is canceling its plan to build a $2.5 billion factory in Georgia.
Freyr relocated two years ago from Norway to the U.S. in order to seize on what then seemed an unstoppable EV market. But according to a spokesperson, it now has pivoted to building out a solar manufacturing plant in Texas that it acquired from a Chinese firm last year.
On the campaign trail, Trump branded the charging program, created by the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law, as an inefficient waste of money.
But advocates for the program last week leaped to its defense, pointing out that charging stations are necessary for people who buy EVs and that anything that impedes the U.S. EV market cedes leadership in a key new technology to China.
“Any slowdown in the EV market puts us at a disadvantageous position to China, because they are not slowing down,” said Nick Nigro, the founder of Atlas Public Policy, which analyzes EV trends.
The NEVI program is intended to build out a national charging network for long-distance travel. State departments of transportation draft plans on how to spend federal money, primarily to install fast-charging plazas at 50-mile intervals along major highways.
The order from the Federal Highway Administration, a part of the Transportation Department, said the pause is meant as a review that would last until spring. It added that any contracts that states had entered into to build charging stations would be honored.
The Trump administration’s muscular halt of EV-charger aid, embodied in an Inauguration Day executive order, hasn’t stopped private investment in EV charging.
Ionna, a new national EV-charging network, said last week that it plans to add 1,000 fast-charging stations nationwide by the end of the year. The effort is a joint venture of eight automakers from around the world, including Ford, Toyota and Mercedes-Benz.
A leading concern of EV supporters is that braking the NEVI program will delay charging stations in low-income and rural areas that need stations in order to persuade the doubtful that a charger will be there when drivers need it.
“We already have big gaps in coverage in a lot of states, especially the rural states,” said Corey Harper, an assistant professor of civil engineering at Carnegie Mellon University who led a study on gaps in the EV charging network.
“If this funding doesn’t go through or get slowed down then the driving experience for a lot of Americans that have EVs or want to purchase EVs is going to be vastly different,” he said.
The big erasure
The new administration strategy came into focus Thursday when the Federal Highway Administration sent a directive to state transportation departments that canceled all the guidance and approvals that the Biden administration had created in the three years since the NEVI program began.
At the same time, the order revealed that Trump’s attempt to dial back the charging effort would only go so far.
States were reassured that the federal government would reimburse them for any contracts they had already signed, “in order to not disrupt current financial commitments.” Typically, the federal government pays for 80 percent of stations built under the program.
The Trump administration took advantage of a wrinkle in the NEVI program. While most federal transportation funding flows directly to states, NEVI requires states to submit yearly plans for approval by the Transportation secretary.
The FHWA order took direct aim at those plans, “suspending the approval of all State Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Deployment plans for all fiscal years.” The program began in 2022.
Such an approach to halting transportation funding has never been tried before, said Nigro. “The strategy is unusual,” he said.
All states have submitted such plans, often for multiple years. On Friday, the site where such plans are warehoused was taken offline.
At the same time, Duffy rescinded all guidance that the FHWA had created for the program.
FHWA has created several rounds of such guidance after receiving comments from thousands of stakeholders. It has set the ground rules for everything from where stations can be placed, to cybersecurity practices, to data collection, to technical specifications for equipment.
“It brought a lot of organizing around what reliable, performance-based charging looks like, and what that charging needs to look like for the mass market,” said Nigro.
In the meantime, FHWA says “no new obligations may occur” until the highway agency issued new guidance and until it received brand-new plans from the states, even for past years.
Transportation chief Duffy defended the policy shift Saturday in an appearance on Fox Business, where he co-hosted a show before joining the Trump administration.
Program host Dagen McDowell asked if the charging program is needed any more, given the administration’s plans to revoke the regulations and policies that support EVs.
“That’s going to be a conversation for Congress,” Duffy said. “The question would become, does the Congress need to invest in an infrastructure for one set of vehicles and maybe not another set of vehicles.”
Trump himself has been “at war” with the $7,500 tax credit for EV buyers, Duffy said.
“I’m not opposed to EVs, but I think there’s been a broader conversation — should the government be subsidizing an EV rollout or EV chargers,” he said.
“For my purposes I was given the authority by the Congress to review the policies and procedures and make sure they fit with the U.S. Department of Transportation,” he said. “We’re going to recalibrate what the program should look like and if Congress takes action in the interim that’s their prerogative.”
It is unclear to what extent states are already engaged in financial contracts that the Trump administration intends to pay for.
According to Paren’s data, $3.2 billion of NEVI money has been allocated to states, and a much smaller portion — $616 million — has been awarded to companies to actually build stations.
Those awards, from 35 states as well as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, are destined to the bank accounts of 104 companies that are expected to produce 999 charging sites. No central respository exists that shows what contracts have been signed.
The next key question becomes what happens to those charging businesses that got state awards but haven’t yet signed their contracts.
That “creates great uncertainty for the billions of dollars states and private companies are currently investing in the urgently needed infrastructure to support America’s highway transportation network,” said Ryan Gallentine, the executive director of Advanced Energy United, a clean-energy trade group, in a post on LinkedIn.
The FHWA directive also gave a green light for states to disregard all the planning that NEVI had required of them so far. “States will be held harmless for not implementing their existing plans,” it said.
Some states, including Florida and Missouri, have moved very slowly on their NEVI plans and have made no awards at all. Other states, including Ohio, Rhode Island, Alabama and Oklahoma, said after Trump’s inauguration that they would put their programs on pause.
Breanna Badanes, the communications and policy director for DriveOhio, an advanced-technology arm of the Ohio Department of Transportation, said in an email, “We’re still working to understand the specific funding impacts of the new guidance.”
She added that the 19 NEVI-funded stations the state has opened to the public will continue operating.
It is unclear whether the administration has the authority to withdraw approval for programs that Biden’s secretary of transportation, Pete Buttegieg, already approved.
The text of the bipartisan infrastructure law specifies that the money can only be spent on “projects directly related to the charging of a vehicle.”
Observers said that legal action by states or companies is likely.
“I imagine a lot of DOT [department of transportation] heads are talking to the attorney generals of their states,” said Paren’s McDonald.
This story also appears in Climatewire.
