Pete Buttigieg went on CBS’s Face the Nation Sunday and somehow made $7.5 billion sound like a rounding error. The Transportation Secretary could not explain to host Margaret Brennan why the Biden administration’s massive federal investment in electric vehicle charging infrastructure has produced, by April, a grand total of seven or eight charging stations.
Seven or eight. Not seven or eight thousand. Not seven or eight hundred. Seven. Or eight. The Biden team got $7.5 billion from the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 to build a national EV charging network, and by the end of 2023 they had built exactly zero stations. A few months later they scraped together enough ambition to get to single digits.
Brennan pressed Buttigieg directly, asking why the rollout wasn’t happening more quickly. His answer was a masterpiece of government-speak. He talked about utility work, formula dollars going to all 50 states, and the President’s goal of 500,000 chargers by 2030. Brennan cut right through it: “Seven or eight, though?” Buttigieg called it the Biden EV charging program “the absolute very, very beginning stages of the construction to come.” Sure, Pete. And a toddler taking his first step is in the very beginning stages of running a marathon.
When Brennan pointed out that seven or eight stations don’t exactly make long-distance EV travel realistic, Buttigieg pivoted to pointing out that the private sector is actually doing most of the charging infrastructure work right now. Which raises a perfectly reasonable question: if the private sector is already handling it, what exactly did $7.5 billion in taxpayer money accomplish?
Part of the answer, according to reporting on the program, is that local zoning restrictions and red tape have gummed up the works, and the Biden administration hasn’t done much to cut through any of it. Compare that to President Donald Trump, who made a point of slashing red tape wherever possible to get his administration’s projects moving. One administration built things. The other built PowerPoint slides about building things.
To top it off, the fossil fuel industry has reportedly been lobbying to have the new EV stations built at existing gas stations, and cashing in on the program in the process. So Biden’s great green energy revolution ended up being a pretty solid deal for the oil and gas guys. You genuinely cannot make this stuff up.
The Biden administration still has its goal of half a million chargers by 2030. At the current pace of seven or eight every couple of years, they’ll hit that number right around the time Pete Buttigieg is collecting Social Security.
