The Biden administration wants 50% of all new vehicle sales to be electric by 2030. It’s an ambitious goal, but did anyone bother to tell the president that the U.S. would need 500,000 charging stations by 2030 to reach that goal and prevent unmitigated chaos?
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Biden wants to grant a waiver from his administration’s “buy American” rule so that countries like China and India could build that massive number of EV chargers for us. The House passed a resolution that would prevent that waiver from going into effect following a similar resolution that the Senate passed.
Biden can successfully veto the measure considering that it takes two-thirds of both the House and Senate to override it. The Senate passed the anti-waiver measure 50-48 while the House passed it 209-198 — both far short of the two-thirds majority needed.
The White House claims that the waiver actually strengthens “buy American” requirements.
“If enacted, S.J. Res. 38 would weaken Buy America requirements by reverting to [the Federal Highway Administration’s] general waiver for manufactured products, allowing federal dollars — including $7.5 billion from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law — to be spent on chargers made in competitor nations like the People’s Republic of China,” the White House said in its veto threat last year.
One of the Senate co-sponsors, Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), said at the time, “Obviously, I don’t agree with their analysis.”
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“The bottom line is this,” Rubio said on the Senate floor. “If we’re going to spend $5 billion of taxpayer money to build electric vehicle charging stations for the United States, it should be made by Americans, in America, using American products.”
White House climate adviser Ali Zaidi on Wednesday highlighted the administration’s ongoing efforts to accelerate the EV transition, including with more factories popping up in the United States. At the end of 2023, about 170,000 chargers had been installed nationwide, he said.
Zaidi, who helped announced new grants for EV chargers, called the Republican resolution “part of a broader effort to take choices away from consumers to underplay and undermine efforts that would strengthen our energy security.”
Who is it taking choices away from the American consumer? The Biden administration is trying to make it so expensive to own a gas-powered vehicle that the only choice will be to go electric.
“A waiver undercuts domestic investments and risks empowering foreign nations,” said Rep. Sam Graves (R-Mo.), chair of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, during a House debate Thursday. “If the administration is going to continue to push for a massive transition to EVs, it should ensure and comply with Buy America requirements.”
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This is exactly the sort of thing that opponents of the $1 trillion infrastructure bill spoke against before it was passed in November 2021. How much of that trillion dollars was going to be spent outside the United States?
Congress added the “Buy American” amendment to the infrastructure bill to prevent Biden from doing what he’s trying to do with the waiver for EV chargers. The big question is whether Democrats will join with Republicans to prevent Biden from enriching other nations at our expense.