Charging Into Oblivion

This time, the electric car can't be killed. But American workers' chance to benefit from it can be, and a lot of them are Trump voters.

(Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

The first time the electric car was killed was around the turn of 20th Century. Oil interests, unregulated and poised to fuel industrialization, used their power to secure massive tax breaks. Gasoline and oil were easy and cheap to find and sell. Electricity sources were hard to come by in Gilded Age 1897, so the cumbersome task of charging an early Baker Electric Coupe lost out to the ease of gassing up, hitting the road, and gassing up again wherever you ended up.

Environmental degradation, sprawl and global warming were far over the horizon.

I was thinking about Donald Trump’s drive to kill the electric car all over again in this, his aspirational Second Gilded Age when this excellent history / cautionary tale dropped including the story above. Electric car sales are slowing, and yes, Donald Trump is trying to snuff them out in his contemporary quest to create demand for fossil fuels. The climate cost, of course, is dire. But Trump’s modern crusade will also do irreparable harm to American workers and the larger economy if courts, voters, or red state Republicans who could sacrifice the most in lost opportunity don’t intervene. The window, one expert tells me, is measured in months, not years.

Trump has gone after electric cars rhetorically, financially and legally, even while paradoxically staging a commercial for Elon Musk’s Teslas on taxpayers’ dime. (I would argue that that gross display was motivated by the immediate problems of Tesla’s cratering share price and Musk’s personal wealth and not any industrial or trade concerns.) Republicans in Congress are poised to rescind a $7,500 consumer tax credit that incentivizes purchases, and could even replace it with a new EV tax. They’re also trying to force California to rescind its 2035 EV mandate. And the Trump Administration unilaterally cancelled a $5 billion federal program meant to help states build out EV charging infrastructure, especially in rural places that often don’t have the high-current transformers, substations or density needed to support them.

But then, something happened the president did not intend.

Impound foolish

A Government Accountability Office investigation released last week found that Trump violated the Impoundment Control Act when he ordered the cancellation of that Biden-era effort, called National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program. That matters, because GAO has the power to sue and force the administration to spend the money as Congress required. Trump’s DOGE-branded assault on the federal government is dotted with similar potential impoundment violations, from the EPA to the undoing of congressionally-mandated USAID programs and beyond. Many are already before the courts.

According to GAO, the cutting off charging station money to the states was a no-brainer illegal impoundment. “What’s at stake is the United States’ ability to govern,” David Super, a professor of law and expert in budget and appropriations law at Georgetown University tells me. If presidents can overturn congressional policies on a whim, the risk is constant political whipsaws in the place of long-term planning, especially in a deeply and evenly divided country.

“You can’t run and advanced economy with the attention span of a gnat,” Super says.

Super argues the EV chargers case is legally clear-cut and would be a good candidate to try and stop Trump’s impoundments power grab in the Supreme Court. Except for “one glitch.”

The head of the GAO’s term is up next year, likely too soon for the case to work its way up to the Supreme Court. Then, Trump is sure to install a replacement Comptroller General, maybe “one of his left over defenses lawyers” to kill the case. “It means that GAO is not going to ride to our rescue on a golden steed" to rein in illegal impoundments in the name of electric car charging, Super says. Other cases are probably a better bet, and there may be even enough conservative justices sufficiently fed up with Trump’s relentless constitutional abuses to curtail them.

Plug ugly

The bad news is that won’t be fast enough to save the economy from a permanently disabling and self-inflicted (or rather, Trump-inflicted) wound, says Gabe Klein, who headed up the NEVI charger program and other electrification efforts in the Biden Administration worth more than $10 billion in total. (Full disclosure: Gabe is a long-time personal friend.)

Consumers are far more likely to buy an EV when they know they can easily charge it on the road. That’s a relatively easy sell in big metro area with lots of infrastructure, lots of chargers, and higher incomes. And it’s a downright hard sell in the swaths of the country where you can go hundreds of miles without passing a place to plug in.

But this isn’t the first Gilded Age. Climate pressure is real. Most of the world is committed to moving away from fossil fuels. Widespread adoption of electric cars is the inevitable future…just like streaming became an inevitable future, no matter how much you liked rifling through your DVD’s in the aughts. The only question is who gets to make and sell them. “The whole winner here is China,” Klein says.

American auto makers, spurred on by investments in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, have poured billions into building and marketing electric cars. But without utility-level, accessible charging in the next few years, consumers won’t buy. Companies face an uncertain climate, and pull back investments. A kind of death spiral for the domestic industry sets in. Stress domestic. Because Chinese EV’s are coming. They’re good, and they’re cheap.

“The Chinese are already way ahead. They have a $10,000 car from BYD that competes pretty will with the Tesla Model 3. Even with a 140 % tariff, that's $24,000. And you can’t keep your borders closed forever,” Klein says.

Several companies building US battery manufacturing have halted plans. They’re in Georgia, Michigan. and elsewhere. And automaker are now forced to re-evaluate plans to open plants to build EV cars. Those are jobs largely in red states, some of the same ones that would have benefited the most from federally-subsidized build-outs of charging infrastructure.

The shocks you don’t take

Building the beginnings of a true charging network is expensive and, at first, slow. You can’t just plug car chargers into an electrical grid without the right current managment, substations, and buy-in from local utilities. The government can step in to push things over the early hump when companies and consumers can’t afford the cost or the risk.

Then market demand takes over and pretty soon it’s everwhere and taken for granted. No one in the market for a made-in-America EV is inhibited by charging anxiety any more than they are about not being able to find an Exxon station. American workers, companies and consumers are all poised to capitalize on the benefits of innovation. That was the whole idea of the $5 billion charging station plan.

It’s not at all unlike federal programs to electrify rural America in the 1930’s. An electricty-powered economy was inevitable. Cities had already been electrified for decades, while places with sparser populations languished in a bygone, depressed age. Lawmakers who grew up in poor, unpowered communities, like Texas Rep. Lyndon Johnson, understood the demand of bringing the whole country out of a literaly dark age. In retrospect it’s impossible to imagine it not happening.

Flash forward to the now, where Trump gleefully attacked electric vehicles while Don Jr. and Elon Musk ridiculed the Biden charger effort for fun. The Biden Administration did an poor job of advertising the wide promise of their modern electrification effort, and an even poorer job of defending it from bad-faith attack.

It’s interesting to contemplate whether red-state lawmakers would have had the guts to vote down their share of $5 billion in free money just because it had Biden’s name on it. (Probably they would have.) But we’ll never know since Trump shielded them from the political consequences of the choice by illegally killing the program. If the courts undo it on anything but an emergency basis, it’ll probably be too late. At least to be the producers, not the consumers of the inevitable age to come.

“This was our one chance to catch up and you don’t get do-overs.” Klein says.

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