What does a government have to do to give away free money these days?
Two years after Presidentish Joe Biden put his signature on the trillion-dollar Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act — you remember, the one that spends about nine cents on the dollar on actual infrastructure — there are billions in electric vehicle charging station money that nobody seems to want.
And Republicans, showing some rare backbone, are trying to cut some spending — but I'll get to that momentarily.
At Biden's insistence, the law set aside $7.5 billion to finance "tens of thousands of electric vehicle chargers across the country, aiming to appease anxious drivers while tackling climate change," as Politico put it on Tuesday. Politico's corporate bylaws prevent the site from publishing a story that doesn't include at least one mention of the world being about to end.
Politico also notes that all those chargers are "essential to reaching President Joe Biden’s goal of having half the vehicles sold in the United States be electric by the end of the decade — a key cog of his climate agenda."
His agenda. Your tax dollars.
But thanks to "the labyrinth of new contracting and performance requirements they have to navigate to receive federal funds," at least according to various state governments and contractors, not a single charging station has been built with those $7.5 billion Biden bucks.
Zero is the correct answer to the burning question, "How many EV chargers can Biden buy for $7.5 billion."
The goal is to build 500,000 new chargers by 2030 so with approximately none built so far, Biden has missed it by that much, as Maxwell Smart would say.
That's a lot of free money just sitting there because this is a government program we're talking about. DC can't just say, "Hey, there's this pool of money available if you'll do this thing we want people to do," and then start writing checks to people once they've shown they've done the thing.
Five billion is for chargers that are supposed to run at least every 50 miles along our interstates, with credit card readers and an uptime of 97%. A J.D. Power study from earlier this year found that only 61% of charging stations were working properly, but government-funded chargers are going to be much more reliable because everyone is on drugs.
One of the would-be beneficiaries of Biden's largess is Arcady Sosinov, CEO of charger manufacturer FreeWire Technologies. "It has been frustrating, to say the least," he told Politico. You think you're frustrated, Arcady? That's my tax money you can't even figure out how to take to finance your business.
Do have some sympathy for the contractors, though. Every free dollar Washington hands out for boondoggles like these EV chargers comes with two migraine headaches for the people trying to install them.
But what's this about Republicans showing some backbone? House Republicans are looking at the delay and wondering what will really happen with that slush fund, and they are trying to eliminate it. Or as POLITICO put it in the scariest-sounding way possible:
"Republican opponents are now trying to shut down the administration’s efforts to build a charging network by choking off its funding. And the sluggish rollout could undermine Biden’s EV-themed reelection messaging."
I suppose Biden could try running on something aside from tardy tax-sucking malinvestments like "clean energy" projects to benefit his cronies, but, if I'm being charitable, what else has he got?
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