Pirate's Cove

It’s definitely Someone Else’s fault. Especially in those pesky states. This is a pretty crazy opinion piece at the Washington Post

Why the government built only 58 EV charging stations in three years

It was one of the proudest moments of the Biden administration: Charging stations for electric vehicles “will be up and as easy to find as gas stations are now,” the president told cheering autoworkers at the Detroit Auto Show in 2022. The bipartisan infrastructure law he signed earlier in his term set aside $5 billion to fill in the gaps of a network of 500,000 charging stations that would stretch seamlessly across the nation by 2030.

Private companies were already installing charging stations by then — but mostly in urban areas with lots of EVs. Rural areas in particular were left underserved. The law would solve that problem by installing between 1,000 and 1,500 publicly funded stations in the places private companies wouldn’t want to invest in. Nobody would be stranded on Thanksgiving on the way to Grandma’s because their car ran out of electrons.

In fairness, it doesn’t take long to install level 2 chargers at someone’s house, even if they have to install a second fuse box. The electricity is there. Installing level 1, 2, and 3 chargers, especially 3, out somewhere can take a bit more time. I watched them take about 6 months to run the lines for a level 3 with just 2 charging ports at a dealership. Permits, digging, running lines, turning it on. But, still, I also watched Tesla install about 6 (maybe more, can only see so many when I drive by them near the gym) in about 3 months in Knightdale.

But more than three years after President Joe Biden signed that law, a mere 58 new charging stations are in operation. President Donald Trump regularly cites that paltry figure as evidence of the incompetence of the federal bureaucracy. His administration, no fan of electric cars, is already trying to claw back the money. So what should have been a triumph of progressive policymaking has instead devolved into humiliation.

Is humiliation a strong enough word?

By the point the Biden administration turned its attention to expanding the nation’s EV charging infrastructure, the approach that FDR might have taken during the 1930s — just hiring people to do it — was entirely off the table. Such a plan would immediately be labeled a “socialist” enterprise that posed a threat to private companies.

When they considered passing and implementing this they should have maybe, you know, considered exactly how the f*** they would actually run the project. This is government in a nutshell: here’s a law, here’s money, make it happen. Would this be acceptable if you were hiring a contractor to say, build an add-on to your house? Wouldn’t you want to know how they were going to do it, and be pretty pissed if they were just winging it? I mean, hell, they could have trained a boatload of the deadweight federal employees to do this.

Instead, the Biden administration was left to rely in large part on the system that governs 90 percent of federal transportation spending: distributing the money to the states. This pattern, established during the Eisenhower administration, works by sending federal dollars to the state highway departments that maintain the nation’s infrastructure. Each state figures out how to implement the law, which in this case called for high-speed chargers at least every 50 miles on major highways.

And, obviously, no one, especially the guy who should have been checking, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and Biden as the “CEO”, bothered to follow up and make sure that the states were contracting the work out so the chargers actually got installed. And, really, how many companies are capable of doing this? Especially those who were not already contracted to install them?

Anyhow, it’s the states’ fault

The states, of course, had no experience with EV technology. And so it was up to the federal government to help them navigate their new responsibilities. The Transportation and Energy departments quickly established a “joint office” to guide the work. Within weeks of the infrastructure law’s signing — lightning speed by modern standards — the administration had published a draft rule establishing the requirements:

In other words, Los Federales slapped tons of requirements onto the projects, making it less likely for companies to want to get involved.

Government, in essence, is slow not by incompetence but by design. And it’s not just one law; the government’s inability to function today is the result of decades of procedural guardrails designed to prevent government from doing bad things.

Don’t discount incompetence.

We’ve created wildlife protections, and environmental study mandates, and opportunities for public comment, and new rights to sue that stand in the way of expeditious progress. Some states, for example, wanted to contract directly with their local utilities to erect the EV chargers, but federal statutes require a bidding process lest any contractor get a sweetheart deal.

Slow, incompetent, and bureaucratic. Skipping to the end (though, worth reading the whole thing)

The EV charging station tale marks what amounts to a “Wizard of Oz” moment for progressives. They want to prevent abuse and use government to serve the greater good. But as its snail-like rollout demonstrates, government today is more like the man behind the curtain than the great and powerful Oz. Progressives need to figure out how they will address the overcorrections of the past several decades and, in so doing, make government work again.

I wonder how much of the money simply disappeared into the pockets of federal bureaucrats, state employees, and contractors with little to no work?