There are about 160,000 gas stations in the United States, the vast majority of them built and run through the private sector to maximize efficiency and convenience for motorists. And then there’s the EV charging network overseen by federal bureaucrats that cost American taxpayers $7.5 billion and produced 68 stations with 384 ports.

The contrast couldn’t be more stark.

In 2021, the Democratic Congress passed and former President Joe Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a $1.2 trillion monstrosity larded with pork and payouts to favored green interests. Included among the “investments” were billions to subsidize a national EV charging network in an effort to jump-start the sale of electric vehicles. The Biden White House insisted the program would fund 500,000 EV chargers by 2030.

As is typical of government infrastructure projects today, the program became bogged down in bureaucratic minutiae. Democrats clogged the grant requirements with all types of woke nonsense dictating, among other things, where the stations had to be built and who would be allowed to build them. At a Senate hearing last year, a Federal Highway Administration official testified that, after three years, the effort had produced seven charging stations and a “few dozen” charging ports, Reuters reported.

A year later, that number has increased. But the result remains underwhelming. The National Review reported last month that “the Biden administration’s program will have cost approximately $19.5 million per charger once the funding dries up in 2026.”

A recently released report from the Government Accounting Office concluded that the joint office set up by the Department of Energy and Department of Transportation to oversee such projects “generally does not have fully defined performance goals for its activities and, consequently, is generally unable to use the performance information it collects to assess progress toward goals.”

President Donald Trump issued an executive order in February directing states to stop spending the Biden money allocated for EV chargers. This is a step forward for fiscal sanity, given the program’s dismal record. The for-profit sector is capable of meeting demand for EV ports — as Tesla has aptly demonstrated. “Private companies have collectively spent billions on this infrastructure,” The Associated Press reported this year. “Industry leaders say that the demand from drivers for EV chargers will propel companies to build more of them.”

And it’s a sure bet that when these companies fund the construction of new stations and ports, they’ll do it in a timely fashion — and for far less than $19.5 million per charger.

— From Tribune News Service