President-elect Donald Trump’s nominees for the departments of Energy and Transportation could seriously curtail the government’s support for electric vehicles.
But will they?
Both Chris Wright and Sean Duffy — Trump’s picks for DOE and DOT, respectively — are critical of electric vehicles. Wright, who runs a fracking technology company, has called terms like clean energy “deceptive.” Duffy, a former Republican representative from Wisconsin, has disparaged EVs as unpopular with drivers and questioned the underlying causes of climate change.
If confirmed by the Senate, the two will have significant — but not absolute — authority to roll back Biden administration programs intended to foster a growing EV industry. At risk are billions of dollars in loan guarantees and grants to battery and material manufacturers, efforts to establish a nationwide charging network and regulations that push the auto industry to transition to lower-emission vehicles.
But it remains to be seen how much appetite Republicans have to actually scale back President Joe Biden’s EV agenda, especially considering how much of it benefits Republican districts.
“The question remains: Will the red states who are benefiting from these programs say they want to continue?” said Alan Baum, an independent Michigan auto analyst.
The actions of Wright and Duffy will affect both the car industry and the global effort to fight climate change. EVs, along with plug-in hybrid vehicles, have helped drive a reduction in pollution from the U.S. vehicle fleet over the last few years, according to EPA data.
If confirmed as Energy secretary, Wright would oversee the Loan Program Office, with a budget of over $6 billion for loan guarantees, mostly to battery-makers and materials miners. He would also control a $2 billion program to convert older factories into EV facilities, as well as $6 billion in grants for companies that build battery components and recycle end-of-life batteries.
Duffy, meanwhile, would helm an agency that plays an important role in regulating emissions from cars and trucks.
The Department of Transportation sets the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, which complement the emissions standards set by EPA. Under Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, DOT wrote a five-year plan to boost fleetwide fuel economy to 50.4 miles per gallon in 2031 from 46.7 miles per gallon in 2026.
The Trump transition team has said the incoming administration plans to roll back the latest CAFE standards. That would involve a monthslong effort, including public notices, a comment period and a public hearing.
DOT also presides over a $7.5 billion program created by the bipartisan infrastructure law to place EV chargers along major highways and to seed local EV networks.
It’s unclear how much EV-related funding Trump could claw back. But experts say his administration is unlikely to eliminate the industry. EVs made up about 10 percent of new car and truck sales in 2024.
“There is a point where this takes off regardless, even in the U.S. It’s just a matter of when and how,” said Chris Harto, a transportation and energy analyst at Consumer Reports, a nonprofit that evaluates products for end buyers.
Options to claw back funds
Daren Bakst, an energy and environmental analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, outlined one possible approach for rolling back federal EV support. The institute is a conservative think tank that targets regulations.
“In the upcoming Trump administration, agencies should methodically review how they are using regulation, subsidies, and spending in general to discourage Americans from driving gas-powered vehicles and trying to incentivize driving EVs,” Bakst said in a statement to POLITICO’s E&E News. “Then those policies and programs, consistent with law, should be eliminated.”
Others said Wright and Duffy could try to block loans and grants for EV chargers, factories and battery plants that haven’t been fully approved.
“Anything that was in that initially approved phase or an application stage, that could all be halted,” said David Reichmuth, a senior engineer in the clean transportation program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “There’s quite a few projects in that conditional approval stage where the loan hasn’t been funded.”
For instance, at least six of the Loan Program Office’s EV-related loans still have only conditional approval, meaning that the recipient has to align its financing in order to release federal purse strings.
Those on conditional status include Ford’s BlueOval battery plants in Kentucky and Tennessee, which are up for $9.2 billion in loans, and last week’s $6.6 billion loan to EV-maker Rivian to build an auto plant in Georgia.
Other conditional recipients are a battery plant in Arizona, as well as a lithium mine and a massive battery recycling and manufacturing facility in Nevada.
Wright or Duffy could also prevent EV policy through inaction. For example, they could decline to staff relevant agencies when vacancies arise, said Levi McAllister, a partner at the law firm Morgan Lewis.
“There’s certainly a path, potentially, of understaffing agencies or understaffing departments that would in turn lead to the cessation of those missions,” he said.
During the first Trump administration, DOE’s Loan Program Office lay mostly dormant. But it has thrived during the Biden years, leveraging the $6 billion it got through the Inflation Reduction Act to create more than a dozen loans worth tens of billions of dollars.
The question is what Trump — and Wright — do with the office in an energy landscape that is rapidly changing.
“Do they completely shut it down? Do they re-target it? Do they focus on nuclear energy, or other sources of energy?” Harto said.
Trump’s new “Department of Government Efficiency” throws another wild card into the equation. The external advisory commission will be headed by pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who want to slash $2 trillion in federal spending, cut numerous programs and massively downsize the federal workforce.
Musk, who dominates EV sales through Tesla, has suggested that the administration should end all subsidies that support any form of transportation over another.
The Trump administration could also just choose to not spend money tagged to support the EV industry.
“Any federal agency could sit on discretionary funds that haven’t been spent,” said Nick Nigro, the founder of Atlas Public Policy, which analyzes EVs and EV-charging data.
Lean into EV alternatives?
Duffy and Walsh could redirect Biden’s EV efforts by broadening them, so that EVs get less special support.
One high-profile example is the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, an unprecedented collaboration between DOE and DOT. Often referred to as the Joint Office, it bridges a knowledge gap between DOT officials, who mostly work in terms of pavement and bridges, and DOE electricity experts on the grid.
The Joint Office’s website describes its mission as “creating a future where everyone can ride and drive electric.” So far, it has focused on serving as an information clearinghouse for state departments of transportation as they try to build the EV-charging networks funded by the bipartisan infrastructure law.
“That office is really laser focused on eliminating the barriers for EV infrastructure,” said Harto of Consumer Reports.
But it might not stay that way.
“There won’t be a thumb on the scale to the same extent as there is now for one fuel type over another, ” said Andrew Wishnia, who was a climate adviser in Biden’s Department of Transportation for two years and helped write parts of the bipartisan infrastructure law.
Wishnia said he “could envision a Trump administration using that office to provide technical assistance to fuel types across the board.” For example, DOT’s EV-charging initiatives allow it to also fund fueling infrastructure for hydrogen, natural gas and propane.
But some of the Biden administration’s EV investments are “lockboxed,” Wishnia said.
The federal government’s surface transportation funding, authorized every five years, was folded into the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law. That means the money for EV infrastructure is embedded into federal highway aid, making those investments hard to extract.
The Charging and Fueling Infrastructure (CFI) program — a pot of $2.5 billion for local charging projects — is tamper-proof in several ways, Wishnia said.
First, the winners of almost all the money — four years’ worth of the five-year program — have already been named. Second, the pot of money from which it’s drawn is funded through 2028, even though the transportation provision and CFI are only funded through 2026. Third, the remaining funding could only be removed if Congress votes to do so, Wishnia said.
Changes to the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program — which funds high-speed chargers along highways — would require sign-offs from Congress’s appropriations committees. That may be difficult to do because the infrastructure law was bipartisan.
Asked if such protections were put in place in case a new president sought to reduce EV support, Wishnia said, “yes.”
“Those programs aren’t going anywhere,” he said.
A hybrid future
Still, the NEVI program has become a punching bag for Republicans. The program, run by DOT, has spent only a small portion of its $5 billion budget to build out a national highway EV-charging network.
Tom Pyle, the president of the American Energy Alliance, a conservative advocacy group that focuses on curtailing Biden’s clean energy initiatives, has urged the Trump administration to “take a slice out of that wildly inefficient charging subsidy.”
That criticism, however, is based on misrepresentations of the program’s spending and actions. Republicans, including Trump, have inflating the program’s budget — and falsely asserted that it was all spent on the handful of chargers currently operating.
“They built eight chargers … for $9 billion!” Trump said at the Republican national convention this summer.
The result of the Trump administration’s efforts may be an auto industry that switches, at least in the short term, to building hybrids.
Hybrids are more profitable than all-electric vehicles, and allow the companies to benefit from the battery plants they’re already building, said Karl Brauer, an auto analyst with iSeeCars.
They’re also more popular with American drivers, who remain concerned about the high cost of EVs and the lack of charging stations.
Hybrids are more fuel-efficient than conventional internal-combustion vehicles. Though they’re not the zero-emissions solution that many environmentalists prefer, they may be the best way to cut pollution from the transportation sector, Brauer said.
“The best diet is not the greatest diet in the world — it’s the one you can maintain,” Brauer said.
This story also appears in Climatewire.
