Sean Duffy has a choice: follow the wishes of his state or his boss.
The former Republican representative is President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Transportation. In that role, Duffy would oversee a $7.5 billion effort to build electric vehicle charging stations.
Trump has repeatedly branded the program as a boondoggle. But the Republican-controlled Legislature in Duffy’s home state of Wisconsin has passed special laws to land $107 million of those funds.
“If you’re looking for someone antagonistic toward charging infrastructure, it’s not the state of Wisconsin,” said Andrew Wishnia, a former DOT official who helped craft President Joe Biden’s EV-charging program.
The Trump team did not respond to a request for comment from Duffy. He will likely face questions on his EV stance during his nomination hearing Wednesday morning with the Senate Commerce Committee.
His dilemma is one example of a broader reckoning across Washington this winter, as Republican leaders try to square their opposition to Biden’s “green scam” with the billions of dollars of jobs and economic opportunities that it is bringing to Republican states, cities and towns.
As transportation secretary, Duffy would oversee the Federal Highway Administration, which is responsible for setting guidelines and disbursing money from the EV-charging programs created by the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law.
Biden’s Transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, has moved quickly to dedicate the programs’ funds and prevent them from falling into the Trump administration’s hands. But Duffy will still have about $2.5 billion of the money left to spend — which he could direct away from EVs or work with Congress to claw back entirely.
Duffy, 53, is an affable former five-term Wisconsin representative and county prosecutor who mostly, but not always, voted with his Republican colleagues.
He is on the record as skeptical about federal aid for EVs from his stint as a host to Fox News’ “The Bottom Line,” a role that brought him to the attention of the TV-loving president-elect. Duffy exited the network after Trump nominated him to head DOT in November.
“This is the dumbest policy,” he said on air in 2023, referring to Biden’s rules to encourage EV adoption. “If Americans wanted electric vehicles — $60,000 a pop — they’d buy electric vehicles.” In an episode from November, Duffy suggested that Biden’s climate change plans — which heavily feature EVs — are part of “an agenda of control.”
Conflicting pressures
Wisconsin’s two senators, Democrat Tammy Baldwin and Republican Ron Johnson, both support Duffy’s nomination. But they greatly differ in their views on what he should do with the federal EV charging money.
Baldwin, who is on the Commerce panel that will consider Duffy’s nomination, signaled her approval after meeting with him in December. In a statement to POLITICO’s E&E News, Baldwin declined to say whether the topic of EV charging came up in their conversation.
But in a statement after meeting Duffy, she said her support came while she was “thinking about the big infrastructure projects in the pipeline.” That includes not just the EV charging program, but other infrastructure projects in Wisconsin, like $1 billion to rebuild the Blatnik Bridge, not far from where Duffy first won office.
“You can bet I will stand up to anyone who wants to take this away from the Badger State,” she told E&E News.
But Johnson said in a statement to E&E News that he looks forward to Duffy “ending the funneling of taxpayer dollars into green energy boondoggles that the country cannot afford.”
Johnson’s view mirrors that of Trump, who has a sour take on EV charging stations.
At rallies during his campaign, Trump frequently railed against Biden’s EV charger push as too expensive, while exaggerating its costs and understating its scale. Electric cars also featured in his nomination speech at the Republican national convention.
“Think of it, they spend $9 billion on eight chargers, three of which didn’t work,” Trump said.
Trump was referring to the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program, which is funded for $5 billion. And while the program has had a troubled and slow rollout, it is expected to eventually fund thousands of chargers. So far, 49 of them are online, according to Paren, a data firm that tracks federal EV-charging action.
Wisconsin whets its appetite
Wisconsin only began using funds from the federal EV charging program last year. How it did so — and why it waited so long — is a sign of the state’s strong lean into federal aid.
The Badger State at first couldn’t employ the money for two wonky reasons: The Wisconsin Department of Transportation wasn’t authorized to run an EV-charging program, and state laws on selling electricity didn’t sync with federal guidelines.
Charging-station operators could only sell the product — electricity — in units of time, not by volume of electrons. Federal rules required sales to be based on electricity usage, because otherwise there would be little financial incentive for charging station providers to enter the market.
By overwhelming bipartisan majorities, Wisconsin’s Republican-dominated state Legislature passed bills to change both rules in 2023.
They were signed by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers in March. Craig Thompson, Evers’ transportation secretary at the time, said the department “is ready to activate the federal funding and help industry quickly build fast chargers across the state.”
“You had a Republican legislature pass a bill relevant to electric vehicles that was signed in by a Democratic governor, and that shows that there’s interest on both sides of the aisle,” said Ben Behlke, the clean technology manager at Renew Wisconsin, a nonprofit that advocates for clean energy in the state.
One gauge of a state’s interest in the federal program is what portion of its highways it makes eligible for federal help. Wisconsin’s is high, encompassing 85 percent of the state highway system.
Those Wisconsin highways are eligible over five years to receive a total of $78 million, most of which will go to build charging stations at 50-mile intervals. As of May, the state had awarded $23 million to 53 projects.
The first three stations came online last month. One of them is in Ashland, just a five-minute drive from the courthouse where Duffy started his political career as Ashland County district attorney two decades ago.
That station, along with the other two, are operated by Kwik Trip, a gas-station-restaurant-grocery chain based in La Crosse, Wisconsin. The chain blankets the state and promotes local sports teams. “They have the hearts of Wisconsinites,” Behlke said.
Kwik Trip is expanding to other states and is one of the country’s most active participants in the federal EV-charging program.
According to Paren, Kwik Trip ranks seventh nationwide in companies nabbing sites for federally funded spots — a line of business that could dry up if Duffy moved to take the money away.
Kwik Trip did not reply to a request for comment.
In August, Wisconsin scored another pair of wins from Biden’s EV-infrastructure effort.
The city of Milwaukee — home to last year’s GOP national convention — got almost $15 million to build 53 charging stations in the region. And Dane County, which is home to the state capital of Madison, won a more than $13 million award to build 92 charging stations.
How will Duffy lean?
It is unknown how Duffy will react to this push and pull between Trump, who famously demands loyalty, and Wisconsin and the hopes it has invested in the EV era.
It’s also unclear how much he can do, as the EV-charging money was designed to be untouchable.
Duffy has bucked his party before in favor of his constituents. In 2011, while in Congress, Duffy went against his Republican colleagues to vote to maintain funding for National Public Radio.
“Those stations would have gone under in my district, and those are stations people love,” he said.
One thing that plays into Duffy’s views is that he’s from rural Wisconsin. Ashland, the county where he started his career and that lies within his congressional district, is a lightly populated land of timber logging and dairy farms, on the frigid shore of Lake Superior.
It is an area where, because of a lack of broadband internet access, people needed NPR. But so far they are not expressing a need for EVs. Perhaps because of long rural routes and frigid temperatures — both of which sap the ability of an electric vehicle battery — Ashland has among the lowest EV registrations in the state.
Nonetheless, they are getting one of Biden’s EV chargers. Ashland County is on the tourist track, meaning the charging station could draw visitors and money from more liberal areas downstate.
“I don’t think people realize quite how remote Northern Wisconsin is,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “They do depend on the federal government being helpful.”