President Donald Trump’s war on electric vehicles could upend a multibillion dollar effort by the U.S. Postal Service to replace thousands of gas-fueled delivery trucks with those that run on electric power, according to environmentalists and clean-vehicle groups.
Trump has not said anything specifically about the post office program since he returned last month to the White House. But Trump’s transition team discussed canceling the Postal Service’s supply contracts before he was sworn in, according to Reuters. And Trump vowed during the presidential campaign to pull the plug on federal support for electric vehicles.
The Postal Service has been used before to promote new technology – mail service was a key source of revenue for the early airline industry, for instance. But like a lot of the clean energy programs the Biden administration promoted, the slow, balky rollout of the new trucks has left the program open to criticism, said David Kirsch, a professor at the University of Maryland who has studied the Postal Service.
While some of the criticism is valid, “That is not grounds for abandoning the project of electrifying local postal delivery,” he said.
