The Trump administration is proposing to require that federally funded electric vehicle chargers be fully U.S. made — an all-but-impossible target that could kill a multibillion-dollar effort to build a nationwide charging network.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said Tuesday that raising the threshold to 100 percent domestic manufacturing — up from 55 percent — would advance U.S. manufacturing and improve national security.
“This proposal is designed to provide a strong incentive for manufacturers to rapidly shift their processes toward domestic manufacturing,” Duffy said, adding it would “protect Americans from foreign-made EV charger components that use technology with cybersecurity vulnerabilities.”
But a chorus of EV supporters and industry experts said Tuesday that the new rule would be next to impossible for federally funded charging stations to meet. It is not yet clear how rigorous the 100-percent rule will be; it’s in proposal stage and open for public comment.
“It’s hard to imagine 100 percent of any product being domestically sourced,” said Jay Turner, a professor at Wellesley College who maintains a database of clean-energy factories.
The move comes amid the Trump administration’s repeated attempts to claw back funding from the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program, a $5 billion Biden-era effort to build EV chargers along highways. Last month, a federal judge barred the administration from any further interference with the NEVI program, after it illegally paused the program last year.
Since then, Congress has rescinded about $800 million from NEVI, and the Trump administration has halted the release of funds to Democratic-led states from a separate pot of EV charging money.
“The reality is that this is likely intended as a de facto pause for NEVI projects, inserting exactly the kind of red tape that the announcement claims to be slashing,” said Steve Birkett, an independent EV-charging consultant, in an email.
Chargers are comprised of hundreds of components, including metals that are often imported. Eleven EV-charging factories are operational today, according to a database maintained by Wellesley College.
None of them make chargers out of only domestic components, according to the Electrification Coalition.
“Today, no EV charging manufacturer can meet a 100 percent threshold, and this change would effectively end the goal of the [National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure] program and years of investment from communities across the country,” the EV advocacy nonprofit said in a statement.
Others said the purity of the rule would be a heavy burden for those responsible for building the stations: state departments of transportation, which have been whipsawed by ever-changing federal guidelines.
“It will again cause the poor state DOTs to scramble,” wrote Bill Ferro, the chief technology officer of Paren, an EV-charging data firm, in an email. “This is similar to the confusion and uncertainty the last [Trump] pause caused.”
This is not the first time that domestic manufacture of charging stations has been a controversy.
The Biden administration threw states and the EV charging industry a curveball in 2024 when it set the domestic-content requirement at 55 percent. States that were already well along in procuring EV chargers had to start over again, hunting for equipment that would qualify.
But the rule also helped jolt U.S. manufacturing of EV chargers into high gear. The country saw nearly a dozen EV-charging factories spring up, helped by incentives for clean energy manufacturing in the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act.
In Tuesday’s announcement, Duffy sought to recast that history, saying,“The Biden-Buttigieg Administration’s empty promises led to few EV chargers and hurt domestic manufacturing.”
In fact, all but one of the country’s EV charging factories were stood up during the Biden presidency. The outlier — a Tesla line at its factory in Buffalo, New York — opened during Trump’s first term.
