Contact: Noah Barnes, Electrification Coalition
noah@electrification.org, (202) 461-2371
WASHINGTON—The Senate’s budget reconciliation bill would force the United States Postal Service (USPS) to scrap $1.5 billion of already purchased electric vehicles for mail delivery and charging infrastructure.
The USPS is replacing its decades-old fleet with state-of-the-art electric models that will provide significant operational savings for decades to come. The Senate version of the budget reconciliation bill would halt this transition, requiring the USPS to sell the 7,200 electric vehicles already in its possession for pennies on the dollar, since there is virtually no private-sector market for mail delivery vehicles. Replacing the vehicles is estimated to cost $1 billion.
The $500 million of electrical upgrades and charging infrastructure invested by the USPS would simply be written off as a loss, as it is nearly impossible to sell wiring that has already been installed underground.
The Senate parliamentarian, a nonpartisan advisor on proper legislative procedure, has ruled that such a move would require a 60-vote supermajority. Some are concerned that Senate Republican leadership could ignore the ruling and move forward anyway.
The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is holding a related hearing, The Route Forward for the U.S. Postal Service: A View from Stakeholders, on Tuesday, June 24 at 2 p.m. ET.
Electrification Coalition Executive Director Ben Prochazka responded:
“Electrifying the entire USPS fleet by 2030 would garner $4.6 billion in savings, with the electrification of USPS mail trucks (Long Life Vehicles) alone yielding $2.8 billion; forcing the USPS to scrap thousands of vehicles and hundreds of millions of dollars of electrical infrastructure would waste $1.5 billion, forfeit several billion dollars of potential savings, and leave our postal service reliant on a rapidly-deteriorating fleet while ceding ground in the race against China for the future of transportation.
“Electrification is as important for our national and economic security as it is for the USPS’s bottom line. The Next Generation Delivery Vehicles, USPS’s purpose-built EVs, are manufactured in South Carolina by an American company, building the domestic advanced manufacturing capacity that allows us to compete with China on the global stage. Developing a robust domestic EV industry is the only way to secure reliable access to the critical minerals that our defense sector relies on, and reducing our reliance on oil for transportation would diminish our vulnerability to supply disruptions and price shocks during geopolitical conflicts such as the ongoing situation in Iran.
“We urge the Senate to reconsider this proposal and instead advance policies that support American innovation, promote energy independence, make proper use of taxpayer resources, and secure our nation’s dominance in the 21st-century transportation economy.”
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About the Electrification Coalition: The Electrification Coalition is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that promotes policies and actions to facilitate the widespread adoption of plug-in electric vehicles (EVs) on a mass scale to overcome the economic, public health and national security challenges that stem from America’s dependence on oil. ElectrificationCoalition.org