Joe Biden’s Other Green Debacle—Billions Thrown at USPS for Tiny Number of Electric Delivery Trucks

It is a story that is rather mordant in its irony. The post office, which has been a financially sucking chest-wound for generations and is well known as an inefficient delivery apparatus, has an EV scandal of sorts. Courtesy of Joe Biden’s highly praised but lowly successful infrastructure spending plan, the US Postal Service was set to retrofit its entire fleet, the bulk of which would now be electric delivery vehicles. 

To the surprise of literally no one, this project involving Biden and the USPS has gone sideways and is shown to be a complete and utter bust.

Although the Biden administration has been hailed by the left for years for its aggressive green energy policies, scant attention has been paid to the results—or, more accurately, the lack thereof. The very fact that there are no follow-up reports on the “success” stories says plenty, but the absence of honest measurements in the press is the real issue. In fact, we have seen how they strive to hide the problems with these energy proposals.

Notice there has been scant coverage in the press when a touted and heavily subsidized EV bus manufacturer has gone wheels up in the ditch. Alas, as we have covered here, Biden and Pete Buttigieg were hailed when they proposed dropping an amount of money on par with the GDP of a second-world nation to build a network of EV charging stations across the country. It led to all of eight chargers being installed. EIGHT!

Recently, Politifact attempted to rescue Secretary Pete’s reputation, striving to correct a Congressman who brought up this figure. The truth sayers rushed in to alert us that after $7.5 billion spent on this fiasco, the actual number of installed chargers is 38! I don’t know how to make the viscounts of verité at Politifact grasp the concept that announcing it is good news that nearly $200,000,000 was spent on each charging station is damning him with faint praise. And now we have the latest shameful EV story.

In 2022, as part of Joe Biden’s spending spree insultingly dubbed the “Inflation Reduction Act,” Joe uncorked his plot to revamp the USPS vehicle fleet with a projected 60,000 new EV postal trucks. The “Next Generation Delivery Vehicles” (NGDVs) would be made by defense contractor Oshkosh, commonly manufacturing heavy grade industrial vehicles for the military. This would be a $10 billion dollar project, with an opening outlay of $3 billion to begin manufacturing. The results have been, expectantly, dismal.

The Washington Post stuns us by committing journalism and exploring this project. After digging through some 21,000 pages of documents from both the government and Oshkosh internal sources, as well as speaking with almost two dozen internal sources, WaPo has uncovered a complete bust of a project. By this date it was expected the USPS would have received upwards of 3,000 of the vehicles. It has been granted less than 100 to this point. The factory was projected to be cranking out approximately 80 trucks daily by now; it is barely managing to get one a day out the door.

So, what is the USPS receiving, for what has so far been mere dozens of trucks coming in with roughly a $32,000,000 sticker price? (Internal estimates peg the actual per vehicle cost at $78,000, or so.)

Significant manufacturing difficulties that were not disclosed to the Postal Service for more than a year have stymied production, according to internal company records and four people with knowledge of the events. Engineers have struggled to calibrate the vehicles’ air bags, according to two people familiar with the manufacturing process. When workers ran leak tests on the vehicles’ bodies and internal components, water poured out as if their oversize windows had been left open in a storm, three people said.

One of the initial delays was seen with the partnering company that is producing the bodies of these EVs. The USPS stated that it expected to see the first new NGDVs on the road in early 2023. The first workable truck bodies from that manufacturer were not sent to Oshkosh until this summer. As a result of the setbacks and delays, some of the leadership at the USPS have been advising moving away from Oshkosh and trying out EVs produced by other manufacturers,

Despite these failures, the Biden administration hailed the USPS at an event in the White House celebrating entities with a Federal Sustainability Award. Included in the group was the USPS: “In December 2022, USPS announced its bold commitment. USPS is expeditiously installing electric vehicle charging infrastructure across the nation, with 14,000 charging ports in progress to be installed over the next few years.” This was a celebration by Joe Biden for spending the money Joe Biden gave to them. It needs to be noted that this was not a celebration of spending the money productively.

Amid these rampant failures, Oshkosh has not been open with the USPS about the problems. Some of those the Post spoke to said they wanted to alert the Service of the issues, but executives silenced them. Likewise, Oshkosh was not forthcoming with its own investors.

John Pfeifer, Oshkosh’s chief executive, told investors on Oct. 30 that the company was “really happy with where we are” and called the NGDV a “revolutionary vehicle.”

But, according to one of the sources from inside the company:

“This is the bottom line: We don’t know how to make a damn truck,” said one person involved in production.

It is for this reason that the incoming Trump administration has already indicated they will likely be yanking the charging plug for this entire enterprise. This possible decision has the expected pushback from the left, saying such would kill off manufacturing jobs. But these are the blind souls who see no problem with snow shoveling billions of federal dollars into projects where they do not actually manufacture the things slated to be produced. Calling out DOGE: If you do not have this on your Kill List, get it on there now.

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