Another Joe Biden boondoggle numbering in the billions.
According to a recently published New York Post report, the Biden administration played a major role in the push to massively electrify the United States Postal Service mail truck fleet. From a USPS press release in 2022:
The United States Postal Service today announced that it expects to acquire at least 66,000 battery electric delivery vehicles as part of its 106,000 vehicle acquisition plan for deliveries between now and 2028. The vehicles purchased as part of this anticipated plan will begin to replace the Postal Service’s aging delivery fleet of over 220,000 vehicles.
The Postal Service anticipates at least 60,000 Next Generation Delivery Vehicles (NGDV), of which at least 75% (45,000) will be battery electric.
But, like Buttigieg’s E.V. charging stations, which cost about a billion dollars each, or Kamala Harris’s $42 billion rural internet “flop” that connected a whopping zero rural Americans to the web, or her one-billion-dollar solar panel plan for Puerto Rico which resulted in “only a few” installations), Biden’s “green” USPS plan has been an absolute cluster. From the Post item:
A Biden administration plan to create a ‘green’ fleet of postal vehicles has churned out a mere 250 electric mail trucks in just over two years — after shelling out taxpayer funds meant to build thousands…
The nearly $10 billion project — which called for more than 35,000 battery-powered US Postal Service (USPS) vehicles to be completed by September 2028 — was funded in part by $3 billion in funding from former President Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
(I suspect the Post item has a typo, because as you see above, the number from the USPS is 45,000, not 35,000.)
So far, the disbursed IRA funds are around $1.7 billion, which means that if Congress is able to claw back the $1.3 billion still allocated for the project, each of these 250 trucks have cost U.S. taxpayers a minimum of $6.8 million a piece—the whole plan was a $10 billion “investment,” so who knows how much else was spent from other sources. Now, “investments” are supposed to give the investors a return on their money, haven’t these financial whizzes heard?
The biggest issue with the program? The lucky contractor doesn’t even know what they’re doing:
‘This is the bottom line: We don’t know how to make a damn truck,’ one person involved with the manufacturing process told the Washington Post.
So, the federal government is only 44,750 short of its 45,000 goal. At this rate, purchasing around 83 electric mail trucks a year, it will take the government another 539-ish years to finalize their plans, which is a bit past the projected date of 2028. (Though we’ll all be long dead, Biden’s all-electric USPS fleet can be expected around the year 2564.)
And these are the people holding our pursestrings and running public policy?
I mean, I don’t care one bit if the USPS fleet doesn’t electrify, but this is just one more example of astounding corruption and incompetence.
Image generated by AI.