Once upon a time in America, taxpayers were scandalized to learn the Pentagon paid $400 for a toilet seat. It was front-page news. Congressional hearings were convened. Outrage flowed like prune juice at the Biden White House breakfast buffet.
Fast forward to 2025, and no one bats an eye over spending more than that for just a toilet.
In fact, the federal government under the Biden administration set aside a whopping $7.5 billion in cold, hard, debased American currency—and to date, we’ve got a grand total of 384 E.V. chargers to show for it.
And here’s the twist: hardly anyone is shocked.
No wall-to-wall hearings.
No breathless exposés strung out on tenterhooks.
No Geraldo Rivera cracking open an empty safe at Fort Knox.
These are strange times. We used to get mad when they flushed money down the toilet for toilets.
And you thought a national debt north of $37 trillion was a fiscal problem. Silly you. It’s not a money issue—it’s a perspective disorder.
Nowadays, when a federal program costs $7.5 billion, the average Appropriations Committee staffer shrugs and mutters, “That’s just a drop in the bucket.”
And it is. Which, of course, is precisely the problem.
Buckets full of drops add up—especially when every drop costs $19 million and still doesn’t charge your car.
But I digress. Or rather, I’m circling to the point. And here it comes.
Recently, we learned that for that low, low price of $7.5 billion, our fair land was rewarded with a few hundred government-approved extension cords, a federal lawsuit, a GAO report stuffed with bureaucratese (surely Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson will approve of this one), and what appears to be a masterclass in how to spend money like the Kardashians on a Rodeo Drive bender.
Although—let’s be fair to the Kardashians.
For that kind of money, they’d at least walk away with some serious bling, a fleet of Bentleys, three reality shows, and probably a small island nation.
Washington, on the other hand, provided us with a few hundred barely used outlets and called it transformational.
This wasn’t a green infrastructure investment. It was a nationwide performance piece—billions in taxpayer dollars transformed into pure virtue signaling. A federally funded avant-garde production titled “Masterfleece Theater Presents: Rich Man, Poor Man.”
The rich men (and women)? That would be the folks heavily leveraged in the green energy sector. Want names? The FEC has a search portal. I’ll let you take it from there.
The poor men and women?
That’s pretty much everyone else—you, me, and anyone who pays taxes instead of offshoring their income stream and virtue-signaling their carbon neutrality on LinkedIn.
The Biden administration promised 500,000 chargers by 2030. At the current pace, we’ll hit that target right around the time electric cars qualify for antique plates.
Let’s be honest—it was never going to happen.
And frankly, I’m tired of politicians making bold promises scheduled to mature long after they’ve left office—if they’re even reelected to begin with. Spoiler alert: that didn’t happen for Mr. Biden.
What we got instead were presidential talking points fed through a teleprompter in the run-up to last year’s election, another drop in the national debt bucket, and a handful of chargers hogging all the good parking spots.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021—and let’s be honest, the only part that wasn’t false advertising is that it was passed in 2021—set aside $7.5 billion to build a nationwide E.V. charging network.
It was supposed to revolutionize travel, bring “charging equity” to underserved communities (whatever that means—it sounds mildly patronizing, like promising omnidirectional microphones to monasteries), and possibly cure male-pattern baldness while it was at it.
That’s a whole lotta Hair Club for Men subscriptions.
So how’s that going?
As of April 2025, 384 charging ports were operational at 68 stations across 16 states, reports National Review, citing federal data and a Department of Energy dashboard.
That’s 384 chargers—not 384,000. Not even 3,840. Just 384.
That number is so embarrassingly low, you’d have to add the entire roster of the Los Angeles Chargers to creep slightly north of 400.
And the payroll cost of those gridiron Chargers? It’d be a rounding error in this $7.5 billion green-energy gala.
The per-port cost? Roughly $19 million.
And guess what? Since this was a Biden-era project, no one can pin the delay on a rogue judge issuing a nationwide injunction from the Ninth Circuit.
Nope—this mess is 100% Biden-led carbon-neutral craftsmanship.
No wonder the Trump administration moved to claw back this boondoggle.
It seems to me that it would make a lot of sense to redirect the unspent funds to a program that actually works—or better yet, use it to pay down the deficit, a quaint concept, I know, I know.
But you know how it goes.
The environmental law cartel—not quite as loud these days as the immigration law cartel, but just as lawyered-up—will be sprinting in their 100% recycled fiber suits to courthouses in Boston, Manhattan, and San Francisco, armed with pre-printed temporary restraining orders and looking for their well-connected Obama-era colleagues who now wear black robes.
Because in the green economy, the only things recycled faster than talking points are bad policy, polyester suits, and federal injunctions.
But then there’s this:
The private sector and state governments have already deployed over 219,000 public E.V. charging ports nationwide—without the benefit of a $7.5 billion supernumerary show. That means this federal contribution accounts for just 0.175% of the national EV infrastructure.
And I don’t know about you, but I see those stations 95% empty at any given time.
Meanwhile, when I pull into what my grandparents used to call the “fillin’ station”— there are days I have to wait for a pump.
And what takes me five minutes there would take forty-five at an E.V. port, assuming the thing works and isn’t blinking red with a “call for service” message.
There’s a message in that somewhere.
One the green policy crowd might want to decode—before they fry the grid and call it equity.
This is far beyond routine government waste—it’s weaponized inefficiency on the taxpayers’ dime (actually 75 billion dimes).
Biden and Company took a massive check, hired a crew of consultants, contracted with some favored green sector syndicates, issued no clear goals, delivered virtually nothing, and called it progress.
And if you raise any questions, you are accused of wanting the oceans to flood Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Because in Washington—for far too long—they didn’t build roads. That’s so… Eisenhower administration.
Instead, they paved the way for lawyers, lobbyists, and NGOs with a leaf in their logo, while the progressive left promised us a Green New Deal.
What we got was a $7.5 billion scavenger hunt for working outlets—and a government that couldn’t find one even when it was holding the plug.
And that’s why so many on my side of the aisle call it what it is: The Green New Scam.
Frankly, it’s no wonder the country reached for the plug last November—and flipped the switch.
Charlton Allen is an attorney and former chief executive officer and chief judicial officer of the North Carolina Industrial Commission. He is founder of the Madison Center for Law & Liberty, Inc., editor of The American Salient, and host of the Modern Federalist podcast. His commentary has been featured in American Thinker and linked across multiple RealClear platforms, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearWorld, RealClearDefense, RealClearHistory, and RealClearPolicy. X: @CharltonAllenNC
Image from Grok.