An agency that manages buildings owned by the federal government, called the General Services Administration, is planning to shut down all of its electric vehicle chargers across the country, saying that they are “not mission critical.” The GSA is also looking to offload newly purchased EV fleet vehicles, and they’re certainly going to lose a lot of money on every single one. If that isn’t wasteful, I don’t know what is.
Right now, the GSA operates several hundred EV chargers across the country, accounting for about 8,000 plugs that are available to government-owed EVs as well as federal employees’ personally owned vehicles. From the Verge:
The official guidance instructing federal workers to begin the process of shutting down the chargers will be announced internally next week, according to a source with knowledge of the plans. Some regional offices have been told to start taking their chargers offline, according to an email viewed by The Verge.
“As GSA has worked to align with the current administration, we have received direction that all GSA owned charging stations are not mission critical,” the email reads.
The GSA is working on the timing of canceling current network contracts that keep the EV chargers operational. Once those contracts are canceled, the stations will be taken out of service and “turned off at the breaker,” the email reads. Other chargers will be turned off starting next week.
“Neither Government Owned Vehicles nor Privately Owned Vehicles will be able to charge at these charging stations once they’re out of service,” it concludes.
Under the Biden Administration, the GSA was at the head of the president’s plan to phase out the federal government’s use of gas-powered vehicles, replacing them with EVs. It currently owns about 650,000 vehicles, and more than half of them were going to be replaced with EVs. Of course, those EVs would need somewhere to charge, and that’s why Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act included $975 million for the GSA to upgrade federal buildings across the country with “emerging and sustainable technologies.” The aim was to get to net-zero emissions at federal buildings by 2045. Of course, with Trump that plan is completely out the window because of woke or whatever.
According to a March 2024 update, the GSA had ordered over 58,000 EVs and begun installing more than 25,000 charging ports, adding to the 8,000 already in use across the government. An interactive map showing the location of all GSA-owned chargers has been taken offline as of February this year. (An older version is available through the Wayback Machine.)
The GSA will also begin offloading the EVs it purchased under the Biden administration, the source said. It’s unclear whether those vehicles will be sold or simply put away in storage. It’s also unclear whether other federal agencies will be making similar decisions for their own EVs, although many of those agencies tend to use the GSA’s EV chargers for their own plug-in vehicles.
Good lord, this is all too stupid for words.
