Three years after President Biden signed the bipartisan infrastructure law, it has resulted in only 58 ERV charging stations. Marc J. Dunkelman at WP:
[By] the time of the chaotic 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, progressives had soured on the establishment’s excesses. Men such as Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert McNamara had steered the nation into an unwinnable war in Vietnam. Local power brokers such as Richard J. Daley and Robert Moses decimated whole neighborhoods in the name of urban renewal.
And so, to protect ordinary people, reformers erected mechanisms to dilute public authority. Slowly, over the course of the next half-century, bureaucracies they deemed too powerful became, in effect, impotent.
By the point the Biden administration turned its attention to expanding the nation’s EV charging infrastructure, the approach that FDR might have taken during the 1930s — just hiring people to do it — was entirely off the table. Such a plan would immediately be labeled a “socialist” enterprise that posed a threat to private companies.
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Instead, the Biden administration was left to rely in large part on the system that governs 90 percent of federal transportation spending: distributing the money to the states. This pattern, established during the Eisenhower administration, works by sending federal dollars to the state highway departments that maintain the nation’s infrastructure. Each state figures out how to implement the law, which in this case called for high-speed chargers at least every 50 miles on major highways.
The states, of course, had no experience with EV technology. And so it was up to the federal government to help them navigate their new responsibilities. The Transportation and Energy departments quickly established a “joint office” to guide the work. Within weeks of the infrastructure law’s signing — lightning speed, by modern standards — the administration had published a draft rule establishing the requirements:Over the course of 2022, the government incorporated public feedback into the rule, as mandated by the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act. In the nearly 80 years since its passage, the APA has become the Magna Carta of bureaucratic governance, ensuring that agencies are fair and transparent. The attendant checks and balances, designed explicitly to prevent the bureaucracy from steamrolling opponents, almost inevitably slow things down.
- The chargers would have to work on all electric vehicles (as opposed to just Teslas).
- They would have to be reliable 97 percent of the time (so drivers wouldn’t encounter broken stalls).
- They would have to be located in remote areas where there would otherwise be gaps (as opposed to the busy corridors where private companies might choose to place them without subsidy).
