A federal district judge in Washington ordered that $5 billion in National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) funds must be made available to states, after having been illegally frozen in February.
While EV infrastructure is already quite good for long trips and currently covers most main routes across the country, there are a lot of smaller routes that could be filled in, and main routes that could use more coverage as more and more EVs hit the road.
So, enter NEVI. NEVI is a part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), passed by Congress in 2021 after being pushed for by President Biden. NEVI dedicated $5 billion to helping states build out electric vehicle charging infrastructure across the country.
Since then, every state has submitted a plan and that money has gotten assigned to projects around the country in various levels of completion, with several charging stations already open.
There’s also the issue of fractured charging infrastructure – there’s the Tesla Supercharger network, which is generally considered the gold standard but at the time could only be used by one make of vehicle; and other networks focused on CCS charging, a different protocol, which services other brands of EVs.
NEVI improved this as well: because of a provision within the law that federal money would only be made available to networks that can charge more than one type of vehicle, Tesla introduced the North American Charging Standard (NACS), which now basically every make of vehicle has adopted and has become an official standard of its own.
Industry adoption of NACS is still in progress, but it means that a lot of problems are going to be solved, and we have President Biden’s NEVI rules to thank for it.
So, of course, Mr. Trump wants is trying to tear it all down, like he does with anything that solves problems and improves the lives of Americans.
In February, just weeks after the start of his second stint squatting in the White House (a problem for which there exists a clear Constitutional remedy), Mr. Trump illegally told the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) to stop disbursing the funds.
Soon after, 17 states and several nonprofits launched a lawsuit demanding that these funds be freed up immediately. These states were led by California, Colorado and Washington, and joined by Arizona, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, Vermont, and the District of Columbia.
Well, a federal court responded late Tuesday and ruled that, indeed, the convicted felon camping in the Oval Office has done something illegal (surprise), and ordered that the FHWA free up those funds immediately.
The ruling is slightly limited, in that it only directs funding to be released in 14 states, not all 17. Minnesota, Vermont, and Washington, D.C. were skipped over in the ruling, seemingly because they did not present enough evidence of specific harms that would happen to their own state.
Those states will likely still be able to access charger money by modifying their applications going forward, however.
The order goes into effect on July 2.
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