While incoming president Donald Trump aims to cancel contracts for new EVs for the US Postal Service, the postmaster general says he defends its electrification plans and won’t return any funding for EVs – unless Congress forces the issue, of course.
Last year, Congress gave USPS $3 billion as part of a $430 billion climate bill to buy EVs and charging infrastructure. And that also included $1.2 billion for EVs, with plans to buy nearly 66,000 EVs by 2028.
Today, Reuters reports that U.S. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy said at a U.S. House of Representatives hearing that “the EV purchase plan makes business sense for USPS.” He added that to make any changes to that “has to be legislation.”
Last week, news hit that Trump’s transition team was looking to cancel the USPS contracts as part of a broad anti-EV suite of executive orders. Sources told Reuters that Trump’s team was looking into how it could unwind multibillion-dollar contracts, including with Oshkosh to build next-gen postal delivery vehicles.
Oshkosh has a South Carolina plant building its EVs, so Representative William Timmons, a South Carolina Republican, suggested a workaround is for the company to revert its plan to buy 90% ICE vehicles, so the contract stays intact. Oshkosh plans to deliver about 45,000 next-gen EVs and 21,000 off-the-shelf EVs, which include 9,250 Ford E-Transit EVs.
“There’s no reason that we should spend a billion plus more dollars to impose a green new deal mandate on the Post Office,” Timmons said. “I can promise you that Congress is about to fix it. I look forward to working with the incoming Trump administration to right this ship.”
According to the report, DeJoy said that USPS purchased 28,000 vehicles this year, with 22,000 of them being gas-powered. Purchases next year are expected to be around 50-50 EVs and ICE, with new vehicles purchased in 2026 to be all EVs, Reuters reported.
As it stands, the USPS has a fleet of some 217,000 delivery vehicles to deliver mail and parcels to more than 135 million addresses, so that is a lot of ground to cover – and adopting EVs for a federal agency that literally touches every neighborhood in the US is long overdue. The service says it is considering going all-electric in its future as part of a $40 billion plan to update its operations – right now it is targeting 75% electrification. It’s a good start, and hopefully it will stay in place next year and beyond.
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