USPS electrification supporters face bumpy road ahead
Proponents of Postal Service electrification face bumpy road ahead
But none of their options are particularly promising, and the clock is ticking before tens of thousands of gas delivery trucks start rumbling down America's roads, undermining President Biden's goal of converting the federal fleet to electric vehicles.
“It's not obvious to me what the remedy is,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) told Maxine yesterday in comments that summed up the messy situation.
The context: Under the leadership of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, who took office during the Trump administration, the Postal Service moved forward with plans to spend up to $11.3 billion on as many as 165,000 new delivery trucks.
- The contract with Wisconsin-based Oshkosh Defense only calls for 10 percent of the new trucks to be electric and offers only a 0.4-mpg fuel economy improvement over the agency’s current fleet, which is nearly 30 years old.
- The Environmental Protection Agency and the White House Council on Environmental Quality last week sent letters to the Postal Service urging it to reconsider the contract, saying it rested on an environmental analysis with flawed assumptions and missing data, Jacob and our colleague Anna Phillips previously reported.
- DeJoy fired back in a statement on Sunday, saying the Postal Service has the “flexibility to increase the number of electric vehicles introduced should additional funding become available” from Congress.
What can Congress do?
After DeJoy kicked the ball back to Congress, Democrats in the House and Senate are exploring ways of blocking the plan, although big hurdles remain.
In the Senate, Democratic Sens. Edward J. Markey (Mass.) and Martin Heinrich (N.M.) led a letter last week urging the Postal Service to pump the brakes on the contract. But the letter hardly carried the force of law, and the Senate is not poised to take up any related legislation.
On the other side of the Capitol, the House is expected to pass legislation this week to overhaul the Postal Service’s long-beleaguered finances. But the bill from Oversight and Reform Chair Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) does not contain a provision sought by Rep. Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) that would provide $6.5 billion for the agency to buy electric trucks.
That provision was included in Democrats' Build Back Better bill as a compromise with Republicans. But now the Build Back Better legislation is stalled in the Senate amid opposition from Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.).
There has been a belief, senior postal officials have repeatedly told Jacob, that Congress would fund the agency’s electric trucks after DeJoy was thought to have smoothed over initial concerns with Democrats when the truck contract was announced in February 2021.
But once Manchin tanked the Build Back Better package, Congress didn’t have a backup plan for postal funding, and the Postal Service appeared to hit the gas pedal on its purchasing plan.
Appropriations
Huffman described the possibility of including language in an appropriations bill to block the Postal Service contract as unlikely.
There are limits to what Congress can mandate because of the semiautonomous nature of this agency,” Huffman said in an interview with Maxine yesterday.
“I suppose it's a good thing to free a large agency like that from micromanaging by Congress,” he said. “But when you get the kind of leadership we have right now at the Postal Service, it's a disaster because there's no accountability.”
Republicans, at least in the House, appear poised to resist appropriating funds to the Postal Service for electric vehicles.
“I think we’re a ways away from that [postal fleet electrification]. This isn’t something that Republicans are interested in right now,” Rep. James Comer (Ky.), the top Republican on the House Oversight Committee, told Jacob. “If [the Postal Service] can come up with a plan to electrify, that’s fine, but right now, there’s no realistic plan.”
The courts
Then there's the likely chance that environmental groups will sue the Postal Service over the contract.
Adrian Martinez, an attorney with the environmental law firm Earthjustice, told Maxine that he “highly suspects” environmentalists will sue.
However, litigation could drag out for years. And postal trucks are built to stay on the road for at least 20 years, unlike their private-sector competitors or other international post offices. That means the first trucks that roll off the Oshkosh assembly line next year could be on the roads in 2043 and beyond.
That’s what has Democrats steaming with DeJoy.
The Postal Service never formally drew up plans to electrify more than 10 percent of its fleet. And though the agency told congressional officials that it could convert gas-powered vehicles to battery power, it wrote in its environmental impact statement for the trucks — and told Jacob — that it no longer has plans to conduct those conversions.
By: Maxine Joselow and Jacob Bogage
Source: Washington Post
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