Senate Republicans cannot force the U.S. Postal Service to scrap thousands of electric vehicles and charging equipment in a massive tax and budget bill, the Senate parliamentarian said late on Sunday.
The U.S. Postal Service currently has 7,200 electric vehicles, made up of Ford e-Transit vehicles and specially built Next Generation Delivery Vehicles built by Oshkosh Defense.
USPS warned on June 13 that scrapping the electric vehicles would cost it $1.5 billion, including $1 billion to replace its current fleet of EVs and $500 million in EV infrastructure rendered useless and “seriously cripple our ability to replace an aging and obsolete delivery fleet.”
Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, whose role is to ensure lawmakers follow proper legislative procedure, said a provision to force the sale could not be approved via a simple majority vote in the Republican-controlled chamber and will instead need a 60-vote supermajority, according to Democrats on the Senate Budget Committee.
What a bunch of petulant little children
Now watch them fire the parliamentarian like democrats were unwilling to do because they didn’t want to raise the minimum wage.
Sure, why not take a 1.5 billion dollar hit just to own the libs. These people are not serious people, and we should stop treating them as if they are.
With nonsense like this Dems should call a press conference outside and explain that Republican voters will be purchasing the USPS a new fleet, for no other reason than because their elected officials think they should.
They literally spent the last 10 fucking years getting these replacements ready to replace the aging fleet.
Also, it’s not just a $1.5 billion dollar hit, there was and is a $6 billion dollar contract with Oshkosh Defense to build 165,000 of these, after going through a 6-year iteration process of bids and prototypes. This is throwing the baby out with the bathwater for no discernible reason and at an extremely high cost just to force USPS mail carrier to be locked into an ancient, aging fleet of vehicles. And I don’t think a defense giant like Oshkosh isn’t just going to sue the shit out of the government for damages for cancelling a contract if it hasn’t been fulfilled already.
It sounds like just one more way to try to kill the USPS because if all their vehicles keep breaking down, they won’t be able to do their jobs.
Fiscal conservatives, my ass. Most wasteful sonsabitches alive.
Conservatism, since its very conception, was always a reactionary movement. It just somehow became synonymous with the cool kind of individualism and traditionalism.
Oshkosh would probably win a large amount of the original contract price without even having to produce. So it’s a corporate handout at our expense.
I actually don’t think they would, the contracts would have all sorts of government clauses to allow for cancellation given funding conditions. So if Congress claws back the funds for it, then they would only be paid what they delivered so far. Contracting with the government, while lucrative, can also be a risk.
I don’t even think “owning the libs” is the primary goal for them. The republicans and libertarians despise public institutions. They want everything to be privatized. They cannot stand that an oligarch is not profiting from the service the USPS provides.
They are constantly trying to undermine the USPS to make it struggle so they can point and say, "Look! Look! See! Government services are bad! We must cut this wasteful spending and outsource mail delivery to Amazon Mail™ "
I don’t think they’ll purchase a new fleet
I see a cash bonus to leadership and then calling to shut down USPS.
I mean, considering the process for getting this fleet started in 2015, it would be 2035 before a new fleet would be rolling out… so yeah, they’ll just call to shut down USPS
The USPS literally just got these, and they’re replacing the way-past-end-of-life former fleet of USPS vehicles. These things are so recent that I have a post about them in my post history and I’ve only been here since October 2023, not even two full years.
Getting rid of them is literally forcing USPS to use old, broken, difficult to maintain due to age vehicles. These replacements have been in the works for ten fucking years and there’s a $6 billion contract with Oshkosh Defense to build 165,000 of them.
Further, the old vehicles are missing a huge boon to mail carriers: air conditioning.
Like so many things, it seems like the cruelty is the point. It’s not just that they hate EVs, they hate mail carriers having modernized vehicles that are in working condition and climate controlled so they’re not sweating their asses off in the summer and freezing their asses off in the winter.
Knee-capping the Postal Service is a feature, not a bug.
True, making them rely on vehicles that are failing will reduce the ability for the USPS to effectively do its job and give them another reason to say we need to privatize it.
Not to mention that EVs are the ideal vehicle for having to drive slowly and make a ton of stops. That shit is rough on an ICE and costs a fuck ton of fuel.
They hate USPS and want to see it fail so they can privatize it for profit.
Getting rid of them is literally forcing USPS to use old, broken, difficult to maintain due to age vehicles.
Something tells me that this may be the point.
Guess she got an inflated sense of her own influence when the Dem leadership used her as an excuse to not raise the minimum wage a few years ago.
The Parliamentarian of the United States Senate is a purely advisory role.
To expect fascists to follow procedure to the detriment of their agenda when nobody is forcing them to is peak Neoliberal delusion.
I hope those things end up some where people will appreciate them. Knowing the republicans they’ll probably sabotage every vehicle out of spite.
I’ll never understand how the EV thing became a political issue. I mean I understand how politicians can exploit it as one, but I don’t understand how voters came to see this as a political issue.
These are American made EVs that will lower costs on maintenance and therefore on deliveries why the hell would anyone want to stop this?
Even if you look at it from the angle of protecting the oil, natural gas and coal industry it doesn’t make sense because the energy used to charge cars is generated from those sources.
If they can make diseases political, they can do it to anything.
Because oil money, and it’s tied to environmentalism.
Jokes on them, environmentalists don’t even like EVs these days.
Seriously about the only argument in favor of EVs that is not true is that they are cleaner. The air in the cities might be cleaner but at a net level they still produce ungodly amounts of pollution due to lihium mining.
Even with the lithium mining, an EV will reach “pollution parity” with a comparable sized ICE vehicle anywhere from 6 months to 5 years on the road, largely depending on what is powering the electrical grid (coal fired electricity being the 5 year), with the average being 1-2 years. That means that an EV from 2023 on average has caused less total pollution than an ICE vehicle of the same age.
On top of that, there has been significant progress made in recycling these batteries so that less lithium needs to be mined, as well as using other metals such as sodium, both sodium ion and sodium iron batteries are commercially available.
Why spend the money to change, when they could just buy a congressman?
The problem is that they’ve started changing and to un-change it would waste a shitload of money
I’ll never understand how the EV thing became a political issue.
I think at first it was viewed as a threat by both the Domestic Auto Industry including the UAW. Tesla was selling an increasing number of vehicles, which is what the Big 3 cared about, and they weren’t a Union Shop, which is what the UAW cared about. So they fought the rise of EVs out of self-protection.
It’s really the oil industry fighting it now because it’s an existential threat. The United States generates almost zero electricity from oil, to them it’s all about fuel. Coal has been in steep decline for two decades and as an industry its nearly done. They were replaced by the Natural Gas folks for electricity generation and you won’t find many NG folks who are actually against EVs. When you do it’s because their parent company is an Oil Company.
Toss in the rise of China as the current best source for EV batteries and the threat that Chinese companies like BYD present to the Big 3 and its easy to see why things are still all knotted up.
EVs were a political issue long before Tesla was a thing. It goes all the way back to the GM EV1 and “Who Killed the Electric Car”.
The EV1 was a wildly impractical vehicle with < 100 miles of range that cost $100,000 in 1996 money (over $200,000 today). It was never ever going to be any kind of mass produced consumer vehicle. Without GM subsidizing the ever loving shit out of them the only people who could have afforded them were the ultra wealthy.
Regardless, the only thing political was California’s insanely premature ZEV mandate set to take effect in 1998. That was political but not the EV1 itself.
BTW GM never really gave up on ZEV / PZEV even though most people think they did. I had a most excellent Hybrid Tahoe in the late 2000s but at 55k-ish new in 2009 ($82,000 today) it was simply too damn expensive to be a mass market vehicle. Just like the EV1.
This is great context too, it’s easy to forget that until recently only Tesla made EVs.
I remember also that Tesla said that all their designs would be open source. Whatever happened to that?
This is great context too, it’s easy to forget that until recently only Tesla made EVs.
Tesla is the Apple equivalent to the car world. They were not the only ones making EVs, they just made EVs popular and more widely accepted.
I don’t remember anything about all their designs being open source but they DID open source(*) the Roadster.
They also open sourced(*) their charging connector which has now become an increasingly used standard called NACS.
I’m putting that asterisks by open source because that’s only sorta-kinda what they did. More precisely they made the Roadster and TCC royalty free to use and released all of the engineering documents necessary to use & recreate them.
What you’re probably remembering is their Patent Pledge from 2014. At this point Tesla holds nearly 1,200 patents worldwide so that Patent Pledge isn’t a small thing. They’re surely not going to make all of their vehicle designs open source but they do seem to be holding to their Patent Pledge and its underlying “Open Innovation Framework”.
This doesn’t mean Musk or his companies are good, it’s just a review of the facts.
Or if you look at it from a jobs perspective, a lot of those jobs are still in the US (until you shut them down): do you really want to not only not have those jobs but also not have that industry?
Or if you look at it as a gadget for the well off …. You could decide to just not spend your own money there
There’s really no point in opposing EVs except if you think it will win you elections for some reason because your voters think EVs are woke or some shit.
I can understand opposition to EV mandates like in California because it is heavy handed market intervention. But this? This is like forcing federal agencies to continue doing things on pen and paper instead of computers.
Ok But even then …… I live in a state that elected to follow CARB rules and everyone I know realizes EVs are inevitable and wishes we’d transition faster. Im probably in an echo chamber like everyone else, but the states that were moving most aggressively were also the states that predominantly want to move aggressively…… and vote blue.
It could be one reason we were only 61% blue instead of 65% as in 2020, but there’s really no significant reactionary politics here
My brothers live in purple states, following EPA standards, and resistance to EVs is pretty solid. Why do they care if they’re not even following the more aggressive standards? If they think it’s heavy handed or wastes money, feel free to laugh at “owning the libs” and vote in what you think is your best interest. That’s what I don’t get: not only how it turned political but how are people so strongly against something that doesn’t affect them?
Yeah no I agree but at a federal level, especially with the outsized economical power California has, you would have to look at if a regulation that they pass could have shockwaves that could be problematic in other states. Like let’s say the top 5 economies in the US decide that ICE engines are banned so now the car manufacturers decide that they can no longer sustain their ICE manufacturing anymore and will only sell EVs. What happens to states that do not have the infrastructure to support only EVs on their roads? So that’s why I say that at a rational level I can understand opposition to that sort of lawmaking.
But actively stopping any organization from adopting a technology that is objectively superior is just stupid. It’s actually anathema to free market capitalism.
Watch them fire the parliamentarian and find a new one who will say yes. They’ve done this shit before.
The current Senate Parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, was appointed by Harry Reid in 2012. The previous Parliamentarian, Alan Frumin, retired after having held the position twice (once appointed by Democrats and the second time by Republicans).
The last Parliamentarian who was “fired” was Robert Dove and like Alan Frumin he held the position twice. He was fired by Democrats in 1987, then brought back by Republicans in 95 then fired by Republicans in 2001.
Senate Parliamentarians don’t get “fired” very often, both parties seem to do it at about the same rate, and even when they are “fired” (demoted really) they tend to boomerang back into the position after a few years. There’s only been 6 of them since the role was established in 1935.
Aha! Here it is:
May 7, 2001
Senate Parliamentarian Robert Dove, the official responsible for enforcing the chamber’s rules and procedures, has been asked to leave his post after a dispute with the Republican leadership, Senate sources said yesterday.
Dove angered Republicans, especially Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), with at least two recent rulings that effectively made it harder for the GOP to push President Bush’s budget and tax cut proposals through the evenly divided body
Thank you! I remember hearing that, during one of the budget reconciliations, the parliamentarian had denied that they could do <something> and so they replaced that person.
Ah, yes, Rafael Cruz, you miserable SOB: “Sen. “Ted Cruz” commented MacDonough should be fired or ignored”
Yeah Republicans, you can’t put this provision through the budgetary process…
You have to pass it using the “incredibly unhelpful and stupidly evil” lawmaking process. Then Democrats will have your back.
It’s woke to drive an EV unless it’s a swasticar. What’s next, replacing them with lifted dodge trucks?
Worse, FedEx.
Worser, DHL
Oh fuck this would be a great way for Elon to offload his unsold cybertrucks
this will be the last time we hear about a parliamentarian
These fucking guys.
Can’t wait for coal powered mail vans.
