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.
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.
Something tells me that this may be the point.
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.