WASHINGTON —The US Postal Service has spent more than $3 billion in tax dollars on a brand-new all-electric fleet of mail trucks — and gotten just 612 vehicles for its money, according to a letter sent to Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and obtained by The Post.
Former President Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Reduction Act set aside billions for what Ernst has since ripped as a green “boondoggle” that saw almost all of that amount paid to Wisconsin-based defense contractor Oshkosh to design and build 35,000 new environmentally friendly mail trucks.
But as of Nov. 10, only 612 of the battery-electric powered vehicles are on the road.
A separate group of electric delivery vehicles — Ford E-Transit vans — are more widely in operation, with 2,010 delivering mail and packages. However, more than 6,700 have been delivered and are just sitting idle — in part because they can’t drive all the routes that the specially designed Oshkosh vehicles can
“Instead of spending another billion dollars on an EV fleet that’s lost in the mail, it’s time to pull the plug on this boondoggle and return the money to sender — the taxpayers,” Ernst said.
Ernst, who chairs the Senate’s DOGE caucus, pronounced the taxpayer spending “a tremendous waste” in a statement after learning about the electric fleet’s poor progress from Peter Pastre, vice president of government relations and public policy at USPS, in the Nov. 17 letter.
Pastre and another USPS rep stressed that thousands more electric vehicles are being produced with IRA funds — though the 9,000 or so rolling off the lots in the three years since Biden’s signature climate law passed hasn’t inspired confidence in congressional Republicans like Ernst who want to rescind the funds.
In the four months since Ernst first inquired in July about the pace of mail trucks being produced, OshKosh has produced 362 trucks in a little more than 100 days, working out to a rate of between three and four trucks per day.
In addition, 6,651 charging ports — around three times the number of vehicles currently being used — have been “commissioned at 75 sites,” according to Pastre, who claimed that none of the $3 billion appropriated under the IRA will be “available for rescission.”
The OshKosh mail delivery trucks are part of USPS’ fleet of Next Generation Delivery Vehicles that are battery-electric powered (NGDV BEVs).
A USPS spokesperson added that, with the addition of the other electric vehicles like the Ford E-Transit, the number of “IRA-funded BEVs” delivered to the mail service has topped 9,300.
“Senator Ernst is unfortunately using only the number of NGDV BEVs on the road (612+ as of 11/10) to suggest those are the only battery-electric vehicles facilitated with IRA funds,” the rep noted.
“This is especially misleading because these are purpose-built right hand drive vehicles, ruggedized especially for postal drive profile, built especially for routes that require curbside delivery,” the spokesperson added. “We have received more than 9,000 Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) electric vehicles that for some reason she does not cite, even though they were also purchased with IRA funds.”
The rep also said of the charging ports: “Logic dictates that charging infrastructure always needs to precede the arrival of electric vehicles, and the most time consuming and utility-dependent part of the deployment is building an energizing charging infrastructure.”
The “greening” of USPS fleet was part of a $10 billion project to have 106,480 new vehicles in its fleet by Sept. 30, 2028, around 60,000 of which were supposed to be next generation and 35,000 of which were supposed to be battery-electric powered.
“Despite some of the concerns expressed in the media and by your office, the vehicle testing and corrections that led to a modest adjustment in the delivery schedule have not been out of the ordinary for a situation in which a supplier is outfitting an entirely new manufacturing facility and creating an entirely new purpose-built vehicle,” Pastre claimed.
The old fleet of Grumman Long Life Vehicles, which date to 1987, are expensive to maintain, loud, fuel-inefficient, and have been known to burst into flames.
But the production of Oshkosh’s updated trucks was plagued by issues that included leak testing that resulted in “water [pouring] out as if [the vehicles’] oversize windows had been left open in a storm,” the Washington Post reported in December 2024.
“This is the bottom line: We don’t know how to make a damn truck,” one person involved with the manufacturing process told the outlet.
The company’s factory in Spartanburg, SC, was only able to make one mail truck per day at the start of the process. Records obtained by the Washington Post found projections that up to 80 trucks per day would be built once production got underway.
The Biden administration had expressed a commitment to the USPS acquiring “100% electric” postal vehicles starting in 2026.
On Monday, USPS put out a press release claiming it is still on track and boasted of acquiring “45,000 battery-electric next-generation delivery vehicles and 21,000 commercial-off-the-shelf battery-electric vehicles” by the end of fiscal year 2028.
“So far, more than 35,000 new vehicles are on the road,” the release added, without clarifying that many of these appear to still be using internal combustion engines.
Pastre told Ernst that “the Postal Services has plans to acquire 40,250 internal combustion delivery vehicles” and has already acquired 26,341, noting in his letter the “delivery of 2,602 NGDV ICE vehicles, 14,489 Mercedes Metris, and 9,250 Ram Promasters.”
“Additionally,” the Monday press release read, “USPS is upgrading infrastructure at its facilities with the addition of charging stations for the zero-emission electric vehicles, of which over 14,000 have already been purchased,” though it’s unclear which firm or firms made those vehicles.
President Trump has floated the possibility of merging USPS with the Department of Commerce, citing the mail delivery service’s capital losses of an astonishing $9.5 billion in fiscal year 2024.
