The Biden administration’s push to electrify the U.S. Postal Service’s (USPS) delivery fleet has collapsed into a nearly $10 billion quagmire, a textbook case of central planning’s inevitable failure. With $3 billion from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and a goal to deploy 35,000 electric mail trucks by September 2028, the USPS has managed to produce just 250 vehicles—each a costly, leaking, airbag-plagued embarrassment.
Prior MRCTV pieces gave warning, notably my February 2022 critique of the EPA’s pressure on the USPS to splurge billions on this green fantasy, this program was doomed from the start. It’s a saga of wasted taxpayer money, ignored warnings, and the hubris of bureaucrats who think they can outsmart markets.
As the New York Post observes, the numbers tell a grim, wholly predictable story. The USPS, already drowning in red ink with a $9.5 billion loss in fiscal year 2024, leveraged Joe Biden’s pork-filled “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022” to replace its aging Grumman Long Life Vehicles with electric Next Generation Delivery Vehicles (NGDVs).
Oshkosh Corporation, based in Wisconsin, won a $2.6 billion contract to build these trucks, with 45,000 slated to be electric. Yet, by late 2024, only 93 vehicles had been delivered, far below the promised 3,000. Today, production limps along at one truck per day, against Oshkosh’s projected 80. Each truck costs $77,692, but with $1.7 billion already spent, the effective cost per truck is a jaw-dropping $6.8 million.
Talk about a “special delivery.”
Related: EPA Pushes USPS To Spend BILLIONS On Fleet Of Electric Mail Trucks | MRCTV
As noted in my 2022 MRCTV article, the EPA’s push for this electrified fleet ignored the USPS’s financial fragility and the practical limits of EV technology for mail delivery. Engineering failures have turned this green dream into a nightmare. The trucks suffer from defective airbags, leaks so severe that water gushes from them, and what one insider called an inability of the manufacturer to “make a damn truck.”
Of course, in government circles, no one seems to accept responsibility. Former Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, evidently trying to wash his hands of the mess, quipped, “I’m in the parcel delivery business, not the vehicle manufacturing business.” The Government Accountability Office’s February 2025 “high risk” designation for the USPS underscores the agency’s inability to manage its core functions, let alone this ambitious EV scheme.
In fact, as the Post notes:
“In recent months, (Donald) Trump has floated the possibility of merging USPS with the Department of Commerce, citing USPS losses of an astonishing $9.5 billion in fiscal year 2024.
‘[USPS has] been just a tremendous loser for this country, tremendous amounts of money they’ve lost,’ the president told reporters in February.”
But shifting a non-market bureaucracy into the circles of another non-market bureaucracy will not fix the economic problem that there is no competitive incentive to perform better, nor will it fix the fundamental fact that the entire government system is predicated on tax thievery.
EVs, while appealing to environmental ideologues, face high production costs, supply chain bottlenecks, and unproven durability for the relentless demands of mail routes. As I argued in my 2022 MRCTV piece, markets, guided by profit and loss, would have tested these variables through competition and innovation. Instead, bureaucrats bypassed the decentralized knowledge that prices convey. The result? A misallocation of stolen resources that leaves taxpayers footing the bill for a failed experiment.
The $3 billion allocated for the USPS’s EVs joins other Biden-era flops, like the $7.5 billion for EV charging stations that yielded just seven stations. As I cautioned in my MRCTV coverage, these are not outliers, but the predictable fruits of top-down mandates. Under new Postmaster General David Steiner, the USPS’s 250th anniversary looms as a reminder of how poorly many government systems are run.