Trump wants to end the $7.5B bipartisan EV-charger buildout. Can he?

President Donald Trump has vowed over and over to undo the Biden administration’s policies supporting the U.S. electric vehicle industry, which he’s consistently and incorrectly described as an ​“EV mandate.”

Last week, the Trump administration took aim at its first target in that mission: federal programs offering $7.5 billion in grants to build EV chargers across the country.

The National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program and the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure (CFI) Discretionary Grant Program were singled out in a much broader executive order last week that instructs federal agencies to temporarily halt all payments from the climate and energy programs created by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act and the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law. The order gives White House officials final discretion over if or when those payments may resume.

But experts say federal agencies can’t legally hold back funds authorized by Congress and structured as ​“mandatory” grants, as the NEVI program was in the 2021 infrastructure law. Attempts to restrict those funds will likely expose the federal government to legal challenges.

What’s more, much of the money has already been committed to state governments, which have in turn contracted with EV-charging providers like Tesla and site hosts like convenience store and truck stop chain Pilot Co. that are using the money to build hundreds of EV-charging locations across the country. Moves to halt or claw back that funding would likely spur lawsuits from states and companies on the grounds that the federal government is violating legally binding contracts.

“In theory, when something is in law already — and the private sector has responded and made investments or has organized around a particular market — best practice is to not pull the rug out from businesses that have made decisions to invest,” said Albert Gore, executive director of the Zero Emission Transportation Association. The trade group includes automakers, battery manufacturers, mining companies, charging manufacturers, and electric utilities.

Actions to disrupt that funding could also prove politically divisive. Many of these chargers are in Republican-led states, including Texas, which is set to receive nearly $408 million, more money than any other state, and Ohio, home to the nation’s first NEVI-funded charging station. The bipartisan infrastructure law that created the programs won support from 19 Senate Republicans and 13 House Republicans, unlike the Inflation Reduction Act, which passed without a single Republican vote.

All of these factors make the NEVI and CFI programs ​“legally entrenched, widely supported, and designed to withstand political turbulence,” Beth Hammon, senior EV infrastructure advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council, wrote in a blog post last week.

But the Trump administration is challenging the foundations upon which that understanding rests.

Trump’s executive order gives final discretion to lift its spending pause to the heads of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the National Economic Council. Russell Vought, Trump’s nominee to run OMB, has claimed that the Impoundment Control Act, a 1974 law that limits presidents’ discretion over Congressionally appropriated spending, is unconstitutional.

Vought, a chief architect of The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a policy blueprint that makes broad and extreme claims of presidential power, reiterated that belief during a Senate hearing last week, drawing condemnation from Democrats.

“The Impoundment Control Act remains the law of the land,” Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington, said at a Jan. 23 press conference. ​“And the Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power of the purse.”

The chaos caused by the Trump administration’s claims of power over federal spending deepened this week.

Late Monday, OMB Acting Director Matthew Vaeth issued a memo to federal agencies ordering them to pause all grants and loans to ​“identify programs, projects, and activities that may be implicated by any of the President’s executive orders.” That affects trillions of dollars for nonprofits, schools, health care and medical research organizations, state and local governments, and other groups.

The vaguely defined order threw federal agencies into confusion and quickly drew widespread criticism from Democratic lawmakers, civic groups, and public officials who said it violates the law and the Constitution and causes immediate hardship for millions of Americans. 

On Tuesday, in response to a lawsuit from the National Council of Nonprofits, a federal judge ordered a temporary stay on applying the order to existing programs. Legal experts predicted the issue would quickly be brought to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Washington Post reported that the Trump administration rescinded the memo on Wednesday, however, putting the next steps in an ongoing legal and constitutional crisis into at least temporary remission.

These uncertainties could be a drag on EV-charging programs that, after years of working slowly through administrative and contracting complications, have finally begun to spur the installation of hundreds of chargers.

“If that money is clawed back or there are other reductions, some of those projects won’t pencil out. Others will,” said Andy Bennett, CEO of Driivz, a company that provides charging management software and services to EV-charging networks, including NEVI funding recipients EVgo and Francis Energy.

At the same time, the prospect of legal and political challenges may temper the Trump administration’s appetite for more drastic actions, he said. ​“We have to keep reminding ourselves that a lot of this funding is really beneficial to Republican states.”

Where the money is going 

One potential silver lining for the states and companies building these federally funded charging stations is that much of the money is already committed.

Of the $5 billion in the NEVI program, which was meant to support the Biden administration’s goal of deploying 500,000 high-speed EV chargers by 2030, $3.27 billion has been obligated to all 50 states; Washington, D.C.; and Puerto Rico, according to EV-charging data firm Paren.

Loren McDonald, Paren’s chief analyst, noted in a webinar last week that NEVI funding is ​“structured under advanced appropriations, basically meaning the money is approved in advance.” That’s different from government programs that require ongoing approval through Congressional appropriations, and it means that ​“the funding is, in theory, lockboxed and is near impossible to touch.”

The NEVI program’s formula funding to these recipients has already been allocated through fiscal year 2026, according to Kelsey Blongewicz, policy analyst at research firm Atlas Public Policy. The Federal Highway Administration has also already reviewed and approved states’ annual spending plans through fiscal year 2025, setting them up to start spending that money, she added.

NRDC’s Hammon agreed in her blog post that NEVI funding tied to federally approved state plans and contracts is ​“nearly impossible to reverse or stop.” She added that as of this month, the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, the federal entity created by the infrastructure law to manage EV-charging funding, has approved EV infrastructure deployment plans of all 50 states; Washington, D.C.; and Puerto Rico, which entitles them to spend the money.

But not all of that money has yet moved through the process of being committed under contract with the companies selected to build the charging stations, McDonald said. Federal agencies involved in NEVI funding might choose to implement the executive order’s spending freeze by ordering states to halt work on contracting funds for money they’ve already received, he noted.

The amount of NEVI funding under contract stood at about $615 million for almost 1,000 sites as of this month, McDonald said. While nine states have yet to issue their first solicitations, 14 states have seen their first NEVI charging stations open, according to data tracked by state transportation and energy agencies and Atlas Public Policy. 

The buildout has been slow. The first NEVI-funded charging station opened in December 2023, and as of this month, only 50 sites are operating, according to Paren data.

That sluggish pace has drawn criticism from Republicans and Democrats alike.

Federal rules for states weren’t issued until February 2023, and since then, ​“states have needed to build their NEVI plans, establish solicitation processes, and coordinate with other stakeholders,” Blongewicz said. Still, ​“there have been a lot of lessons learned over the past couple of years,” she added, and state officials expect the pace of installations to grow quickly in the years ahead — if funding isn’t disrupted.

Bridging the charging gaps

The $2.5 billion CFI program is a bit different, Blongewicz said. While NEVI funding is allocated to states as formula grants, CFI is a competitive grant program open to state, local, and tribal governments; metropolitan planning agencies; transportation operators; and other eligible parties.

The discretionary nature creates ​“more variables” as to how federal agencies might restrict funding, she said, and ​“the security of the award would depend upon whether the awardee has reached a contract agreement for that funding.”

So far, the program has awarded $1.78 billion in three rounds of funding to more than 100 projects in over 22 states, according to Paren data. Funded projects range from statewide electric-truck charging networks to small pockets of chargers in remote rural and tribal communities.

McDonald highlighted that NEVI and CFI funding isn’t intended to finance all of the public chargers needed to give people confidence to buy EVs. The Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory has estimated that the U.S. will need a cumulative investment of $31 billion to $55 billion by 2030 to build the roughly 1.2 million public charging stations necessary for widespread charging coverage. The U.S. had about 192,000 public chargers as of mid-2024.

Instead, the federal funds are meant to ​“fill in strategically where private industry has not added them,” he said. Left to the market alone, public chargers are mainly built in wealthier communities where EV ownership is concentrated, rendering many parts of the country ​“charging deserts” that lack the EV density to give private-sector developers the confidence they’ll be able to earn enough to pay off their costs.

As EV adoption continues to rise in the U.S., gas stations, truck stops, and convenience stores that sell fossil fuels are ​“already planning to deploy charging stations at their locations” to meet that growing market, McDonald said. ​“What NEVI does is just take the risk out and many of the costs out to make it a no-brainer.”