Court rules feds cannot interfere with disbursement of EV charger funds (Upd.)
A federal district judge in Washington ordered that $5 billion in National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) funds must be made available to states, after having been illegally frozen in February.
Update, Jan 23, 2026: This story was originally posted June 25, 2025, with a preliminary judgment releasing funds for 14 states. Now, A federal court has entered final judgment permanently protecting the NEVI program across all 50 states and ruling against the Dept. of Transportation. This story has been updated in accordance.
While EV infrastructure is already quite good for long trips and currently covers most main routes across the country, there are a lot of smaller routes that could be filled in, and main routes that could use more coverage as more and more EVs hit the road.
So, enter NEVI. NEVI is a part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), passed by Congress in 2021 after being pushed for by President Biden. NEVI dedicated $5 billion to helping states build out electric vehicle charging infrastructure across the country. Advertisement - scroll for more content
Since then, every state has submitted a plan and that money has gotten assigned to projects around the country in various levels of completion, with several charging stations already open.
There’s also the issue of fractured charging infrastructure – there’s the Tesla Supercharger network, which is generally considered the gold standard but at the time could only be used by one make of vehicle; and other networks focused on CCS charging, a different protocol, which services other brands of EVs.
NEVI improved this as well: because of a provision within the law that federal money would only be made available to networks that can charge more than one type of vehicle, Tesla introduced the North American Charging Standard (NACS), which now basically every make of vehicle has adopted and has become an official standard of its own.
Industry adoption of NACS is still in progress, but it means that a lot of problems are going to be solved, and we have President Biden’s NEVI rules to thank for it.
So, of course, Mr. Trump wants to tear it all down, like he does with anything that solves problems and improves the lives of Americans.
In February, just weeks after the start of his second stint squatting in the White House (a problem for which there exists a clear Constitutional remedy), Mr. Trump illegally told the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) to stop disbursing the funds.
Soon after, 17 states and several nonprofits launched a lawsuit demanding that these funds be freed up immediately. These states were led by California, Colorado and Washington, and joined by Arizona, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, Vermont, and the District of Columbia.
Well, a federal court responded in June with a preliminary injunction that, indeed, the convicted felon camping in the Oval Office has done something illegal (surprise), and ordered that the FHWA free up those funds immediately.
The ruling at the time was slightly limited, in that it only directed funding to be released in 14 states, not all 17. Minnesota, Vermont, and Washington, D.C. were skipped over in the ruling, seemingly because they did not present enough evidence of specific harms that would happen to their own state.
Update, Jan 23: Those funds restarted in August, but the legal case remained, seeking to stop the DoT from holding back funds across all of America, rather than just those 14 states. Several of the nonprofits involved (Sierra Club, Plug In America, Earthjustice, NRDC, and more) released statements expressing their satisfaction with the decision.
But with today’s ruling on this case, a federal court finally entered final judgment permanently stopping the DoT from meddling with EV charging funds. It declared a complete victory for the states and nonprofits and said that the DoT must follow the law, and that it acted in an arbitrary and capricious manner when originally seizing the funds.
Pay attention to those words, “arbitrary and capricious.” This is legal language from the Administrative Procedures Act, which governs how federal agencies are allowed to act. When they act haphazardly and don’t follow the rules, courts can stop them from doing so, as has happened many times with the haphazard and capricious entity currently squatting in the White House.
In the interim, DoT had made a big dumb show pretending this was all their idea and that they just wanted to ensure the funds were disbursed efficiently and without so much red tape.
However, given that the funds have now been delayed for almost an entire year awaiting this ruling, and that $879 million in charger funds are now in jeopardy as republicans try to cut them from the funding bill currently making its way through Congress, this kind of puts the lie to the idea that republicans are just trying to ensure efficient implementation of the program.
They are in fact actively trying to make it less efficient, then pointing to their own interference as proof of the program’s inefficiency.
So, today is a big win for states and loss for the feds (as expected, given their compulsive criminality), but it looks like the story isn’t over yet, as republicans seem to still want to make it harder to charge, forcing more people towards expensive, polluting vehicles instead of superior EVs. And at the same time, giving a “gift to China” by holding back America’s transition to the auto industry’s current state of the art technologies.
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