On Thursday, Rep. Doug Lamalfa (R-CA) questioned Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg on EV-related policy durign a House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee hearing.
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NewsTranscript
00:00The gentleman yields. Mr. LaMalfa is recognized for five minutes for questions.
00:04Thank you, Madam Chair. Secretary, thank you for appearing with us here today once
00:07again. Appreciate it. Let's see, so on electric vehicles and the chargers, in
00:14the infrastructure bill a while back there was seven and a half billion
00:17dollars put forth for that. Five billion of that was allocated to states
00:23individually to build their own networks with that seed money. So the report I
00:29have is that since then we've seen an intense amount of money go out, but
00:35we've only accomplished approximately seven charging stations spread amongst
00:40four states. So we have this term investment that doesn't seem to be
00:46hitting much of a goal as people are still frustrated with the electric
00:51vehicle owners we have still seem to have a lot of challenges finding what
00:54they need in order to go more than 30 miles from home, for example. So and then
01:02the nature of the EV stations themselves are they're exempted from the Buy
01:08America provisions. So we're buying these components from China and other
01:12overseas. So that's disturbing because we should be building it here
01:18when we are and we would have the ability, which leads to a couple more
01:22questions, but Secretary with my understanding there's another 1.3
01:30billion that was added to that initial 7.5. Why are we doubling down on more
01:35when the performance so far has been basically only seven stations? So to be
01:39clear there are a hundred and eighty thousand hundred eighty six thousand
01:44public chargers across the United States. That's about double what it was when
01:48President Biden arrived. Most of those have been put in by the private sector
01:52but we believe that public sector involvement is necessary to build out
01:55the rest of the network, hence the NEVI program that you referred to. That
01:59program is intended to install tens of thousands of chargers in the second half
02:04of this decade and we've already had 38 of the states that we're providing
02:09funding to release their solicitations for the program. We're even going to see
02:14the first few hundred of those chargers installed this year. As you mentioned
02:18there's even a tiny handful that are up and running today but I want to
02:21emphasize our expectations have been that the peak year for installation
02:26would be 27 or 28 because this is a totally new program for the states. I do
02:32want to emphasize also that these this charging program is subject to
02:37Build America, Buy America provisions. There is flexibility in that to
02:41recognize the fact that we're standing up what's effectively a new industry in
02:45the United States but we're committed to making sure that that new American
02:49industry is homegrown, is creating jobs right here on U.S. soil and as the
02:55states work toward their procurement we think we're going to really see that
02:59demand signal lead to a burgeoning of that industry here in the United States.
03:03The difficulty of the Buy American is that we don't seem to be able to produce
03:07in this country, well the mined raw materials have to come from somewhere
03:13else and then the manufacturing pretty much stays in those other areas and so
03:18we're not we're not doing well at Buy American on on what comes from the mines
03:23as well as the finished products. That's a big part of what we're changing
03:26through the president's initiatives. DOE now estimates with the new awards for
03:30example for producing a domestic battery supply chain that we will have enough
03:34graphite to support 47% of the U.S. demand domestically. We're also working
03:40on partnerships with friendly countries so that when we do need to turn abroad
03:46for materials or refinement we're not necessarily turning to places like China
03:51and increasingly recycling will be important. Let me drill down on that.
03:54Materials live indefinitely. Thank you. Let me drill down on that. Would you be
03:58part of a voice, a group of voices would say we need to mine these products in
04:02this country instead of somewhere else? I certainly would prefer that they be
04:05sourced domestically. Okay, thank you. On the EVs themselves, now we're seeing that
04:11there seems to be a turning around of attitude on that. Like Ford Motor
04:17Company, they lost four and a half billion dollars on them. They're down,
04:21they're bringing down the price of their electric pickup quite a bit, which
04:26that's probably going to be a loser for them, I don't know. And they're letting
04:31their dealers off the hook from having to install hundreds of thousands of
04:36dollars worth of infrastructure to be EV dealerships. So it's, you see a
04:43retraction of that. As well as seven out of ten Americans said they don't not want to
04:47buy an EV because it takes, the charging isn't there, the battery technology.
04:50And then current EV owners, half of them are considering switching back
04:55to gas vehicles. So shouldn't we be tailoring it to people that want them?
05:00It would seem like 10 or 15 percent instead of forcing people up to, you know, a
05:05complete ban by 2035, like California's talking? Well, one of the reasons that we
05:09have not forced anyone to purchase any particular vehicle is we want this to be
05:12led by consumers making choices. And consumers are choosing EVs more every
05:17single year than they did the previous year. And I think that reflects the fact
05:21that as the prices come down, more and more Americans decide it's the right
05:24answer for them. Thank you, Madam Chair.