Electric Bus Program Hits Bumpy Road: Costly, Unreliable, and Falling Short of Promises

July 30, 2024

The Clean School Bus program pioneered by Vice President Kamala Harris and the Biden administration has run into numerous roadblocks. This program which aims to switch school buses over to electric has had difficulty getting schools to adopt the buses due to their high costs of nearly $370,000 per bus, or three times as much as a diesel bus, and their unreliability.

The Washington Free Beacon  reports: 

“As part of the first tranche of Clean School Bus program funding two years ago, Harris and EPA administrator Michael Regan unleashed nearly $1 billion in federal rebates for 389 school districts across all 50 states to help deliver a total 2,463 electric school buses. According to federal data reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon, just 27 of those districts have proven to the EPA that their buses were delivered and that their diesel-fueled buses being replaced have been discarded.”

So far, only 60 buses have been deployed, and 55 districts and counting are pulling out due to a slew of issues. Tom O’Malley, a superintendent from Northern California stated,

“We get super cold in the winter—we get down below zero in the winter and it’s cold here about nine months out of the year,” he continued. “Basically, we’re being told that you can’t run the heaters, which means you can’t defrost your windows because they take too much battery power. So, we were told they would get 200 miles on a charge, but the people in the field were telling us 70 with a loaded bus. That just doesn’t work.”

Currently, there are 547,000 diesel-powered buses in the US; replacing the whole fleet at an average cost of $370,000 would total over $200 billion. This is a ludicrous price tag for buses that would not even be able to keep America’s children warm and potentially put them in danger. Kamala Harris referred to this program as an “investment in our children, their health, and their education,” that is not at all what this is; the program is only another shameless attempt by the Biden-Harris administration to ignore the wants of everyday Americans in order to advance their political and eco-left agenda.