President Biden on Wednesday vetoed a Republican-led effort that could have thwarted the administration's plans to invest $7.5 billion to build electric vehicle charging stations across the country.
In issuing the veto, Biden argued that the congressional resolution would have harmed domestic manufacturing as well as the transition to clean energy.
“If enacted, this resolution would undermine the hundreds of millions of dollars the private sector has already invested in domestic electric vehicle charging manufacturing and curb further domestic investment in this critical market,” Biden said in a statement.
The move comes amid a growing political divide over electric vehicles. The Biden administration is aggressively promoting them as an important part of the fight to curb global warming. The historic climate law signed in 2022 by Biden, the Inflation Reduction Act, offers incentives to consumers to buy electric vehicles and to manufacturers to build them in the United States.
Republicans, including former President Donald J. Trump, Biden's likely rival in the 2024 election, have attacked electric vehicles as unreliable, inconvenient and ceding U.S. auto manufacturing to China, which dominates the supply chain. supply of electric vehicles.
Republicans, with some Democrats, voted to repeal a waiver issued by the Biden administration that allows federally funded electric vehicle chargers to be made from imported iron and steel, as long as they are assembled in the United States.
The “buy American” requirement of the 2021 infrastructure law says that iron and steel produced in the United States must be used for projects funded by the Federal Highway Administration Act. The law includes $7.5 billion to build a national electric vehicle charging network.
Installing electric vehicle charging stations is a top priority for the administration because surveys show that many drivers interested in purchasing electric vehicles are hesitant to do so due to a lack of convenient charging stations.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., introduced the effort to end the exemption. “It hurts American businesses and allows foreign adversaries, like China, to control our energy infrastructure,” he said in July. “We should never use US dollars to subsidize products made in China.”
On Wednesday, upon learning of Biden's veto, Rubio wrote on the social media platform
The White House argued that by repealing the waiver, lawmakers were actually blocking the made-in-America requirements.
That's because a repeal would have caused a return to a 1983 policy that exempts many manufactured products from domestic requirements. That would have made it more likely that federal funds would be “spent on chargers made in competing countries like the People's Republic of China,” Biden said in his veto statement.
The Senate voted, 50-48, in November to repeal the waiver, and Democrats Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Jon Tester of Montana joined Republicans in eliminating the waiver. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky was the only Republican to oppose the measure.
The House voted, 209 to 198, in January in favor of repeal. Two Democrats, Jared Golden of Maine and Donald Davis of North Carolina, voted with Republicans in favor of the measure. Two Republicans, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Tom McClintock of California, opposed it.
