Did the Biden administration spend $3 billion to procure just 93 electric mail trucks? No, that's not true: The Postal Service placed a $2.9 billion order for 50,000 vehicles, 35,000 of them electric, the company manufacturing them told Lead Stories. Some of that money was earmarked in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act to encourage the Postal Service to buy electric vehicles.
The claim appeared in a post on X (archived here) on December 14, 2024. Its video included a freeze frame of a FOX News report with a picture of President Joe Biden under the words "Wasteful Spending." It said:
We spent $3 billion on 32 mail trucks. $32 million per mail truck. What the hell is his admininstration doing?
Here is how the post looked at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Wed Dec 18 14:32:14 2024 UTC)
The post misstates the number of electric mail trucks mentioned in the Fox News report. This fact check will focus on the number of battery-operated electric vehicles, or BEVs, ordered by the United States Postal Service (USPS) and their average cost to taxpayers.
On August 16, 2022, Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) into law (archived here). One of its features: providing funds to encourage the USPS to upgrade its delivery fleet with new electric vehicles.
The IRA set aside $1.29 billion for BEVs and $1.71 billion for supporting infrastructure (archived here). The law allows USPS 10 years to use the funds.
As part of his December 10, 2024, live testimony to the House Oversight Committee (written testimony is here; archived here), Postmaster General Louis DeJoy explained at the 1:24:00 mark that the money allocated in the IRA supplemented funds already budgeted for new vehicles so that BEVs would be cost effective:
We got $1.2B to use as an offset to the increase in the electric vehicle price versus a standard vehicle.
On March 24, 2022, Oshkosh Defense announced it had received an initial order from USPS to build 50,000 New Generation Delivery Vehicles at a cost of $2.9 billion (archived here). That order originally included 10,019 BEVs, the rest traditional internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. On December 18, 2024, Oshkosh Defense spokesman Tim Gilman (archived here) told Lead Stories that once the Inflation Reduction Act was approved, USPS adjusted the order to 35,000 BEVs and 15,000 ICE vehicles. He would not disclose how many have been built so far, but he said they are on schedule for delivery next year:
We are on track with our contractual obligations including the ramp up to full-rate production in 2025, and we stand ready to supply the USPS with any mix of ICE and BEV units needed to support its operations across the country.
Lead Stories reached out to USPS for comment and will update this fact check when they respond.
For a Lead Stories fact check on a similar claim involving the per-unit cost of electric vehicle charging stations, click here.
For Lead Stories fact checks for other claims involving electric vehicles, click here.
