Public electric vehicle chargers break down for a variety of reasons. Pins on the connector that attaches the charger cable to the vehicle can bend or break, preventing a complete connection. The screen customers interact with to make payments can go dark or suffer glitches. In some cases, an internal component like the power converter might break. And vandalism is increasingly common, with people cutting charging cables to extract and sell the copper wiring inside them.
These are just a few of the reasons that about 12,000 of the 212,000-odd public electric vehicle chargers scattered around the United States are inoperable right now. Some are down for scheduled maintenance, but many more are simply broken, with nobody coming to fix them.
The Biden administration wanted to remediate this epidemic of broken chargers, which is why it implemented the first-ever federal reliability standards for EV chargers. These standards meant that owners who received government subsidies were obligated to repair broken chargers — or risk losing their funding.
Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images
On February 6, the Trump administration suspended the Department of Transportation program behind those standards, freezing billions of dollars of unawarded funds intended to strengthen the country’s EV charging network. The future of the program is now uncertain, and some experts believe the funding suspension is illegal. But if the Trump administration winds up permanently shrinking or scrapping the program, it will not only mean fewer chargers getting built along highways, but more chargers failing to get fixed.
There’s “a measurable difference in reliability” between chargers that have been built according to the federal government’s standards and those installed outside of the program, Bill Ferro, co-founder of the EV charging analytics company Paren, told Grist in an interview.
The transportation sector is responsible for roughly a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, and electrifying most or all of it is considered essential for avoiding the worst impacts of climate change. But for Americans to swap the hundreds of millions of gas-powered cars they own for electric replacements, many experts believe that charging a battery needs to be as convenient as filling a gas tank. The first step is building lots more public chargers, which is what then-president Joe Biden and Congress tried to do when they enacted the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law. The legislation included $5 billion for the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure, or NEVI, program, a U.S. Department of Transportation-led effort to build a network of public chargers around the country.
NEVI is focused on building DC fast chargers — which can fill a battery in as little as 30 minutes — along key highway corridors to enable long-distance EV travel. The program requires states to develop and submit EV infrastructure deployment plans to the federal government. Once those plans are approved, the Department of Transportation allocates funds to the states, which then award contracts to private companies or other entities to build EV chargers.
The program was considered integral to the Biden administration’s goal of developing a national network of half a million public EV chargers by 2030, as well as to the larger objective of getting Americans off gas-powered cars. “This program is really trying to build that fundamental backbone of longer-distance fast charging,” Beth Hammon, a senior advocate for EV infrastructure at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Grist.
Kyle Mazza / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
But installing enough chargers to support tens of millions of EV drivers doesn’t mean much if they aren’t kept in good working order. That’s something the EV charging industry has a rocky track record with so far, but that NEVI sought to address with its charger reliability standards.
NEVI stipulates that chargers funded through the program meet a 97 percent “uptime” requirement. Put another way, a charger built with NEVI funds can only be offline 11 days out of the year (with exceptions for situations like natural disasters and vandalism). If a company fails to meet this requirement, then depending on the terms of its contract, the state distributing funds might withhold future maintenance revenue.
Early data shows that NEVI-funded charging stations — of which there are only 60 open so far — score about 10 points higher than non-NEVI-funded ones on Paren’s in-house reliability metric, which gives charge point operators a grade out of 100 based primarily on whether a customer can successfully charge their car on the first attempt.
The program’s 97 percent uptime requirement is “very important” for ensuring EV chargers are fit for purpose, Oregon Department of Transportation spokesperson Matt Noble told Grist in an email. “Many Oregon EV drivers have told us that they no longer have ‘range anxiety’ about their EV but rather ‘will-the-public-charger-be-working anxiety.’” Noble added that Oregon’s Department of Transportation is continuing to advance its NEVI program with the $26.1 million in funding that the state has already awarded, which is enough to cover a first round of NEVI-funded EV chargers slated to be built along three separate highways.
Outside of NEVI’s relatively tiny existing network, the reliability of EV chargers varies from location to location and company to company. Tesla, which owns and operates about half of all DC fast chargers in the country and is the second-largest recipient of NEVI funds to date, is widely considered to have the most reliable charging network out there. Ferro said that Tesla consistently achieves top marks on Paren’s reliability metric.
“Love or hate Tesla, the charging experience is very successful,” Dan Bowermaster, the senior program area manager of electric transportation at the clean energy research firm EPRI, told Grist. Tesla’s streamlined charging experience is one reason it has dominated the U.S. EV market to date, although public opinion of the firm is falling rapidly due to the actions of CEO Elon Musk, who has spent the last several weeks leading Trump’s efforts to cut government staffing and expenditures in ways that many law professors and policymakers say are illegal.
Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images
Bowermaster and Ferro cited several reasons for Tesla’s success, including its pattern of routinely maintaining its chargers and the vertically integrated nature of the company. As both a carmaker and power supplier, Tesla collects reams of data on the status of its chargers and Tesla drivers’ habits, which can help inform charger maintenance and repair plans.
The dozens of non-Tesla charging networks put differing resources into maintaining and repairing their equipment. Some, like Electrify America and EVgo, have repair and renew programs and are on a “continued mission to replace older equipment,” according to Ferro. Others contract out maintenance to a third party that specializes in repair, like ChargerHelp. (Grist reached out to over half a dozen leading charge point operators and EV charger maintenance companies, including Tesla, Electrify America, EVgo, and ChargerHelp for comment for this article. None of them responded.)
Outside of dedicated charging networks, a wide variety of other entities install and maintain public chargers, including utilities, municipalities, and commercial businesses. When a hotel, restaurant, or mall owner decides to put a handful of EV chargers in the parking lot, it’s typically “up to that site owner to have a maintenance contract,” Ferro said.
“They can choose to have a maintenance contract with the [manufacturer] that put them in, or they can choose another company,” he added. “Or they can do nothing.”
When station operators neglect to plan for maintenance and repair, chargers start to break down. Ferro said that sometimes, private business owners will fail to renew their maintenance contract after a few years. Some early EV charger manufacturers have gone out of business, while others have switched to newer equipment and stopped making the components needed to service older chargers. “That’s the reality,” Ferro said.
The NEVI program, which kicked off in 2022 and runs through 2026, has already allocated about $3.3 billion to states. But because of delays getting the program up and running, so far only $616 million has been awarded to companies to build just over 1,000 charging sites that will contain over 4,500 individual charge ports.
On Trump’s first day in office, he signed an executive order that sought to “terminate” Biden-era climate programs, which he referred to as the “Green New Deal.” Since then, his administration has frozen “obligated” spending related to all manner of projects funded by the bipartisan infrastructure law and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. “Obligated” means that a government agency has signed a contract with a business, tribe, nonprofit group, or other entity promising to pay a certain amount of money to support, say, bridge repairs or a climate resilience hub. The funding freeze, which legal experts (including judges) say is a violation of contract law and the Constitution, has thrown climate and infrastructure projects into chaos around the country.
The portion of the $616 million that NEVI has promised to companies but not yet paid out appears to be unaffected by Trump’s abrupt suspension of contractually obligated funding. Oregon’s Department of Transportation told Grist that it has had no issues accessing its already-obligated federal funds. A spokesperson for Pennsylvania’s Department of Transportation told Grist they anticipate that 91 projects currently under federal contract “will continue to move forward.” New York State is also continuing to make progress on NEVI projects for which funding has already been obligated, a spokesperson told Grist.
Drew Angerer / Getty Images
But the more than $2.6 billion that states have not awarded in contracts now appears frozen. On February 6, the Federal Highway Administration — the Department of Transportation subagency administering the program — wrote a letter informing states that their plans for how to spend NEVI funds are being scrapped and that no new funds can be obligated at this time.
The letter states that the federal government is developing new NEVI program guidance for the states that is aligned with “current U.S. [Department of Transportation] policies and priorities.” A public comment period on the new draft guidance will be held later this spring, according to the letter. No information is available on when the guidance will be finalized, and the Federal Highway Administration didn’t respond to Grist’s request for comment.
Although the Federal Highway Administration appears to be honoring its legal obligation to reimburse states that have NEVI contracts with charger companies, many legal experts believe the freeze on NEVI’s unspent funds is also illegal, since the president doesn’t have the constitutional authority to interfere with spending authorized by Congress. Furthermore, Hammon said that the funding freeze comes at a moment when the NEVI program was finally “hitting its stride.” An overhaul of the rules underpinning the program, or a lengthy court battle over its fate, will at the very least delay the rollout of many projects that were nearing installation, she said.
And it could permanently tamp down on EV charger deployment in states that were less enthusiastic about the program to begin with. As Inside Climate News reported in February, some states are spending all the federal funds they have obligated and remain committed to building more chargers with or without federal support. But others pressed pause on their charger deployment plans even before the Federal Highway Administration issued its letter.
Hammon is concerned that the Trump administration’s letter — on top of the earlier executive order — signals an intent to do more than merely review and revise the program.
“To me, it feels a little bit like this is an indefinite pause,” she said. “I can’t say that with certainty, but that’s the fear that I have.”
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Biden had a plan to keep America’s EV chargers in good working order. Trump pulled the plug. on Mar 7, 2025.
For Americans to adopt electric cars, many experts believe that charging a battery needs to be as convenient as filling a gas tank. Politics, Transportation Grist
