In a shocking twist to the political drama that nobody saw coming (except literally everyone), President Donald Trump — famous for calling electric cars “glorified golf carts” — has just handed Elon Musk what economists are calling “a money hose attached to a federal fire hydrant.”
On Monday, the administration begrudgingly restored $5 billion in funding for the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program after a federal judge told them, in legal terms, “No backsies.” But in classic Trump fashion, the return came with “efficiency-focused revisions” — otherwise known as “removing any rule that doesn’t directly benefit a billionaire you had dinner with once.”
The Biden-era rules required chargers to be evenly distributed, environmentally responsible, and located in underserved communities. Those are now gone, replaced with the much simpler “put them wherever Tesla would put them anyway” standard.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, speaking with all the enthusiasm of a man forced to eat a salad at gunpoint, said the new NEVI would “slash red tape.” Critics noted that “slash red tape” appears to mean “delete every requirement except the one that says federal money must be spent.”
Tesla — which already owns the fastest, largest, and most reliable charging network — is now free to swoop in and collect NEVI funding for doing exactly what it was already doing: installing chargers in high-traffic areas that generate sweet, sweet charging fees from both Tesla owners and those driving “lesser” EVs.
This is like making Jeff Bezos run a lemonade stand where the lemonade is free to make, costs $7 a cup, and the government pays for the cups,” said one analyst while staring at a chart that just says “Elon wins” in Comic Sans.
White House insiders reportedly tried to spin the move as a blow against “wasteful subsidies,” a claim undermined by the fact that the subsidies now directly feed Musk’s $1 trillion charging empire. “We don’t like green energy,” said one administration official, “but if we have to do it, we might as well let our billionaire friends do it faster and make more money.”
When asked for comment, Musk tweeted a single emoji: 💰. It received 1.3 million likes in under an hour, followed by a Dogecoin meme and a vague promise to “make Superchargers great again.”
In unrelated news, Blink Charging’s CEO was last seen screaming into a paper bag while ChargePoint executives googled “how to pivot to lemonade stands.”