President Biden's dream of delivering a fully electric fleet of federal vehicles may just have been delayed by none other than the U.S. Postal Service. On Wednesday, USPS finalized its plan to spend just over $11 billion to upgrade its decades-old fleet of mail trucks. This plan, however, only requires that 10 percent of up to 165,000 new vehicles are required to be electric.
Both federal agencies and environmental advocacy groups framed the Postal Service's decision to stick with mostly fossil fuel-powered vehicles as a lost opportunity for one of the largest government fleets in the world to reduce its carbon footprint. "A ten-percent commitment to clean vehicles, with virtually no fuel efficiency gains for the other 90 percent is plainly inconsistent with international, national, and many state [greenhouse gas] emissions reduction targets," wrote Vicki Arroyo, the Associate Administrator for Policy at the Environment Protection Agency, in a letter to USPS.
