GSA started canceling its federal EV charging projects after Trump issued an executive order on Jan. 20 called “Unleashing American Energy.” (Douglas Rissing/Getty Images)
The General Services Administration canceled 32 of its electric vehicle charging projects worth $23 million while informing federal agencies under its purview that only mission-critical charging stations will remain.
“GSA is quickly correcting course on efforts to install electric vehicle charging ports and looks forward to working closely with our federal agency partners to stop wastefully spending taxpayer dollars on charging stations that are not used or needed,” said Michael Peters, GSA public buildings service commissioner.
GSA has now issued a memo to tenants in federal facilities under its authority that outlines how they must justify what is necessary to retain EV charging infrastructure since only mission-critical EV charging stations will remain under President Donald Trump’s administration.
“Charging infrastructure not deemed mission critical will be deactivated, and associated contracts or orders will be terminated. This is the first step in GSA’s process of evaluating the mission-critical needs of our partner agencies for electric vehicle charging infrastructures,” GSA noted.
GSA started canceling its federal EV charging projects after Trump issued an executive order on Jan. 20 called “Unleashing American Energy.”
The agency provides centralized procurement and shared services for federal agencies and manages 360 million rentable square feet nationwide, federal contracts for $110 billion in products and services, and provides technology services to federal agencies. It establishes governmentwide vehicle contracts and leases 50% of the non-postal federal fleet, while the remaining half (including EVs) is ordered from GSA.
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On March 3, GSA issued Directive 5605.1B stating that no new EV charging station installations will be authorized. It also requires federal agencies to provide written verification about a mission-critical need to charge EVs at a GSA-managed facility.
The Biden administration’s push to shift from traditional vehicles to alternative ones like EVs resulted in a significant change for GSA. The agency had fewer than 2,000 EVs in its 600,000-vehicle fleet before Biden’s presidency.
By 2024, GSA had ordered more than 58,000 zero-emission vehicles and started installing more than 25,000 charging ports to boost its inventory of 8,000 EV charging ports operating across the federal government. In fiscal 2024, GSA ordered 4,000 ZEVs — 20% of all vehicle orders. In 2023, the agency ordered over 5,800 ZEVs, up 63% from 2022.
