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infrastructure
Government Watchdog: Trump Administration Illegally Withheld EV Charger Funds
"These bipartisan investments need to start flowing immediately," the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee said of the GAO finding as a lawsuit over the funding got a boost from green groups.
May 22, 2025
Key congressional Democrats on Thursday welcomed a government watchdog's finding that the Trump administration unlawfully withheld appropriated funds for building electric vehicle charging infrastructure across the United States‚ a decision that came as advocacy groups joined a related lawsuit filed by state attorneys general.
Shortly after returning to office in January, President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing agencies to pause disbursement of funds appropriated under the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, specifically mentioning the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program.
In response, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) and one of its agencies, the Federal Highway Administration, in February canceled previously issued guidance for the NEVI program and suspended plans that states had submitted for grant money—which led to calls for Congress to stand up to the administration's "illegal attempts to halt legally mandated funding."
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in its Thursday decision that the department violated the Impoundment Control Act: "DOT is not authorized to withhold these funds from expenditure and DOT must continue to carry out the statutory requirements of the program. While DOT cannot withhold these funds under the ICA, DOT could propose funds for rescission or otherwise propose legislation to make changes to the NEVI Formula Program for consideration by Congress."
"The Trump administration didn't just break the law—it shortchanged the American people."
Politico reported that "the GAO could issue similar rulings in the coming months, as the independent, nonpartisan watchdog agency works through at least 39 investigations into whether the Trump administration violated the Impoundment Control Act. GAO rulings are nonbinding but could influence Congress' response to... Trump's freezing of billions of dollars lawmakers intended to flow to specific programs and projects, as well as the many ongoing lawsuits challenging the president's tactics."
In a Thursday statement about the GAO findings, U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee Vice Chair Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said, "This legal decision affirms what we've long known: The president is breaking the law to block funding Congress passed on a bipartisan basis and that is owed to the American people—simply because he disagrees with it. This plain fact is unacceptable—and it cannot stand any longer."
"Congress passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law by wide margins and specifically provided funding for every state to build out a network of chargers for the electric vehicles that families are increasingly turning to and that are being made right here in America, she continued. "These investments should be getting out the door—creating new jobs and helping Americans get where they need to go without interruption—but President Trump has illegally choked this funding off."
"These bipartisan investments need to start flowing immediately—as do the hundreds of billions of dollars in other investments President Trump is holding up," she added, taking aim at his Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director. "I don't care about Russ Vought's personal interpretation of our spending laws; the Constitution is clear, and President Trump simply does not have the power of the purse—Congress does."
House Budget Committee Ranking Member Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) released a similar statement welcoming the GAO's new legal opinion that "the Trump administration broke the law when it blocked funding that Congress had already approved."
"That money was supposed to build and maintain a nationwide EV charging network—and with it, create good-paying jobs in communities across the country," he stressed. "Instead, the administration stalled economic growth, delayed critical infrastructure, and undermined job creation—all without a shred of legal authority."
"This wasn't just a legal violation. It was an economic setback for American workers, and a direct hit to the communities counting on these investments," Boyle added. "The Trump administration didn't just break the law—it shortchanged the American people."
According to Politico, while the DOT could not be reached for comment, an OMB spokesperson called GAO's opinion "wrong" and said the department is "appropriately using the authority granted to it by statute to review state plans."
Standing up for cleaner vehicles and clean air. @sierraclub.org @climatesolutions.org @earthjustice.org and allies sue Trump Admin for illegally impounding funds that Congress appropriated for EV charging. www.sierraclub.org/press-releas...
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— Ross Macfarlane (@rossmacfarlane.bsky.social) May 22, 2025 at 3:53 PM
The attorneys general of 16 states and the District of Columbia disagree, and have filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington. The Sierra Club, CleanAIRE N.C., Climate Solutions, Earthjustice, Natural Resources Defense Council, Plug In America, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, the Southern Environmental Law Center, and the West End Revitalization Association joined that legal challenge on Thursday.
"Donald Trump is trying to cut jobs, increase pollution, and endanger our health. We refuse to let him," said Sierra Club executive director Ben Jealous in a statement. "NEVI benefits everyone, whether you drive an EV or not, and the only people who benefit from blocking it are Big Oil and auto executives seeking to keep us hooked on fossil fuel-powered cars, while communities in every corner of the country lose out on infrastructure investments in our growing clean energy economy."
"The NEVI program is working and states are legally entitled to the money allocated to them by Congress," Jealous added. "Once again, we are taking the Trump administration to court over its reckless and illegal actions."
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Instead of ‘Abundance,’ Let’s Have a Conversation About ‘Shared Prosperity’
“Abundance” without an eye for who the abundance serves runs the risk of exacerbating the problem at the core of our economic challenges—the hoarding of power and wealth by the people that already have a lot.
May 09, 2025
Those of us who care about building a healthy, thriving, and prosperous future are reeling. The Trump administration’s attacks on our people and our planet plus the outright evisceration of government by Elon Musk and his corporate army are forcing us to reflect on how we got here and to ponder how we move forward.
As believers in the government’s ability—and in fact responsibility—to do good, we are having to face the extremely uncomfortable fact that the government does not work for the majority of people. So, it makes sense that many are talking about how government can work better to create “abundance”—and the recent release of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book of the same name—as the solution to our despair. Klein and Thompson argue that America’s inability to build and the reason why liberals are losing is the result of excessive red tape, deliberate policy decisions, and bureaucratic inertia, which must be eliminated.
For over a decade I have worked to craft, implement, and evaluate strategies that leverage private, public, and philanthropic investments to deliver tangible and substantial benefits to formerly “redlined” communities. In plain terms, I’ve been fighting like hell to get resources—actual dollars—back into communities of color. And I’ve borne witness to the growing frustration with the perceived inability of all levels of government to deliver results. All too often, regulations have become the scapegoat that some argue drive up the cost or slow the development of essential infrastructure like housing, renewable energy, and transportation networks.
What shared prosperity requires is a shift away from profit maximization and toward affordability.
Don’t get me wrong, I completely agree that we have to urgently build more housing, transportation networks, and clean energy—the ingredients that people need to live healthy and prosperous lives. But just building more by eliminating regulations is not the silver bullet. “Abundance” without an eye for who the abundance serves runs the risk of exacerbating the problem at the core of our economic challenges—the hoarding of power and wealth by the people that already have a lot of, well, abundance.
Just building more—“abundance” as a goal in and of itself—will not allow us to deliver solutions to the thorniest and extremely interconnected challenges we face, like climate change, a widening racial wealth gap, extremely low levels of confidence in the public sector, eroding governance structures, and dwindling public financing due to rising costs and constraints on raising new revenue.
These problems were not created because we don’t build things; rather, they are the outcomes of an economic system built on fabricated scarcity and the doctrine of maximizing profit, exploiting communities of color, and concentrating political and economic power.
It's our inability to share in abundance, our over consumption, and the belief that in order to have more abundance you need to hoard as much of it as possible that truly hurts our planet and our people.
Take this example. Several years ago, California’s investor-owned utilities were planning to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in charging infrastructure to support the state’s transition to electric vehicles. But the majority of the investment was planned for wealthy communities where electric vehicles were already being used. The utilities claimed that low-income families would not use the chargers because they didn’t own electric vehicles, but we argued that investments in charging infrastructure at multifamily housing and in low-income communities were essential to creating the conditions for families to consider switching to clean vehicles. In the end, the utilities agreed that a percentage of chargers should be deployed to low-income communities and over the years those percentages have continued to increase as the stigma that low-income communities would not use chargers was dispelled.
And this lesson is replicable. By focusing on who the benefits of vehicle charging stations were going to, we were able to scale the clean energy transition even faster by opening the option up to more Californians—not just those who already had access.
And so, I propose that to really tackle our complex challenges we must not work toward “abundance,” but instead work toward the goal of “shared prosperity,” of which abundance is a key strategy to achieving that goal.
Shared prosperity first and foremost is rooted in people, not markets, and meets the needs of all people, including those who have suffered the most under our current paradigm, creating an economy in which all communities can thrive. It ultimately recognizes that we are part of an interconnected system and that we are only as strong as our ability to care for the most vulnerable among us.
What shared prosperity requires is a shift away from profit maximization and toward affordability. By definition, it’s prosperous for all, meaning that jobs with good benefits and worker protections are ubiquitous, and so are opportunities to build generational wealth and community resilience to climate, social, health, and economic crises.
The most vulnerable among us need to know that they can count on being able to bounce back. And to do so, our governments, our community-based organizations, and our people must have the capacity and resources to meet the call for support when needed.
Reading Abundance I get the sense that the authors think that people are often the obstacle to progress. Government, community leaders, environmental justice advocates, and environmentalists are not antagonists toward a healthy and prosperous future; they are the force that will ultimately help us achieve it.
Let me give an example of how a pivot from an “abundance” to a “shared prosperity” paradigm can function.
Take the Transformative Climate Communities (TCC) Program, a California state program which has delivered 400 units of affordable housing, planted 13,000 trees, installed over 600 solar panels on homes, deployed 26 electric buses, and placed people into approximately 800 jobs—all thanks to the vision and voices of the communities and their local governments who have been at the center of decision-making that impacts their daily lives. The eight communities—notably formerly redlined communities—where this work is taking place previously had an “abundance” mindset, they just needed the right support and government interventions. TCC is successful precisely because it shifted from this abundance mindset and toward a shared prosperity mindset, putting communities in the driver’s seat to determine how best to build thriving neighborhoods, fight climate change, and determine their own economic futures.
The challenge before us is to design a government that has new and better tools to scale our progress, from financing mechanisms that generate the revenue necessary to do this work, to governance practices to steer our progress, to, yes, revisiting the laws and regulations that govern our built environment to eliminate those that no longer fit our moment and to update those that require retooling.
Above all, we must focus our attention on building abundance and prosperity where it is hardest to achieve, where decades of disinvestment and a legacy of injustice have locked in poverty and pollution. Otherwise, “abundance” is just a new version of trickle-down economics, which not only never trickled-down but continued the grotesque hoarding of wealth and power among the people that already had it to begin with.
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Capitalism Eating Itself by Fueling Climate Mayhem, Warns Capitalist
If humanity stays on current course, warns top insurer, the "financial sector as we know it ceases to function. And with it, capitalism as we know it ceases to be viable."
Apr 03, 2025
A veteran financial consultant and insurance executive is warning his fellow capitalists that their commitment to profits and market supremacy is endangering the economic system to which they adhere and that if corrective actions are not taken capitalism itself will soon be consumed by the financial and social costs of a planet being cooked by the burning of fossil fuels.
According to Günther Thallinger, a former top executive at Germany's branch of the consulting giant McKinsey & Company and currently a board member of Allianz SE, one of the largest insurance companies in the world, the climate crisis is on a path to destroy capitalism as we know it.
"We are fast approaching temperature levels—1.5C, 2C, 3C—where insurers will no longer be able to offer coverage for many" of the risks associated with the climate crisis, Thallinger writes in a recent post highlighted Thursday by The Guardian.
"Meanwhile in the real world—a capitalist declares that capitalism is no longer sustainable..."
With "entire regions becoming uninsurable," he continues, the soaring costs of rebuilding and the insecurity of investments "threaten the very foundation of the financial sector," which he describes as " a climate-induced credit crunch" that will reverberate across national economies and globally.
"This applies not only to housing, but to infrastructure, transportation, agriculture, and industry," he warns. "The economic value of entire regions—coastal, arid, wildfire-prone—will begin to vanish from financial ledgers. Markets will reprice rapidly and brutally. This is what a climate-driven market failure looks like."
Commenting on the Guardian's coverage of Thallinger's declaration, Dan Taylor, a senior lecturer in social and political thought at the Open University, said, "Meanwhile in the real world—a capitalist declares that capitalism is no longer sustainable..."
While climate scientists, experts, and activists for decades have issued warning after warning of the threats posed by the burning of coal, oil, and gas and humanity's consumption of products derived from fossil fuels, the insurance industry has been the arm of capitalism most attuned to the lurking dangers.
"Here go the radical leftist insurance companies again," said David Abernathy, professor of global studies at Warren Wilson College, in a caustic response to Thallinger's latest warnings.
Despite their understanding of the threat, however, the world's insurers have primarily aimed to have it both ways, participating in the carnage by continuing to insure fossil fuel projects and underwriting expansion of the industry while increasingly attempting to offset their exposure to financial losses by changing policy agreements and lobbying governments for ever-increasing protections and preferable regulatory conditions.
In the post, self-published to LinkedIn last week, Thallinger—who has over many years lobbied for a more sustainable form of capitalism and led calls for a net-zero framework for corporations and industries—warned of the growing stress put on the insurance market worldwide by extreme weather events—including storms, floods, and fires—that ultimately will undermine the ability of markets to function or governments to keep pace with the costs:
There is no way to "adapt" to temperatures beyond human tolerance. There is limited adaptation to megafires, other than not building near forests. Whole cities built on flood plains cannot simply pick up and move uphill. And as temperatures continue to rise, adaptation itself becomes economically unviable.
Once we reach 3°C of warming, the situation locks in. Atmospheric energy at this level will persist for 100+ years due to carbon cycle inertia and the absence of scalable industrial carbon removal technologies. There is no known pathway to return to pre-2°C conditions. (See: IPCC AR6, 2023; NASA Earth Observatory: "The Long-Term Warming Commitment")
At that point, risk cannot be transferred (no insurance), risk cannot be absorbed (no public capacity), and risk cannot be adapted to (physical limits exceeded). That means no more mortgages, no new real estate development, no long-term investment, no financial stability. The financial sector as we know it ceases to function. And with it, capitalism as we know it ceases to be viable.
In an interview earlier this year, Thallinger explained that failure to act on the crisis of a rapidly warming planet is not just perilous for humanity and natural systems but doesn't make sense from an economic standpoint.
"The cost of inaction is higher than the cost of transformation and adaptation," Thallinger said in February. "Extreme heat, storms, wildfires, floods, and billions in economic damage occur each year. In 2024, insured natural catastrophe losses surpassed $140 billion, marking the fifth straight year above $100 billion."
"Transitioning to a net-zero economy is not just about sustainability," he continued, "it is a financial and operational necessity to avoid a future where climate shocks outpace our ability to recover, straining governments, businesses, and households. Without decisive action, we risk crossing a threshold where adaptation is no longer possible, and the costs—human and financial—become unimaginable."
Thallinger's solution to the crisis is not to subvert the capitalist system by transitioning the world to an economic system based on shared resources, communal ownership, or a more enlightened egalitarian response. Instead, he proposes that a "reformed" capitalism is the solution, writing, "Capitalism must now solve this existential threat."
Calling for a reduction of emissions and a rapid scale-up of green energy technologies is the path forward, he argues, asking readers to understand "this is not about saving the planet," but rather "saving the conditions under which markets, finance, and civilization itself can continue to operate."
This disconnect was not lost on astute observers, including Antía Casted, a senior researcher at the Sir Michael Marmot Institute of Health Equity, who suggested concern over Thallinger's prescription.
"It would be fine if [the climate crisis] destroyed civilization and maintained capitalism," Casted noted. "They just need to find a way for capitalism to work without people."
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