DOGE Lawmakers Want to Recoup the Money from Biden's Post Office EV Boondoggle

AP Photo/David Zalubowski

There are still any number of Biden-era boondoggles to be defunded and defenestrated. Case in point: DOGE Caucus chair Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA) and Representative Michael Cloud (R-TX) are introducing a bill to drag back $3 billion allocated by the Biden administration's stupendously misnamed "Inflation Reduction Act" to build electric postal service delivery trucks. 

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This delivery truck issue is a great example of government incompetence in action.

A South Carolina defense contractor responsible for the 60,000-vehicle order was already "far behind schedule" as of November. A Washington Post exposé revealed that by then, fewer than 100 of these vehicles had been delivered to USPS.

Citing that, Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, DOGE Caucus chair, and Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas, will be forwarding the "Return to Sender Act," seeking to recoup what is about 30% of the overall appropriation in Biden’s law that was intended to be geared toward reducing inflation.

The Postal Service was to receive an initial order of 50,000 EV delivery trucks from defense contractor Oshkosh within the next three years, but only 93 had been produced by November, according to the Post.

Whoever approved this contract should have their pronouns changed to "Fired" and "Unemployed." And it gets worse:

One person involved in the production told the outlet that the "bottom line [is] we don’t know how to build a damn truck."

That, along with a Post revelation that the government’s deliveryman agreed to pay more for the trucks after the contractor increased its prices, appeared to lead Ernst and Cloud to announce their bill.

The agreement forged between the Postal Service and the manufacturer ultimately finalized a $77,692 cost per EV truck for about 28,000 vehicles. While the company did not comment at the time of the exposé, its CEO told investors in October that Oshkosh "is really happy where we are" on the project.

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Now, Oshkosh Defense, the company in question, does seem to know how to build trucks. They are manufacturers of several tactical vehicles in use by the American armed forces, including the Heavy Expanded Mobility Tactical Truck (HEMTT A4), the Heavy Equipment Transporter (HET), and the Medium Caliber Weapon System (MCWS).

But electrical postal delivery vehicles apparently aren't their bag.


See Related: USPS Suspends Packages From China, Hong Kong...Then Does an About-Face

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What's baffling about this is what electric postal vehicles have to do with reducing inflation. Well, all right, it's not all that baffling; it's a typical Democrat practice to stick all kinds of crap into an enormous bill with a misleading name, and this is a rather egregious example. The "Inflation Reduction Act" did everything but reduce inflation, although it did meet the Democrats' accepted idea that the way to beat inflation is to throw money at it; that thinking goes back to the Carter era and our last major round of punishing inflation.

But then, the Democrats' solution to anything is to throw money at it - our money, taken from us by force of law. Or borrowed from China.

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It's not certain this bill will make it to the president's desk, although it should. Three billion dollars is far too much for us to pay for 93 delivery trucks. It would be cheaper and more efficient to adopt an old Post Office tradition and just buy a bunch of Jeeps for the delivery service. Jeep will probably even provide a substantial fleet discount.

DOGE is finding billions of dollars in wasteful spending, and the Democrats are losing their minds as they realize their gravy train and woke projects are coming to an end.

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