Obviously this is extremely bad and dumb and performative, but putting that aside: who is going to buy them at the needed scale? They're custom purpose-built vehicles for mail delivery, not exactly something I see the marketplace absorbing.
Apparently, only 93 electric vehicles have been delivered. And the 3,000 originally expected. [1]
I suppose the headline could’ve been: “GOP tax bill compels USPS to sell its 93 delivery EVs”. But let’s be honest, that wouldn’t get many clicks nor be on the first page of HN.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/12/11/biden-usp...
Over the past few years i've become friends with my neighborhood's USPS mailman.
While it doesn't get as hot here as other parts of the country, it's pretty awful what he needs to deal with once temps reach 80+. his truck is like sitting in a metal can. he does what he can to park in shady areas but otherwise he's basically being cooked when he needs to go inside to get mail or drive it from stop to stop.
these vehicles would've been a huge improvement.
Does anyone know the Republicans' steel-man argument in favor of this idea? (It wasn't clear if the article presented it.)
I'm ready to believe the absolute worst about their conduct, but experience tells me to always hear both sides of a story before judging.
> “Biden administration officials hoped that postal procurement would bolster the small-but-growing domestic EV market, both for commercial fleets and individual consumers.”
Ho-Ho-Ho!
> “The Senate’s version of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill […] aims to cut unnecessary costs […] and … the environmental initiatives pushed by the Biden Administration.”
Undermining investment in American companies! This agendas of this administration are a cancer.
Alternative, non-paywalled story
https://electrek.co/2025/06/22/republicans-cant-stop-wasting...
All 100 of them?
FTA: "Instead it had provided roughly 100 and raised its prices as the Postal Service ordered additional EVs."
Proposed bills generally don't make good HN submissions, since usually nothing much comes of them:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
(I'm not commenting on this bill, about which I don't know anything.)
At first impression this does seem pretty silly to cancel the project so late after most of the costs have already been incurred. Auctioning the vehicles will certainly not recover anything close to their cost, to say nothing of the other infrastructure that has been built out and will essentially have to be scrapped.
On the other hand, that could be a "sunk cost" fallacy, if the future costs of these bespoke EVs is higher than the cost of just using a standard commercial utility vehicle. Not saying that it is, and the article really doesn't explore this other than to quote Rand Paul as saying that the provision “aims to cut unnecessary costs and focus USPS on delivering mail and not achieving the environmental initiatives pushed by the Biden Administration.”
Wisconsin folks should be seething about this. These vehicles were created by Oshkosh Corporation and are one of the more successful public/private "redesigns" in recent memory.
The postmen and women love this design. Plus they’re cheaper to run and clean. I hate this administration and group of people like nothing I’ve hated before.
What a bunch of corrupt, useless idiots.
Anybody who considers themselves an American needs to be calling for a full stop to all activities of this administration, including impeachment and conviction. It's clear that our country and our government have many problems. They have festered over years, causing the frustration and pan-society feelings of disenfranchisement that drove Trumpism. But at this point it's clear that regardless of all the "4d chess", there is no reforming going on here - just a wholesale destruction and fire sale of our country at the behest of the same entrenched interests that have been pulling the strings the entire time. This is like going to the hospital for a broken bone, and they start calling surgeons to salvage your organs.
I hope the spite is worth it for all the wasted money for anyone who voted for this.
https://archive.is/4iBzE