Kamala Harris touted greener school buses — but good luck finding them with only 7% of districts switching
Veep Kamala Harris touted federal grants two years ago to replace thousands of gas-guzzling school buses with greener versions — yet fewer than 7% of the initial districts have actually completed the switch.
The administration announced its kick-off to the troubled program in 2022, with Harris crowing that the first billion dollars would help 389 school districts across the country purchase upwards of 2,400 “clean” buses.
But so far, just 27 of those hundreds of school districts have marked their project status as “complete,” according to an EPA tracker, which was updated June 20.
Within the 27 school districts, which were awarded a total of $19.3 million, there are 60 electric or propane-fueled school buses, the tracker said.
Dozens of other school districts dropped out of the program, citing such obstacles as school-board opposition and costly electrical infrastructure upgrades, according to the EPA’s annual report on the program, whose issues were first reported by the Washington Free Beacon.
Funding for the project, called the “Clean School Bus’’ program, was included in a 2021 infrastructure bill that President Biden signed into law.
The move allocated a total of roughly $5 billion to be doled out to the districts over about five years.
Harris touted the first billion-dollar tranche of grants during an event in Seattle, Wash., in 2022.
“Who doesn’t love a yellow school bus, right?” she quipped at the time.
“It’s part of, you know, a nostalgia and a memory of — of the excitement and joy of going to school to be with your favorite teacher, to be with your best friends, and to learn,” said the vice president — whose record has come under scrutiny since she abruptly became the presumptive Democratic nominee for president.
She went on to lament how 95% of school buses in the country ran on diesel, which she suggested “contributes to very serious conditions that are about health and about the ability to learn.”
Earlier this year, the Biden-Harris administration then announced plans to dish out another roughly $1 billion to about 280 more school districts.
In May, it announced 530 more recipients who would share about $900 million in additional grant money from the program.
The EPA says a total of 1,290 school districts have now been earmarked for money worth about $2.7 billion and intended to replace 8,651 buses.
But an inspector general investigation into the initiative has already concluded that the program has been rife with “potential fraud, waste, and abuse.”
“We also identified instances in which entities lacking student enrollments applied for and received funding, imperiling the program’s principle of equitable resource distribution,” according to its probe report released in December.
In April, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) and Rep. Buddy Carter (R-Ga.) wrote a letter to EPA administrator Michael Reagan raising concerns about the findings.
“The EPA’s own reporting on the program reveals that numerous award recipients encountered difficulty utilizing the funding they were awarded,” the pair wrote.
“Additionally, the EPA continues to administer the program in a manner that favors the use of electric school buses over other types of buses that are eligible for funding under the program,” they said.
The Clean School Bus program is far from the only Biden-Harris infrastructure-related initiative that has struggled to show significant results several years out.
In March, the Washington Post reported how roughly two years after Congress green-lit $7.5 billion for electric-charging stations, only seven funded spots were operational.
Biden, 81, has promised to build 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations across the country by about 2030.
Last month, the Washington Times also reported that nearly three years after Biden signed a $42.5 billion package to help modernize high-speed Internet access in rural America, no home or business got connected to new broadband.
Neither the White House, EPA nor a rep to Harris responded to Post requests for comment.
