Congress and the administration have hit yet another speed bump in their attempt to overturn the Postal Service’s electrification mandate. Congress cannot toss out the EV mandate with a simple majority vote in the Senate, the body’s procedural supervisor said Sunday, which will likely result in the issue being pushed in separate legislation, rather than as part of the tax and spending bill currently being evaluated by Congress. Thanks to a provision in the original legislation, Senate Republicans will have to find support for a 60-vote supermajority in order to overturn the mandate—a tall order in a chamber where they hold only a slim majority.
And the kicker? Nobody’s asking for this—at least nobody at the Postal Service itself, which has warned lawmakers that reversing the process now will only waste taxpayer money. Replacing existing EVs would cost the service approximately $1 billion—nearly half of that for vehicles already delivered, plus the cost of contracts for vehicles that have not yet been delivered. Mothballing the charging system that was just installed would mean writing off $500 million in recent investment.
On top of all that, an about-face would set USPS back significantly in its ongoing effort to replace its ancient fleet of delivery vehicles, which the service has been trying to do since the first Trump administration. The original bill included provisions for adding more than 160,000 new delivery vans. Only 10% of the new vehicles added to the USPS fleet would have been electric under the original terms of the legislation.
The Biden administration asked Congress to aim for a higher EV share after being elected in 2020. A new formula increased the minimum order of electric vans to 45,000 (a 300% increase) and baked in an order for nearly 10,000 electric Ford E-Transit vans on top of that allocation. As a result, vehicles being added to the USPS fleet in 2025 are split almost evenly between EV and ICE; from 2026 on, they would be exclusively electric. The revised replacement schedule would see the entire $10 billion plan completed by 2028.
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Byron is a contributing writer and auto reviewer with a keen eye for infrastructure, sales and regulatory stories.
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