At the same time, the prospect of legal and political challenges may temper the Trump administration’s appetite for more drastic actions, he said. “We have to keep reminding ourselves that a lot of this funding is really beneficial to Republican states.”
Where the money is going
One potential silver lining for the states and companies building these federally funded charging stations is that much of the money is already committed.
Of the $5 billion in the NEVI program, which was meant to support the Biden administration’s goal of deploying 500,000 high-speed EV chargers by 2030, $3.27 billion has been obligated to all 50 states; Washington, D.C.; and Puerto Rico, according to EV charging data firm Paren.
Loren McDonald, Paren’s chief analyst, noted in a webinar last week that NEVI funding is “structured under advanced appropriations, basically meaning the money is approved in advance.” That’s different from government programs that require ongoing approval through Congressional appropriations, and it means that “the funding is, in theory, lockboxed and is near impossible to touch.”
The NEVI program’s formula funding to these recipients has already been allocated through fiscal year 2026, according to Kelsey Blongewicz, policy analyst at research firm Atlas Public Policy. The Federal Highway Administration has also already reviewed and approved states’ annual spending plans through fiscal year 2025, setting them up to start spending that money, she added.
NRDC’s Hammon agreed in her blog post that NEVI funding tied to federally approved state plans and contracts is “nearly impossible to reverse or stop.” She added that as of this month, the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation, the federal entity created by the infrastructure law to manage EV charging funding, has approved EV infrastructure deployment plans of all 50 states; Washington, D.C.; and Puerto Rico, which entitles them to spend the money.
But not all of that money has yet moved through the process of being committed under contract with the companies selected to build the charging stations, McDonald said. Federal agencies involved in NEVI funding might choose to implement the executive order’s spending freeze by ordering states to halt work on contracting funds for money they’ve already received, he noted.
The amount of NEVI funding under contract stood at about $615 million for almost 1,000 sites as of this month, McDonald said. While nine states have yet to issue their first solicitations, 14 states have seen their first NEVI charging stations open, according to data tracked by state transportation and energy agencies and Atlas Public Policy.
The buildout has been slow. The first NEVI-funded charging station opened in December 2023, and as of this month, only 50 sites are operating, according to Paren data.
That sluggish pace has drawn criticism from Republicans and Democrats alike.
Federal rules for states weren’t issued until February 2023, and since then, “states have needed to build their NEVI plans, establish solicitation processes, and coordinate with other stakeholders,” Blongewicz said. Still, “there have been a lot of lessons learned over the past couple of years,” she added, and state officials expect the pace of installations to grow quickly in the years ahead — if funding isn’t disrupted.
Bridging the charging gaps
The $2.5 billion CFI program is a bit different, Blongewicz said. While NEVI funding is allocated to states as formula grants, CFI is a competitive grant program open to state, local, and tribal governments; metropolitan planning agencies; transportation operators; and other eligible parties.
The discretionary nature creates “more variables” as to how federal agencies might restrict funding, she said, and “the security of the award would depend upon whether the awardee has reached a contract agreement for that funding.”
So far, the program has awarded $1.78 billion in three rounds of funding to more than 100 projects in over 22 states, according to Paren data. Funded projects range from statewide electric-truck charging networks to small pockets of chargers in remote rural and tribal communities.
McDonald highlighted that NEVI and CFI funding isn’t intended to finance all of the public chargers needed to give people confidence to buy EVs. The Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory has estimated that the U.S. will need a cumulative investment of $31 billion to $55 billion by 2030 to build the roughly 1.2 million public charging stations necessary for widespread charging coverage. The U.S. had about 192,000 public chargers as of mid-2024.
Instead, the federal funds are meant to “fill in strategically where private industry has not added them,” he said. Left to the market alone, public chargers are mainly built in wealthier communities where EV ownership is concentrated, rendering many parts of the country “charging deserts” that lack the EV density to give private-sector developers the confidence they’ll be able to earn enough to pay off their costs.
As EV adoption continues to rise in the U.S., gas stations, truck stops, and convenience stores that sell fossil fuels are “already planning to deploy charging stations at their locations” to meet that growing market, McDonald said. “What NEVI does is just take the risk out and many of the costs out to make it a no-brainer.”
