The Biden-Harris administration is yanking every lever of executive power it can get its hands on to snuff out Americans’ love affair with the internal-combustion engine (ICE).
The prime lever-puller is the Environmental Protection Agency. In league with California’s climate regulators, EPA is trying to force the auto industry to electrify new cars and trucks by dictating carbon dioxide emissions limits that are impossible for ICE vehicles to meet—something Congress never authorized.
But EPA isn’t the only federal actor abusing its statutory authorities in furtherance of President Biden’s electric vehicle directive. Under Pete Buttigieg, the U.S. Department of Transportation is throwing its weight into this coercive effort, too.
Acting through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the Biden-Harris DOT has finalized two sets of “corporate average fuel economy,” or CAFE, standards (minimum-mile-per-gallon requirements for new ICE vehicles) that, perversely, cannot realistically be satisfied with a traditional gas-powered engine.
In the first of those two rules, finalized in April 2022, NHTSA replaced the fuel economy standards adopted by the Trump administration for vehicles produced in model years 2024 through 2026 with gigantic increases. The replacement standards mandated preposterously huge annual jumps in fuel efficiency of 8% for each of model years 2024 and 2025 and 10% for model year 2026.
These increases in CAFE standards were meant to track the stringency of the carbon dioxide limits for new motor vehicles EPA had begun to implement in 2021—all in obedience to the Biden-Harris anti-fossil fuel agenda.
NHTSA’s 2022 rule required automakers to achieve average fuel economy levels of nearly 60 miles per gallon for passenger cars and higher than 42 mpg for light trucks (including pick-ups, minivans, SUVs, and all-wheel-drive crossovers). These mileage requirements are pure fantasy. They can’t feasibly be achieved by the ICE vehicles that America’s families want and need and that they can afford to buy.
Under these standards, automakers will have to phase out the most popular models of cars and trucks and transition their fleets to expensive EVs that so far don’t meet the budget and performance needs of most Americans—particularly not lower-income and rural families. The 2022 rule is currently under legal challenge in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
The second Biden-Harris CAFE rule adds yet further increases to the fuel economy requirements beyond the levels imposed in the 2022 rulemaking. The second rule covers passenger cars and light trucks in model years 2027 through 2032 and medium-duty trucks (basically delivery vans and heavy work pick-ups) produced in model years 2030 through 2035.
When this second rule was initially proposed in 2023, NHTSA planned to increase the stringency for passenger cars by an additional 2% per year for six years and for light trucks by a whopping 4% per year (in an effort to bring the mileage standards for pick-ups and SUVs closer to parity with the higher standards applied to sedans and other smaller passenger cars). For medium-duty work trucks, NHTSA proposed an incredibly stringent increase in fuel efficiency of 10% per year.
Again, these proposals were intended to stay directionally consistent with EPA’s carbon dioxide restrictions—at least to the extent NHTSA felt it could do so within the statutory parameters of the CAFE program.
Just how extreme the standards had gotten was evident from NHTSA’s 2023 notice of proposed rulemaking. The agency predicted that almost every legacy automaker would be unable to meet the new standards, even with a rapid conversion to EV production, and, as a consequence, would be forced to pay sizable penalties to the U.S. Treasury.
After getting strong pushback against the proposal in public comments, NHTSA decided to moderate the standards when it finalized the rule in June of this year.
For passenger cars, NHTSA kept the additional annual increases at 2% throughout the period covered by the rule, but for light trucks, it reduced the increases to 0% for 2027-2028 and to 2% per year for 2029-2032. For medium-duty work trucks, it kept the final stringency increases at 10% per year for 2030-2032 but reduced them slightly to 8% per year for 2033-2035.
Predictably, the Biden-Harris administration has tried to spin these changes as a merciful “compromise,” granted by the grace of the almighty regulator, to “scale back” the requirements of the CAFE program in light of economic and political realities.
However, this portrayal of NHTSA’s latest rule is disingenuous for two reasons.
First, you have to remember that the modified increases in the mileage mandates adopted in the 2024 rule would be piled on top of the already sky-high fuel economy levels adopted in the 2022 rule. The 2022 standards will be unachievable for nearly all ICE vehicles produced through 2026, and the later standards, growing in stringency from the 2026 standards, will be even more unachievable, despite the modulation in the rate of increase.
Even with the changes NHTSA made in the latest standards, by 2032, those standards would demand average fuel economy performance of more than 72 mpg for passenger cars and more than 47 mpg for pick-ups, SUVs, and other popular light trucks.
There is simply no way automakers can possibly come close to meeting these fleetwide average mileage standards without shifting much of their production to EVs, which are given artificially generous regulatory credit for purposes of measuring CAFE compliance.
Inducing this industrial shift to electrification has become the driving purpose of the CAFE program under the current administration.
Second, the tempering of the year-over-year increases in CAFE standards for the later model-year vehicles is rendered effectively meaningless, in any event, by EPA’s separate rules imposing even more draconian carbon dioxide emissions limits on those same vehicles.
That’s because putting regulatory limits on the amount of carbon dioxide ICE vehicles produce per mile traveled (as EPA is doing) is functionally the same as setting minimum mile-per-gallon fuel economy requirements (NHTSA’s job in the CAFE program).
Therefore, the reality now, under the Biden-Harris administration, is that EPA has taken over the driver’s seat in setting fuel economy requirements for the nation’s fleet of new cars and trucks. That transfer of regulatory power from DOT to EPA is directly contrary to Congress’s design.
Congress made the decision nearly 50 years ago to give the Secretary of Transportation, not EPA, the sole power to establish fuel economy standards for new motor vehicles sold in the U.S. In carrying out that responsibility, NHTSA consults with EPA and the Energy Department, and EPA is tasked with measuring the automakers’ compliance with the standards NHTSA sets, but neither EPA nor any other agency is supposed to supersede or interfere with NHTSA’s CAFE authority.
The CAFE program was not created to be another form of environmental regulation. The purpose was to prod the automakers toward production of more fuel-efficient vehicle models to help lessen America’s strategic dependence on foreign oil in the wake of the Arab oil embargoes of the 1970s.
And in authorizing the program, Congress has always been very careful to limit NHTSA’s discretion to impose overly stringent fuel economy requirements.
Congress’s goal all along has been to wean the U.S. of its strategic dependence on unreliable foreign sources of critical inputs like oil while (1) preserving the health and vitality of America’s job-sustaining automotive industry, and (2) ensuring that Americans will continue to benefit from a wide range of affordable ICE vehicles that suit the needs of families in all income brackets in all regions of the country.
Consistent with those objectives, Congress expressly prohibits NHTSA from considering the imputed fuel economy of EVs in setting CAFE standards.
The bottom line is that NHTSA has no authority to compel the phaseout of internal-combustion engines or require automakers to use new technologies that are not responsive to market demand or that fail to align with the industry’s existing production realities.
So how is it that EPA has come to usurp NHTSA’s role in regulating fuel economy, and why has the CAFE program been hijacked in support of the Biden-Harris EV mandate?
It was the Obama-Biden administration that originally launched EPA into the business of limiting carbon dioxide emissions from new vehicles under the Clean Air Act.
Recognizing the potential that EPA’s rules could improperly trample on NHTSA’s exclusive CAFE authority, the Obama administration had NHTSA and EPA join together to establish a common harmonized set of fuel economy standards and carbon dioxide emissions limits for each model year of new cars and trucks.
For its part, the Trump administration continued the practice of having NHTSA and EPA issue a single joint rule to ensure harmonization.
But now, in the name of pushing its thoroughly radicalized climate policies, the Biden-Harris administration has unleashed EPA, directing it to set carbon dioxide restrictions at levels calculated to achieve the White House’s EV goals without any regard for the careful limits Congress placed on the CAFE program.
Following the same marching orders, Pete Buttigieg has instructed NHTSA to push the bounds of its own statutory authority to support and reinforce EPA’s actions.
The consequences of these regulatory abuses will be nothing short of devastating for America.
The price of all new vehicles will rise dramatically, and America’s families will lose many of their favorite options at the dealership. Lower-income and rural Americans will be stuck driving older and older used vehicles, which are far less safe, so highway deaths and serious injuries will rise.
NHTSA recognizes the negative safety effects of unrealistically stringent fuel economy requirements, and yet it’s pushing all these rules nonetheless. The fact that America’s premier traffic safety regulator has purposefully supported rules it knows will increase highway traffic deaths and injuries is shocking and ought to be a national scandal.
At the same time, countless jobs will be lost in the U.S. auto industry, while employment surges in China, as the U.S. becomes desperately dependent on China for the production of critical minerals and other inputs needed for EVs—a national security danger antithetical to the purposes of the CAFE program.
Any artificially ramped-up transition to electric cars and trucks will also put a tremendous strain on our fragile electricity grid and require a huge increase in power production, just as the EPA has issued separate regulations designed to shut down fossil-fuel power plants. Electricity prices will inevitably spike for all Americans as a result.
And even if it were fully carried out, the Biden-Harris administration’s Green Dream scheme will have no meaningful effect on global temperatures because China’s production of energy from dirty coal (consumed in growing measure to produce ever more EV batteries) will just keep climbing.
It’s no wonder, then, that the wisdom of using the power of the administrative state to coerce EV production in the face of flagging market demand, with all the economic disruptions and destructive consequences that will inevitably follow from it, has become a highly charged public policy issue in 2024.
