The General Services Administration (GSA), which manages buildings owned by the federal government, is planning to shut down all of its electric vehicle chargers nationwide, describing them as “not mission critical.” The agency, which manages contracts for the government’s vehicle fleets, is also looking to offload newly purchased EVs.
The GSA currently operates several hundred EV chargers across the country, with approximately 8,000 plugs that are available for government-owned EVs as well as federal employees’ personally owned vehicles.
The official guidance instructing federal workers to begin the process of shutting down the chargers will be announced internally next week, according to a source with knowledge of the plans. Some regional offices have been told to start taking their chargers offline, according to an email viewed by The Verge.
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“As GSA has worked to align with the current administration, we have received direction that all GSA owned charging stations are not mission critical,” the email reads.
The GSA is working on the timing of canceling current network contracts that keep the EV chargers operational. Once those contracts are canceled, the stations will be taken out of service and “turned off at the breaker,” the email reads. Other chargers will be turned off starting next week.
“Neither Government Owned Vehicles nor Privately Owned Vehicles will be able to charge at these charging stations once they’re out of service,” it concludes.
At the GSA’s Denver office, employees were told that EV chargers at four federally owned buildings would be taken offline next week. The news was first reported by Colorado Public Radio.
Under the Biden administration, the GSA was in charge of implementing the president’s plan to phase out the federal government’s use of gas-powered vehicles in favor of EVs. The federal government owns approximately 650,000 vehicles, more than half of which were to be replaced with EVs.
Those new EVs would need reliable places to charge. Former President Joe Biden’s signature climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, included $975 million for the GSA to upgrade federal buildings across the country with “emerging and sustainable technologies.” The aim was to achieve a net-zero emissions federal building portfolio by 2045, which included EV chargers.
According to a March 2024 update, the GSA had ordered over 58,000 EVs and begun installing more than 25,000 charging ports, adding to the 8,000 already in use across the government. An interactive map showing the location of all GSA-owned chargers has been taken offline as of February this year. (An older version is available through the Wayback Machine.)
The GSA will also begin offloading the EVs it purchased under the Biden administration, the source said. It’s unclear whether those vehicles will be sold or simply put away in storage. It’s also unclear whether other federal agencies will be making similar decisions for their own EVs, although many of those agencies tend to use the GSA’s EV chargers for their own plug-in vehicles.
“Neither Government Owned Vehicles nor Privately Owned Vehicles will be able to charge at these charging stations once they’re out of service.”
President Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to roll back his predecessor’s EV policies, which he falsely labeled a “mandate.” And since his inauguration, he halted a $5 billion program to install new public EV chargers across the country, signed an executive order rescinding Biden’s directives to purchase new EVs for the federal government’s vehicle fleet, and signaled his intention to eliminate the federal EV tax credit and other incentives for consumers.
Unlike gas-powered vehicles, EVs generate no tailpipe pollution. Burning fossil fuels like gasoline and diesel release carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, into the environment. These emissions have been proven to cause climate change, which supercharges extreme weather events like wildfires, hurricanes, and flooding. Transportation, including personal vehicle usage, accounts for about 28 percent of all US greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
A spokesperson for the GSA did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The GSA also plans on selling approximately 500 buildings as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to gut the federal government, Wired reports.
With additional reporting by Mia Sato
