Biden Administration Awards Grants for Electric Vehicles Manufacturing

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$1.7 billion for retooling projects across eight states; but will the program be here in 2025?

The Biden administration on Thursday announced $1.7 billion in grants to retool 11 auto factories for the manufacture of electric vehicles (EV) and their components.

Much of the money comes from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the 2022 climate law that also includes consumer tax credits of up to $7,500 for the purchase of a new EV.

And most of the grants will overhaul factories operated by General Motors and Stellantis, the parent company of Chrysler. The largest one, $500 million, will help GM convert its Lansing, Mich. plant from producing internal combustion engine vehicles to EVs. But the grants are stretched across eight states and, if they're completed as planned, will create 2,900 auto industry jobs and save another 15,000 of them, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

The administration is hustling to get these funds like these awarded before the November presidential election, the Washington Post reports, because former president Donald Trump has vowed to toss them and all climate-related industrial policies enacted or set during President Biden's first term. Trump called them the "green new scam" during their recent debate.

So there's a little bit of uncertainty in the air! The And that's not exactly great for investment planning or the economic growth this effort is meant to induce. Here's what the leader of a free-market think tank told the New York Times a few weeks ago:

Alex Flint, the executive director of the Alliance for Market Solutions, a conservative group that advocates for a carbon tax to fight climate change, also opposes subsidies. But the tax credits have created "the hope that we will catch up with China" in clean technologies and repealing them would make the United States seem unreliable, he said.

"Turning subsidies on and off diminishes their immediate value and discounts the value of any U.S. policies in the future," Mr. Flint said.

In the past two years, or roughly since the IRA took effect, companies have announced $152 billion in private investment in domestic clean energy and EV manufacturing, according to the Clean Investment Monitor, a project of the Rhodium Group and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This relatively small amount of grant money is just more on the pile, as U.S. EV sales continue to grow. Will they be growing in 2025?

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