Sean Duffy, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to head the U.S. Department of Transportation, thinks owners of electric vehicles should pay to use roads.
“How to do that, I think, is a little more challenging,” Duffy said at his confirmation hearing Wednesday before the Senate Commerce Committee.
The former Republican lawmaker is correct that it would be a challenge to enact such a change that would affect owners of Tesla, Rivian, Lucid and other EVs.
Federally funded road repairs are mainly paid for by taxes collected on diesel and gasoline. EVs don’t consume gas, which means they don’t contribute to fuel tax revenues. Some argue this creates a funding gap.
It’s not within the DOT’s power to make this change on its own. The agency would need to work with Congress to pass new legislation authorizing taxes or fees. It might, for example, amend the Highway Revenue Act, which was passed in 1956 and establishes a federal fuel tax. Today, it’s 18.3 cents per gallon.
Lawmakers would also need to come up with a new implementation framework, one that could potentially measure and report EV mileage or electricity usage. How to do this accurately and in a way that ensures privacy would be a technological hurdle. And such a fee would likely face steep opposition from environmental advocates and automakers.
In many states, EV owners already pay to use roads in order to compensate for the fact that they don’t contribute to fuel tax revenues. Some, like Georgia and Illinois, charge a flat fee (and in Illinois’s case that fee is higher than what owners of gas-burning cars pay). Others like Utah charge based on weight or mileage, which is tracked by the state.
Duffy’s statement is part of broader politicization of electric vehicles from the incoming Trump Administration. Trump has framed EVs as emblematic of liberal policies and has threatened to roll back the EV tax credits that were a part of President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. During his first term, Trump also rolled back Obama-era Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards that were designed to help spread adoption of EVs and hybrids.
In contrast, Trump has focused on coal and oil; the slogan “Drill, baby, drill,” has become one of his rallying cries in the last election.
