Sean Duffy, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to head the US Department of Transportation, believes electric vehicle owners should pay to use the roads.
“How to do that, I think, is a little more difficult,” Duffy said at his confirmation hearing Wednesday before the Senate Commerce Committee.
The former Republican lawmaker is right that it would be a challenge to enact such a change that would affect owners of Tesla, Rivian, Lucid and other electric vehicles.
Federally funded road repairs are paid for primarily by taxes collected on diesel and gasoline. Electric vehicles don’t use natural gas, which means they don’t contribute to fuel tax revenue. Some argue that this creates a funding gap.
It is not within DOT’s power to make this change on its own. The agency would have to work with Congress to pass new legislation authorizing taxes or fees. It could, for example, amend the Highway Revenue Act, which was passed in 1956 and established a federal fuel tax. Today, it is 18.3 cents per gallon.
Lawmakers would also need to come up with a new implementation framework, which could potentially measure and report electricity mileage or electricity usage. How to do this accurately and in a way that ensures privacy would be a technological hurdle. And such an end would likely face strong opposition from environmental advocates and automakers.
In many states, electric vehicle owners already pay to use roads to compensate for not contributing fuel tax revenue. Some, such as Georgia and Illinois, charge a flat fee (and in the case of Illinois that fee is higher than car owners pay for gas). Others, like Utah, charge by weight or mileage, which is tracked by the state.
Duffy’s statement is part of the incoming Trump administration’s broader politicization of electric vehicles. Trump has characterized EVs as emblematic of liberal policies and threatened to roll back tax credits for EVs that were part of President Joe Biden’s inflation-reducing law. During his first term, Trump also rolled back Obama-era corporate average fuel economy standards designed to help spread the adoption of electric and hybrid vehicles.
Instead, Trump has focused on coal and oil. the slogan, “Drill, baby, drill,” became one of his rallying cries in the last election.
