You really have to give the Joe Biden Autopen administration credit for one thing: They've been out of power for over six months, and their failures just keep stacking up. That's a remarkable thing, even if the remarks prompted are on the order of "what a complete and utter cluster foul-up."
Case in point: The Biden/Autopen administration went all in on electric school buses and poured American taxpayer money into a Canadian manufacturer, Lion Electric, to make that happen. Now, Lion Electric is failing, the school districts that bought these buses are finding they can't get them repaired, and now these districts are going back to good old reliable diesel buses.
That's what $159 million in American taxpayers' money got us.
The Biden administration awarded Canadian electric bus maker Lion Electric $159 million to manufacture 435 school buses between 2022 and 2024, making it the third-largest recipient of such funding. The company has since fallen into bankruptcy, failed to deliver hundreds of the buses it promised, and warned school districts that its dire financial straits prevent it from servicing those in circulation.
As a result, many of those districts are turning back to diesel.
This was, of course, inevitable. With current technology, these things just aren't practical in most places. And the administrators of the school districts who bought into this boondoggle - literally - are now, understandably, feeling a little maladjusted over the whole thing.
"All of our contacts from Lion that we worked so closely with to ensure the project's success have been fired," Mike Leskowich, superintendent of the Homer Community School District in southern Michigan, told the Free Beacon. "We are going to keep our electric fleet on the roads for as long as possible. Eventually, however, we will return to diesel, as the cost of the vehicle is far less than electric."
Leskowich, whose district received $2.8 million in federal funding to procure seven Lion buses in 2022, added that Homer schools have started sourcing their own parts to repair their buses. He told the Free Beacon that it "does hurt" that the buses' warranties are no longer valid.
Charlie Butler, superintendent of the Madison Parish School District in northern Louisiana, said the 14 Lion buses his district received are still new, but that he is struggling to find companies that can repair them.
That's a hot one.
Read More: What Does a $19.5 Million EV Charger Look Like? Ask Pete Buttigieg.
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Once again, and as is generally the case, this all comes back to markets. When left to themselves, markets can be messy but generally get things right in the end. When government, at any level, starts addling the markets with a long-handled spoon, things generally go south. That's what happened here. The Biden administration, to forward the far left's "green" agenda, subsidized these things to the tune of, as we note above, $159 million. Now that money has gone down the rathole, the rathole in question being a Canadian company that went bankrupt despite the subsidy. We should add in the as-yet undetermined costs of these districts reverting to diesel buses as well, although it is the taxpayers in those local jurisdictions who will be soaked for that.
Joe Biden and his autopen have been out of office for seven months, and their policies are still failing, his boondoggles are still costing American taxpayers, and reality is still delivering some richly-deserved beatdowns to that administration's pie-in-the-sky notions. It would be amusing if it weren't so pathetic.
Editor's Note: President Trump is leading America into the "Golden Age" as Democrats try desperately to stop it.
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