Here we go- a small story with big implications. The take-away? The Biden White House didn’t pick winners and losers; it mainly picked losers. The latest chapter in what President Trump calls the Green Scam…
Nobody was more excited about electric school buses than Kamala Harris. Joe Biden’s VP was one of the most enthusiastic drivers behind a $5 billion grant program dedicated to electrifying the nation’s fleet of school buses, an effort she championed as senator and later as vice president. She helped secure that money from the $1 trillion infrastructure bill signed by Biden in 2021 – money that seems mainly to have vanished.
“Who doesn’t love a yellow school bus, right?” Harris said at a gathering in 2022. The program, she said, “symbolizes so much about our collective investment in our future.”
We hope not. The electric school bus boondoggle continues to unravel, costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. A year ago, the Wall Street Journal chronicled the sorry story:
“So far nearly $3 billion in grants and rebates have been awarded to school districts by the Environmental Protection Agency, enough to buy more than 8,000 electric buses. Less than a third of that number have made it onto the road, with electric buses making up around 1% of the country’s fleet of 480,000 school buses…”
The numbers are getting worse.
Canadian electric bus maker Lion Electric, a company that specialized in electric school buses and trucks, filed for bankruptcy in December 2024. This past May, a new investment group from Quebec acquired Lion’s assets, but the restructuring voided warranties for U.S. buyers, affecting nearly 2,000 school buses.
Consequently, school districts in Yarmouth, Maine, and Herscher, Illinois, that had bought buses from Lion, were stuck with buses riddled with problems, unserviceable and ultimately inoperable. “They ran properly for approximately two weeks, then we started getting error messages,” said the superintendent of schools in Yarmouth, Maine. What was their response? Back to efficient, reliable, diesel-powered buses.
Lion had sold approximately 3,400 electric buses in the United States, many funded through the EPA’s $5 billion Clean School Bus initiative. Some 1,600 are now idled because of technical malfunctions.
Specifically, Lion received $159 million in federal funds to manufacture 435 school buses between 2022 and 2024, but failed to deliver
$95 million worth of electric buses. That puts the cost per bus at around $365,000; a diesel-powered bus costs about $100,000. But sure, the EV- variety obviously makes sense.
But apparently they cannot, even with gigantic subsidies, make money. In 2023, with great fanfare, Lion opened a manufacturing facility in Joliet, Illinois, to make the electric buses, promising hundreds of jobs. The launch was celebrated by Gov. JB Pritzker and U.S. Sen. Richard Durbin, who attended a grand opening ceremony and repeated claims the operation would create 1,400 jobs. They boasted that the Lion Electric factory was the first auto assembly plant to open in the Chicago area in more than 50 years.
Only a few months later, layoffs began and the plant shut down barely two years later.
It isn’t the first. Another electric bus company, Proterra, filed for bankruptcy in 2023 and was bought by Phoenix Motors in 2024. And let us not forget EV car makers Fisker, Nicola, the UK’s Arrival, Electric Last Mile Solutions, Lordstown Motors and Canoo, all of which are also now in bankruptcy. There will be others but at least under Trump we will not see any more taxpayer dollars sunk into this losing business.
Kamala must be heartbroken.
