Democrats spent four years trying to force every American into an electric vehicle nobody asked for.
The auto industry fought it. Car buyers resented it. And the chargers they promised never showed up.
Now President Trump just put a permanent end to the whole scheme.
Trump Drops the Hammer on Biden’s EV Mandate
President Donald Trump announced recently that he approved sweeping new fuel economy standards that gut the electric vehicle mandates left behind by former President Joe Biden and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.
Trump broke the news in a Truth Social post, and he did not hold back.
“BIG DAY FOR AMERICAN AUTO WORKERS AND CAR BUYERS! I have just approved new Fuel Economy Standards that TERMINATE Sleepy Joe Biden and Pete Boot-EDGE-EDGE’s ridiculous EV Mandate,” Trump posted. “The Dumocrats cost our Great Auto Manufacturers $Billions, forced Americans into cars they never wanted, and wasted Billions on Chargers that were never built.”
And he kept going.
“These new Standards will take the waste out of building cars in America,” Trump wrote. “That means LOWER PRICES, saving families thousands on a new, beautiful, and safe car — Far better than the Environmental Monsters that we were building heretofore. Every Manufacturer, from General Motors to Ford to Stellantis, has called me wanting to build here, and now they can!”
The mockery of Buttigieg’s name was intentional, and it landed. “Pete Boot-EDGE-EDGE” is Trump doing what Trump does — stripping the pretense off a policy that hurt real people and making sure everyone remembers exactly who built it.
What the New Standards Actually Do
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced plans in December to reset CAFE — Corporate Average Fuel Economy — standards for cars made by 2031 to 34.5 MPG, down from Biden and Buttigieg’s goal of 50.4 MPG.
That is not a small adjustment. That is a wholesale rejection of an agenda that required automakers to restructure their entire product lines around battery-powered cars most buyers did not want.
Duffy told reporters earlier this year, “We are about to announce a common-sense fuel economy standard because we want Detroit to build cars that Americans want to buy — not cars that Democrats want Washington to build.”
That quote says it all. The Biden rule was not about fuel efficiency. It was about using regulatory pressure to engineer an outcome the market refused to produce on its own.
Weaker fuel economy standards mean that automakers can produce more pickup trucks and SUVs, which are much more profitable than smaller cars but have worse gas mileage. Working families who actually need a truck to haul a trailer or get to a job site are not a nuisance to be regulated out of existence. They are the backbone of the country.
And the numbers bear that out. Resetting the CAFE standards is expected to save the typical consumer at least $1,000 off the price of a new car.
Trump said that tariffs and other policy decisions have driven auto manufacturers back to the US. Big Three automaker Stellantis, which owns Jeep, Chrysler, and Ram, has said it will invest $13 billion in Midwest auto factories in Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan.
That is not a coincidence. That is what happens when Washington stops treating the auto industry like a science experiment and starts letting it build what customers actually buy.
Buttigieg Fires Back — and Misses the Point
Pete Buttigieg did not take this quietly.
Former Biden Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg slammed the president’s decision to remove these EV standards. “U.S. manufacturing jobs are down under Trump, including in the auto industry. His strategy failed, and so will this,” he wrote on social media. “Lowering standards will accelerate what he has already been doing: handing the clean tech future to China and forcing Americans to pay more at the pump.”
Let’s think about that response for a moment.
Buttigieg ran the Transportation Department during a period when the Biden administration threw billions of dollars at electric vehicle charging infrastructure — and those chargers largely never materialized. Trump called that out directly. The argument that rolling back an EV mandate hands the future to Communist China is the same argument the climate Left recycles every time voters reject their agenda. It assumes that because China manufactures solar panels and batteries, the only American response is to submit. That is not a policy. That is a rationalization for government control of consumer choice dressed up as geopolitical strategy.
Democrat energy policy has followed a simple pattern for years: make it harder and more expensive to use the energy sources Americans actually prefer, then tell them they are saving the planet. The Biden fuel economy rules fit that pattern perfectly. The 50.4 MPG target was not achievable without fundamentally reorienting production toward electric vehicles. That was the point. It was regulatory coercion with a green label on it.
Trump has bashed Biden plenty of times in the past for his administration’s push to get more Americans driving electric vehicles, with Trump calling it a “government assassination” of the auto industry in 2023. He was not wrong then, and he is not wrong now.
But the pushback from Buttigieg reveals something worth noting. The people who designed these mandates have never shown much interest in what car buyers want. They see consumer preference as a problem to be corrected rather than a signal to be respected. When pickup truck sales consistently outpace electric sedan sales, the regulatory response from Democrats is to make the pickup more expensive and the sedan more mandatory — not to ask why people keep making the same choice.
The Biden-era fuel economy push also leaned heavily on the assumption that charging infrastructure would materialize at the scale needed to make EVs practical for the average American. The Dumocrats, in Trump’s own words, “wasted Billions on Chargers that were never built.” That is not a small policy failure. Families in rural areas, workers who drive long distances, and Americans without a garage to charge overnight were handed a mandate built on infrastructure that did not exist. The inconvenience fell on ordinary people. The virtue fell on the politicians.
And the auto industry itself made clear where it stood. Traditional automakers and oil industry representatives complained that the Biden-era requirements pushed the boundaries of available technology and effectively penalized the production of standard gasoline-powered vehicles. When the people who actually build the cars tell regulators the targets are unworkable, the regulators are supposed to listen. The Biden administration did not listen. Trump did.
There is a reason every major manufacturer has reportedly called the White House expressing interest in building here. Some companies, like General Motors, have said they will still make electric vehicles — on their own terms, based on what the market demands. That is how it should work. Build the product. Let the buyer decide. Stop using federal fuel economy rules to run an industrial policy that Congress never voted for.
Pete Buttigieg spent his tenure at the Transportation Department lecturing the country about the future of transportation while the chargers did not get built and the auto industry bled billions trying to hit targets that made no economic sense. He can post on social media all he wants. The mandate he championed is gone.
American auto workers, car buyers, and the companies that sign their paychecks just got a very good day. Washington’s attempt to tell them what to drive just got terminated.
Sources: Mediaite, “Trump Celebrates New Fuel Economy Standards Which ‘TERMINATE’ Biden and ‘Pete Boot-EDGE-EDGE’s Ridiculous’ Rules”; CNBC, “Trump says he approved new fuel economy standards, rolling back Biden-era rules”; The Hill, “Trump says he ended Biden electric vehicle rule, updated fuel economy standards”; Townhall, “Trump Terminates Biden’s EV Mandate, Promises Cheaper Cars for American Families”; RedState, “Trump Signals Drastic U-Turn on Fuel Mandates by Biden DOT Meant to Push Americans Into EVs”; The Washington Sun, “Trump Says He Has Reversed Biden-Era Fuel Efficiency Standards”