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Sean Duffy, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to head the US Department of Transportation, thinks electric vehicle owners should pay to use the 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 primarily paid for by taxes collected on diesel and gasoline. EVs do not consume gas, which means they do not contribute to fuel tax revenue. Some argue that this creates a funding gap.
It is 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 the taxes or fees. It could, for example, amend the Highway Revenue Act, which was passed in 1956 and establish a federal fuel tax. Today, it is 18.3 cents per gallon.
Legislators also need to come up with a new implementation framework, one that could measure and report EV mileage or electricity use. How to do this accurately and in a way that ensures privacy would be a technological hurdle. And such a tariff would likely face strong opposition from environmental advocates and auto makers.
In many states, EV owners already pay to use the roads to compensate for the fact that they do not contribute to fuel tax revenue. Some, such as Georgia and Illinois, charge a flat fee (and in the case of Illinois that fee is higher than what gas car owners pay). Others like Utah charge based on weight or mileage, which is tracked by the state.
Duffy’s statement is part of a broader electric vehicle policy by the incoming Trump Administration. Trump has framed EVs as emblematic of liberal policies and threatened to roll back EV tax credits that were part of President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. During his first term, Trump also canceled the Obama-era Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards that were designed to help spread the adoption of EVs and hybrids.
In contrast, Trump has focused on coal and oil; the slogan “Drill, baby, drill”, became one of their cries in the last election.
