Congress should short-circuit the nation’s electric vehicle charging program

By Steve Swedberg of CEI. Excerpt:

"how many EV charging stations has NEVI installed? After all, the NEVI program was enacted in November 2021. The Biden administration was hoping to have 500,000 charging ports installed by 2030. With $5 billion allocated over a five-year period, one would think that NEVI would have established a well-functioning network of EV chargers by now. Here are some estimates as to how many EV chargers have been installed under NEVI:

·      The EV States Clearinghouse, which is co-maintained by the National Association of State Energy Officials and the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, has the estimate at 532 charging ports currently open.

·      An industry analysis reported that EV charging data analytics company Paren puts the estimate at 725 ports.

·      The Government Accountability Office calculated that as of April 2025, there were 384 EV charging ports installed under federal government programs. Notably, this figure includes ports from NEVI and another program called the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Grant Program.

Regardless of the estimate used, the number of charging ports installed by the federal government is less than 1,000 and accounts for much less than one percent of the 235,428 charging ports available as of January 2026 and the 500,000 charging ports promised by the Biden administration by 2030. More than four years after enactment, and with billions appropriated, this level of deployment suggests more than ordinary implementation lag. Even a backloaded program would show clearer signs of growth by this point. Instead, NEVI’s output indicates structural bottlenecks embedded in its design rather than temporary startup delays.

Paperwork over power

Even before the Trump administration decided to rescind the existing NEVI Formula Program Guidance and suspend state approvals of deployment plans, NEVI was already floundering in red tape. As of February 6, 2025, which was a few days after USDOT Secretary Sean Duffy was sworn into office, $2.7 billion of the $3.3 billion available in NEVI funds were unobligated. In plain terms, most of the money Congress set aside had not been committed to projects.

According to the center-left think tank Third Way, NEVI’s slow progress is not due to lack of need or funding, but to bureaucratic hurdles. Complex requirements and delayed federal guidance left states navigating red tape instead of building charging stations, highlighting inefficiencies in the program’s design.

The Environmental Law Institute further breaks down these hurdles mentioned by Third Way by showing that NEVI’s deployment delays are baked into the program’s structure. States and contractors must navigate local building approvals, utility interconnection studies, and environmental reviews for each proposed site, which often stalls projects for months before a single charger goes live.

In addition, federal “Buy America” requirements add supply-chain constraints that create additional bottlenecks and increases production costs. Industry groups and state Departments of Transportation have warned that “Buy America” requirements could delay federal EV infrastructure projects due to limited domestic suppliers and complex compliance processes. These intertwined requirements illustrate how well-intentioned federal oversight can transform a supposedly fast-moving infrastructure program into a slow-moving bureaucratic behemoth.

Private sector vs. NEVI deployment timelines

An interesting point of comparison is the project timelines between the private sector and NEVI installations. Industry analysis indicates that regulatory and utility interconnection processes alone commonly add a year to 18 months to the timeline for NEVI‑funded charging projects, well before construction begins. Although all 50 states have submitted and received approval for NEVI EV charging deployment plans, the plans do not include uniform benchmarks for how long it takes from award to station operation. Arizona expected it to take a year to install once approved, whereas California provides a range of one to two years.

By contrast, the private sector reports shorter timelines. EV charging financing company Sustainable Capital Finance (SCF) estimates that it can take 3 to 16 months to install an EV charger, whereas EV charging company EVgo puts the figure at 18 months. EV charging stations take time to install, irrespective of red tape. At the same time, these diverging timelines illustrate why the private sector is able to generate tens of thousands of ports in the time that NEVI has installed fewer than 1,000 ports. 

Daren Bakst, director of CEI’s Center for Energy and Environment, has noted this discrepancy reflects a broader principle: states and private actors ultimately determine where and when chargers are built, and government mandates cannot substitute for market-driven deployment. In fact, Bakst highlighted that even with billions allocated to NEVI, no chargers had yet been installed at the time of his analysis in December 2023. This insight reinforces the idea that federal intervention cannot reliably accelerate infrastructure deployment.

Beyond regulatory red tape, NEVI has been hampered by predictable governance failures that exacerbate the timeline issues. For example, a federal court recently ruled that the US Department of Transportation unlawfully froze congressionally appropriated NEVI funds, which forced states to litigate simply to access money already authorized by law. Such administrative paralysis is not an anomaly. It is a predictable outcome when a program centralizes decision-making in federal agencies subject to shifting priorities, complex compliance rules, and political interference.

NEVI spending fails the traveler

Despite a $5 billion commitment made in 2021 to build a nationwide EV charging network, there are fewer than 1,000 operational charging ports. This amount represents a miniscule fraction of the ports already available nationwide, and more importantly, the amount promised by the Biden administration. The Government Accountability Office highlights how NEVI lacks clear performance goals or benchmarks, meaning policymakers cannot even track whether NEVI is meeting its intended outcomes. Combined with bureaucratic hurdles, slow deployment, and small scale of charging ports at this stage, it becomes difficult to argue that NEVI is doing anything of substance to positively contribute to transportation infrastructure.

At the same time, private companies continue to expand the EV charging network across the US and often complete projects in a matter of months instead of years. History has shown that building a nationwide network of fueling infrastructure does not require subsidies. Gas stations achieved this growth organically in the 20th century without subsidies. Those same market forces can drive and already have been driving EV charger deployment."

Tariffs as Fiscal Policy

From Jeffrey Miron.

"President Trump has claimed his tariffs will raise enough revenue to allow for income tax cuts.

Recent research, however, finds that even at optimal tariff rates, these tariffs

would raise an amount less than one-fifth of federal income tax revenue … generat[ing] efficiency losses nearly equal to the revenue raised.

Tariffs are also

regressive … [and] today’s tariffs are particularly high, variable, and uncertain. This raises compliance costs, reduces investment, creates serious tax administration problems, and encourages corruption and wasteful lobbying efforts.

Lastly, while tariffs do reduce imports, they also reduce exports and invite retaliatory tariffs, which in turn harm US manufacturers.

Tariffs are a blunt instrument that—even without the current volatility, but even more with it—cause efficiency losses, increase compliance costs, and harm the industries they allegedly help."

There is no evidence that time spent on social media is correlated with adolescent mental health problems

See The mainstream view by Tyler Cowen.

"Multiple studies have either shown that smartphone and social media use among teens has minimal effects on their mental health or none at all. As a 2024 review published by an American Psychological Association journal put it: “There is no evidence that time spent on social media is correlated with adolescent mental health problems.”

And this:

Advocates of bans compare social media to alcohol or tobacco, where the harms are indisputable and the benefits are minimal. But the internet, including social media, is more analogous to books, magazines or television. I may not want my sons watching “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” or reading “Fifty Shades of Grey,” but it would be crazy to ban books and films for kids altogether.

But that is the nature of these social media bans. Australia’s law not only restricted access to platforms such as Instagram and TikTok but also banned kids under 16 from having YouTube, X and Reddit accounts. Even Substack had to modify its practices.

Here is more from the excellent Sam Bowman.  And many teens make money through “digital side hustles,” in this day and age that is what a teenage job often means."

Why Economic Freedom Matters

By David R Henderson. 

"Each year the Economic Freedom of the World report does something important: it measures whether ordinary people are allowed to make economic choices—work, save, start a business, trade, invest, and keep what they earn—without being pushed around by the government. The newest edition, published in 2025 by the Fraser Institute’s global network, compiles data through 2023 and ranks 165 jurisdictions.

The premise is simple. If you want a society in which people can pursue their own plans—especially people who do not have political connections—you need a framework that protects property, enforces contracts, keeps money reasonably sound, permits trade, and limits regulatory barriers. The report’s value is not that it settles every argument, but it does settle a good many. Among those many is the biggest issue in economic policy: free markets versus government. Which kind of economic policies make it easier for people, including the poor, to succeed? In each of the many reports done since 1985, the answer is clear. Economic freedom works well to generate well-being for pretty much everyone. (bold added)

The good news is that economic freedom rose fairly steadily until 2019. The bad news is that it has fallen since then. For the United States, the good news is that we rank fifth out of 165 political jurisdictions. The bad news is that our absolute score is lower than it was in 2019.

These are the opening paragraphs of my latest article for the Hoover Institution: “Why Economic Freedom Matters,” Defining Ideas, February 19, 2026.

The December 2025 report didn’t make as big a splash on the web as I think it should have. That’s why I wrote this piece.

Another excerpt:

The report also points out one tragic fact: “The 10 lowest-ranked countries were Chad, Libya, Syria, Argentina, Myanmar, Iran, Algeria, Sudan, Zimbabwe, and Venezuela.” Venezuela was the lowest, with a score of 3.11, and the highest of the ten was Chad, with a score of 4.84. Where were Cuba and North Korea? There were not enough reliable data available for the authors to assign a score.

And:

Here is the uncomfortable headline: global economic freedom peaked in 2019 and has declined each year for four years afterward. The report ties the post-2019 drop to the policy response to the coronavirus pandemic and notes that all five areas declined after 2019, with “sound money” experiencing the largest drop.

Since 2019, therefore, the direction is clearly down. That matters because many people—especially in rich countries—talk as if freedom is the default setting and only dictatorships threaten it. The data say otherwise: freedom can shrink by “temporary” emergency measures, and the shrinkage can linger. Adam Smith famously said, “There is much ruin in a nation,” but that doesn’t mean that declines in freedom are to be ignored.

And:

Start with income. Comparing the freest quartile of countries to the least free quartile, the report finds that average incomes are 6.2 times as great in the freest countries as in the least free. And the income of people in the bottom 10 percent is 7.8 times as high in the freest quartile as in the least free. Those are ratios. The report also provides concrete dollar levels in purchasing power parity dollars. The average income threshold for the poorest decile is about $9,771 in the freest quartile versus about $1,255 in the least-free quartile. If you care about poverty in a serious way—meaning you care about what poor people can actually buy—those numbers should end a lot of fashionable conversation.

Read the whole thing."

THE 1950S: A NOT-SO-GOLDEN AGE

By John Cochrane. Excerpts:

"Look at standards of living. Real gross domestic product per capita, which is also national income per capita, sat below $19,000 in 1955. In 2025 it approached $69,500. These figures are expressed in 2017 dollars, thus accounting for inflation. The average American is about 3.7 times better off today than in 1955. It’s not even close.

Yes, GDP grew faster in the 1950s. Real GDP per capita grew 28 percent from 1949 to 1959, and only 18.3 percent from 2009 to 2019. Slowing growth is a major economic problem today. Be that as it may, we eat levels, not growth rates. We might not be getting even better off as fast as we were then, but we’re still 3.7 times better off.

How about jobs? In August 2025, 163 million people were employed in the United States; in August 1955, 63 million. America created 100 million jobs over those seven decades. This growth occurred even as manufacturing employment shrank and machines took over. People found better—and better-paying—jobs, most in services. Has any evangelist for union jobs of the 1950s considered how dirty, dangerous, and mind-numbing it was to work on an assembly line? Isn't being a desk drone, a nurse, a bank employee, or any of a hundred mid-level service jobs a lot nicer in addition to better paid? In 2025 the unemployment rate, the fraction of workers looking for a job, stood at 4 percent, just about what it was in the 1950s and what economists think of as a normal labor market.

The great 1950s union labor market was great only if you were a straight white man, and usually one with connections. “We don’t want nobody nobody sent” was the great saying of Chicago Machine job allocation. Women, African Americans, other minorities, and immigrants faced bleak prospects. One of the great achievements of the U.S. economy since the 1950s has been to expand the labor force as well as opportunities for high-paying jobs to all sorts of people who were excluded then. Civil rights, the emancipation of women, and the increasing acceptance of gays, foreigners, Catholics, and Jews (not so true in the 1950s)—these are nothing to sneeze at. The unions made good jobs for white men, relative to other jobs at the time, in part by excluding others.

What about those easy-to-buy houses? The average house in the 1950s was about 1,000 square feet. The famous Levittown houses were 750 square feet. One bathroom. Today, the average house is about 2,500 square feet, even though the average number of people in it declined from 3.4 in 1950 to 2.5 in 2024. People are choosing larger and better homes.

To men of my age, 1950s cars evoke nostalgia. But they were awful, unsafe rust buckets compared to today’s boring SUVs.

What about those easy to buy houses? The average house size in the 1950s was about 1,000 square feet. The famous Levittown houses were 750 square feet. Today is it about 2,500 square feet, even though the average number of people in it has declined from 3.3 to 2.5. And modern houses are much better. People are choosing larger and more expensive homes. 1950s cars, to men of my age, evoke nostalgia. But they were awful unsafe rust buckets compared to today’s boring SUVs.

THE MYTH OF AN EGALITARIAN UTOPIA

GDP isn’t everything, though it is a lot. Was health care cheaper in the 1950s? Yes, though for many diseases, including heart conditions and cancer, treatment then consisted of asking whether you wished to see a priest, a minister, or a rabbi to send you off to the next world. Life expectancy at birth has increased by a full decade, rising from 65.6 to 75.8 for men and from 71.1 to 81.1 for women.

Pollution in the 1950s was atrocious, especially in those industrial areas so beloved by nostalgic left-wing professors. (I grew up on the south side of Chicago. I remember coal dust that accumulated on anything outside.) The fraction of people living in extreme poverty has plummeted, even as the goalpost keeps moving. And we all benefit from nearly free technological marvels undreamed of in the 1950s. Most homeless people have cell phones.

Our prosperity is, in fact, widely shared, though the inequality warriors would have you believe otherwise. Most research on income inequality doesn’t account for taxes and transfers, especially in-kind transfers. Consumption inequality is much lower than income or wealth inequality, and has expanded a good deal less. You just can’t have that many vacation homes. Wealth inequality largely consists of high stock market values in a low-interest-rate environment. Just how much social harm is Elon Musk’s huge holding of Tesla stock doing, remaining invested in the company, and producing cars and rockets?

Some observers regard the 1950s as a sort of egalitarian utopia because the rich faced high statutory tax rates. Yes, the highest federal income tax rate stood at 91 percent for most of the decade. But people confronted with sky-high tax rates go talk to their lawyers fast. Even the far-left economists Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman found that the top 1 percent of American households paid on average 42 percent of their income in taxes in the 1950s. Six decades later, at a time of supposedly stark inequality, that number had fallen only slightly, to 37 percent.

These figures account for all forms of taxes. In the 1950s, the top 1 percent paid, on average, an effective rate of just 16.9 percent in federal income taxes, as the Tax Foundation documents. How could they pay so little when the top federal tax rate reached 91 percent? The answer is: loopholes—many, many loopholes. Celebrities incorporated themselves and bought oil wells for the write-offs."

Minimum Wages and Racial Disparities

Job losses and earnings reductions from minimum wage increases between 2005 and 2019 were much more prevalent for black workers, especially black men, and were minimal for white workers.

By David Neumark and Jyotsana Kala. Excerpt:

"Our research uses data from the American Community Survey between 2005 and 2019 to examine the effects of minimum wage increases on black workers and their relative impact compared with that of white workers. We studied not only teenagers—the focus of much existing research—but also other lower-skilled groups, including workers under the age of 30 and those without a high school degree.

Our findings indicate that job losses from minimum wage increases were much more prevalent for black workers, especially black men, and were minimal for white workers. For example, among black male workers under the age of 30 without a high school degree, a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage reduced employment by 4.1 percent on average. In contrast, our research finds no evidence of reduced employment for white workers with the same characteristics, even though the wages of both black and white workers increased by a similar degree.

Considering the wage and employment effects together, we found that higher minimum wages have decreased earnings for lower-skilled black workers. For example, within the same group of black male workers, a 10 percent increase in the minimum wage led to a 4.8 percent average reduction in earnings. In contrast, we found no evidence of reduced earnings for white workers with the same characteristics. In fact, for several of the lower-skilled groups we studied, minimum wage increases tended to increase earnings for white workers.

Because there is substantial residential segregation by race in the United States, the concentration of the minimum wages’ adverse effects on black workers implies that their adverse effects are also concentrated in heavily black neighborhoods. Indeed, our research finds that the adverse effects of minimum wage increases fell disproportionately on people of all races living in areas with a high black population share, worsening the adverse effects of minimum wages on black workers living in these areas relative to workers living elsewhere. In some cases, the accumulation of adverse effects for black workers and black neighborhoods implies that large differences in minimum wages could account for roughly 40 percent of the gap in employment rates for lower-skilled workers between areas with high and low black population shares."

The US tax system has become much more progressive

Tweet from Stefan Schubert.

"The US tax system has become much more progressive (notice the X-axis). The richest pay half their income in tax, the poorest nothing."