I'm neither right nor left, but firmly for the average person. And for us, the vast majority of this country, the government hasn't worked for us in decades. Instead, politicians have wrapped themselves and their decisions in heaps of bureaucracy, miles of red tape, and all the insider trading they can get away with. And they can get away with a lot.
It's why, despite the federal government taking more and more of our paychecks over the last 30 years, our roads are still trash, our schools are falling apart with teachers funding their own supplies, our national parks and forests go unmaintained and prone to fire, and why everything in our lives feels a little worse with each passing year.
They've got the money to fix all this, but they've made it absolutely impossible to do so in any real way, just so they go after one another in the press and fundraise off our anger that "the other side" won't let them get things done. It's horseshit.
And the biggest case study of this is the Inflation Reduction Act which, on the face of it, should've been great for cities across America. But because Washington is Washington, and the laws they pass are designed to basically drag a project on forever, it utterly failed, as evidenced by the fact that the feds allocated over $7 billion for public EV chargers, but only managed to build 400 stations.
That's not just ludicrous, it's criminal. And it lies on the head of both sides of the aisle.
Now, according to Reuters reporting, "U.S. states have built less than 400 electric vehicle charging ports through April under $7.5 billion federal infrastructure programs, the Government Accountability Office said Tuesday. As of April 2025, 384 charging ports are operating at 68 stations in 16 states, GAO said, saying a joint office overseeing the program 'has not defined performance goals with measurable targets and time frames for its activities.'"
Part of the issue is that the current Trump administration is hell-bent on rolling back the clock, and reality, and doing its best to stop all electric vehicles for some unknown reason (cough, cough oil and gas industries). And its stopped dolling out federally approved funds to states across the country, with many suing the administration for said funds.
But there's a bureaucratic aspect of the issue, too, and that, the Democrats are absolutely implicated in as well. And that is, that over the years, both parties have added so many layers to the permitting process, so many federally-mandated requirements to access those funds, so many asinine handshakes that have to occur before you can ever even think of before breaking grounds and doing the damned thing. Hence the video above with Ezra Klein and Jon Stewart talking about this issue.
Ezra—no relation—lays out how to even start a project under the Inflation Reduction Act that Biden passed in his second year as President, it would take state agencies a minimum of three years just to get to the point of potentially accessing those funds due to the bureaucratic red tape that surrounds any sort of federal project. Three freakin' years. Not for the project to be done. Not for it to start. But for it to just get to the point of maybe starting.
That's frankly absurd, and so when I see that the feds allocated $7 billion for EV infrastructure and only managed to build a whopping 384 chargers, I get why that number is so artificially low. Because it's an absolute pain in the ass to get any of these funds.
Now, obviously, the federal government didn't spend $7.5 billion dollars on 384 chargers. No, they spent $1.5 billion, and the Trump administration wants to take back the extra $6 billion in unspent funds, per Reuters. How you spend that much money on so few chargers is beyond me, but if DOGE was looking for actual forms of bureaucratic waste, that feels like one if you ask me.
That's all to say that I'm for expanding electrical infrastructure, and that the federal government should be working to help the regular person. But the way it goes about anything feels antithetical to that mission. At least in how these politicians have set everything up. Which may be the point?
"More for me and not for 350 million Americans..."
