USPS sued to block gas vehicle buys

16 states, D.C., climate activists say agency underestimated cost and impact

Sixteen states, the District of Columbia and environmental activist groups are suing the U. S. Postal Service to block its purchase of 148,000 delivery trucks over the next decade, alleging the agency has underestimated the vehicles’ costs and adverse ecological impact.

The suits brought on by the state attorneys general, Earthjustice and the Natural Resources Defense Council contend the mail service relied on faulty assumptions and miscalculations to justify spending as much as $11.3 billion on gas-powered vehicles that get 8.6 mpg, which is only incrementally better than the 30-year-old vehicles now in use.

Postal officials hoped the truck procurement would go smoothly and signal that the mail agency was evolving to meet new business opportunities and joust with its private-sector rivals. But the agency’s purchase plan would have only 10% of the new fleet dedicated to electric power, well below benchmarks set by FedEx, UPS and Amazon. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

Transportation is the single biggest source of greenhouse- gas emissions in the United States, but electrical vehicles have yet to make significant inroads. EV proponents had hoped the Postal Service contract would provide a lift for electric automobiles, which account for about 5% of all new-vehicle purchases.

Though there’s wide consensus on the necessity of new mail trucks, the deal the agency struck with Oshkosh Defense in 2021 was criticized by environmental groups, which said its marginal commitment to EVs was insufficient. Meanwhile, organized labor groups chafed at the company’s decision to move manufacturing away from unionized shops.

Postal Service spokeswoman Kim Frum, in an emailed statement, said the agency “conducted a robust and thorough review and fully complied with all of our obligations under [environmental law].”

The Postal Service began studying the environmental impacts of the vehicles — which federal regulators estimate would emit roughly the same amount of Earthwarming carbon dioxide each year as 4.3 million passenger vehicles — after paying Oshkosh $482 million to begin production. The suits allege the agency conducted its analysis to retroactively justify its procurement decision. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy placed the agency’s first order for 50,000 trucks in March; 10,019 of those vehicles will be electric, roughly double DeJoy’s original commitment. They are expected to hit the street by the end of 2023.

“The Postal Service has a historic opportunity to invest in our planet and in our future. Instead, it is doubling down on outdated technologies that are bad for our environment and bad for our communities,” said California Attorney General Rob Bonta, a Democrat, whose office is leading the states’ case in the Northern District of California.

Regulators from the Environmental Protection Agency and White House Council on Environmental Quality have found serious deficiencies with the Postal Service’s environmental study. They said the agency significantly underestimated the cost of the gas- powered vehicles — it projected fuel prices at $ 2.19 per gallon, nearly $2 less than the U.S. average this week — and how their emissions could worsen the climate crisis.

In an interview last month, DeJoy said “the economics that my team has come up with” are sound and support his agency’s purchase plan.

“That is the math that we are going with,” he said.

The 10% electric commitment also falls well short of White House and environmental activists’ goals. President Joe Biden has called for the entire federal civilian fleet to go electric by 2035. The mail agency’s 217,000 vehicles make up the largest share of the government’s nonmilitary vehicles.

“The crux of this case is that the Postal Service performed its [environmental] analysis too late, and even the analysis it did prepare was incomplete, misleading, and biased against cleaner vehicles,” Earthjustice attorney Adrian Martinez wrote in his complaint. The group is suing on behalf of the Sierra Club, Center for Biological Diversity and Clear Air Now, a Kansas-based nonprofit.

The other jurisdictions that joined the case are Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington, the District of Columbia, New York City and the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, an environmental regulator in Northern California. The states’ suit and Earthjustice’s suit were filed in the Northern District of California.