Dead Battery: Army's Transition to Zero-Emission Non-Tactical Vehicles Faces Roadblock.

• Date: 01 February 2025
• Author: Tegler, Jan
• Published date: 01 February 2025

The Army's effort to comply with the Biden administration's 2021 executive order to transition to 100 percent acquisition of zero-emission vehicles for the federal vehicle fleet by 2035 will likely be shut down swiftly by the Trump administration, according to some defense analysts.

"The executive order was a purely political directive by the Biden administration," said John Ferrari, nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. "It remains political, and I think that on day one or day two of the new administration that executive order will be withdrawn."

That will include a similar order for all light-duty vehicle purchases--sedans, sport utility vehicles, smaller pickup trucks--to be zero-emission vehicles by 2027.

Executive Order 14057, signed in December 2021 by then-President Joe Biden, was part of the administration's effort to establish the federal government as "a leader in sustainability."

So far, the Army has acquired "a little over 4,000 zero-emission vehicles," according to Paul Farnan, principal deputy assistant secretary of the Army for installations, energy and environment. The figure represents a fraction of the service's light-duty, non-tactical vehicle fleet, which numbers 56,000 vehicles.

The Army's effort to comply with Biden's executive order got off to a slow start, Farnan said.

"The big push really started with the fiscal year 2023 orders," Farnan noted. "By the time the [Army] Climate Strategy was published, it was late winter of 2022, so the orders for fiscal year 2022 had already been placed."

"Back then, there were still a lot of supply shortages," he continued. "EV production hadn't really ramped up. We asked for well over 2,000 electric vehicles, but we only got about 1,100 that year, because we weren't able to procure any more from the manufacturers."

The Army would be well on its way to transitioning its non-tactical fleet to zero-emission vehicles by 2027 if the executive order remained in force. "Certainly by 2027 we would be complying with the executive order to be only purchasing ZEVs," he said.

A December 2024 report from the Government Accountability Office on how the costs and benefits of operating and maintaining electric vehicles in the federal fleet compare with those of operating and maintaining gas vehicles concluded that "agencies overall were only at about 50 percent of their self-set target for acquisition of zero-emission vehicles," according to David Marroni, GAO's director of physical...