Lawmakers are claiming the Biden-Harris administration’s billion dollar clean bus project is promoting reliance on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in a new scathing report that details the taxpayer-funded price tag for the energy initiative.
The Biden administration authorized the Clean School Bus Program in 2021, which appropriated $5 billion for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to incentivize the replacement of school buses with "clean" alternatives.
The House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations released a 51-page report on the project, reviewed by Fox News Digital, that highlighted the push for electric school buses over "cheaper" low-emissions alternatives and how "vulnerabilities for waste, fraud, and abuse riddle this program."
"Costly subsidies for ESBs are a poor use of federal taxpayer money at a time when school budgets are increasingly strained," the report said. "Currently, it is only the existence of massive taxpayer-funded subsidies that enables ESBs to compete with diesel buses and low emission buses in the market."
The committee claims that the EPA funding structure "incentivized districts" to choose the electric school bus options.
The average diesel school bus costs roughly $100,000, while the average electric school bus in the 2022 Clean School Bus Rebate Program costs $381,190, according to the committee's findings.
Advocates of electric buses told lawmakers that the initiative promoted lower operating costs compared to diesel buses, but the committee argued in the report that the "savings don’t come close to offsetting the tremendous upfront costs."
The committee also cited a "serious security vulnerability" over the reliance on China for mineral mining.
"ESB batteries rely on opaque supply chains rife with national security risks and that pose grave human rights concerns, and are to the benefit of adversarial regimes, such as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which largely has a monopoly on certain parts of the supply chain for these products," the report reads. "Promoting EVs like ESBs means enriching the People’s Republic of China and the CCP because, as Morgan Stanley estimates, 90% of the EV battery supply chain relies on China."
The committee also noted that Chinese companies will mine lithium in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, "thus enriching both China and the Taliban," citing Paul A. Brinkley, a former U.S. deputy undersecretary of defense.
During its investigation, the committee said they reached out to some of the schools that received funds from the EPA and found the agency "did not require attestations of truth from applicants, lacked procedures to verify applicant claims, and relied on insufficient self-certification to determine that applicants met EPA requirements."
"The program, led by the radical Biden-Harris EPA, props up a market that relies heavily upon a supply chain dominated by the Chinese Communist Party. Further, the program was constructed without the necessary safeguards to prevent fraud and incentivizes schools to use buses they otherwise would not choose," the committee chairs wrote in a statement.
Vice President Kamala Harris, the 2024 Democratic nominee for president, has been a vocal proponent of replacing older buses with electric vehicles.
"Who doesn't love a yellow school bus, right? Can you raise your hand if you love a yellow school bus? Many of us went to school on the yellow school bus, right? It’s part of our experience growing up," Harris said while speaking at Lumen Field in Seattle in 2022. "It’s part of a nostalgia, a memory of the excitement and joy of going to school to be with your favorite teacher, to be with your best friends and to learn. The school bus takes us there."
Asked about the report, the EPA told Fox News Digital that the program is "creating the future that our children deserve – a future with cleaner air on the bus, in bus loading areas, and in the communities in which they operate."
"EPA appreciates Congress’ continued interest in the EPA Clean School Bus Program. EPA is committed to oversight and accountability and to ensuring that these funds are delivering clean air and climate benefits to communities. EPA continues to work with a diverse set of stakeholders, including the OIG, to continually improve the design, implementation, and monitoring of the program," the agency said in a statement.
