Verge: "The GSA is shutting down its EV chargers, calling them 'not mission critical.'" Color me bewildered, but I find myself again unusually posting about something already fairly widely covered in most media—because this is so close to my heart.  I had heard about this story before I went downtown to have breakfast with some guys, which I do every Saturday, but before the restaurant opened I wandered down to the post office in the same block to look at their EV chargers. Each of them had signage from the City of Bellingham. Our post office building is listed as an historic building + is owned by the city, so maybe the edict foisted on the General Services Administration [GSA] to take hundreds of charging stations out of service will not apply here. But this just seems such a vindictive a move by the White House, or is perhaps due to lobbying by our very own Machiavellian Musk [who has all of his own Tesla charging stations].  Quoting the internal memo sent out via cryptologically protected Signal to GSA: "Neither Government Owned Vehicles nor Privately Owned Vehicles will be able to charge at these charging stations once they’re out of service." The federal government owns some 650,000 vehicles, more than half of which were to be replaced with EVs under the last administration. "According to a March 2024 update, the GSA had ordered over 58,000 EVs and begun installing more than 25,000 charging ports, adding to the 8,000 already in use across the government...but since his inauguration, [Trump has] halted a $5 billion program to install new public EV chargers across the country, signed an executive order rescinding Biden’s directives to purchase new EVs for the federal government’s vehicle fleet, and signaled his intention to eliminate the federal EV tax credit and other incentives for consumers." I easilyanticipated all of this would ensue after election results were in. But taking out existing, functional, utilitarian charging systems already in place?  Is this guy trying to make himself more unpopular than he already is? Ye gods and little fishes.
