Illinois’ government-anointed electric bus maker is a bigger fiasco than we knew – Wirepoints

By: Mark Glennon*

Electric school bus maker Lion Electric, once a darling of the State of Illinois’ renewable energy plan, turns out to have been a federal as well as a state miscarriage of central planing.

Among the countless spending scandals now finally being exposed by the federal government:

The Environmental Protection Agency has disclosed that the Biden Administration gave $160 million to now bankrupt Lion ahead of production rather than making payments along the way as school buses were being produced. “They still haven’t provided $95 million worth of school buses to the 55 school districts,” said EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin. “It’s the American taxpayer that gets screwed.”Lion, a Canadian company, received the funding even as it struggled to turn a profit and took on millions of dollars in loans. It’s all in a Free Beacon article here and a FOX interview with Zeldin here.

Gov. JB Pritzker announced a “historic” investment by lion in 2021 for a factory built to make electric buses in Joliet. The project, Pritzker said, “represents not only a win for our communities, but a strong step forward in our work to expand clean energy alternatives and the jobs they bring to our communities. The new Joliet facility will put Illinois at the forefront of a national movement to transition to zero-emission vehicle use, advancing our own goals of putting one million of these cars on the road by 2030.”

Illinois taxpayers were to provide nearly $50 million in incentives for Lion, but the 900,000 square foot factory is now nearly idle, which we wrote about earlier. That’s the good news. This project failed so fast that the employment goals needed to get the $50 million were never met, so the funding from the state never occurred.

Federal taxpayers probably won’t be as lucky. Whether the $160 million from the federal government can be recovered is doubtful given the bankruptcy proceeding Lion is now in. The EPA, however, is attempting to recover what it can. It’s part of the Trump Administration’s effort to claw back or freeze expenditures and appropriations that should not have been made. On that, law professor Jonathan Turley, writing about Lion, wrote Thursday that “Such accounts are likely to be cited in cases where Democratic groups are fighting to force agencies to continue to pay out money after court injunctions. The argument of the Trump Administration is that it wants to freeze expenditures as it reviews these contracts.

Maintenance and repair issues have plagued electric bus, as we wrote earlier. Most recently reported are problems with Lion buses purchased by school districts in Maine. A recent headline there sums it up. “Maine’s Lion Electric school buses have been a disaster.” At least some Illinois school districts have purchased Lion buses but the number is unknown.

Electric school buses were a particular favorite of Vice President Kamala Harris. Here she is proudly announcing the federal program for electric school bus subsidies in 2022. “One of Kamala Harris’s highest profile responsibilities as vice president has been spearheading the federal government’s billion-dollar efforts to deploy thousands of electric buses across hundreds of school districts nationwide,” the Free Beacon said.

When asked last year about Lion’s problems, Pritzker had somebody to blame: the Fed. About layoffs at Lion Electric and other Illinois manufacturers, as reported by CapitolFax, he said this:

Listen, the Federal Reserve is responsible for where interest rates are right now, and they could lower interest rates. I encourage them to lower interest rates. That will help all these companies and help us grow the economy more than it is already growing. And as you’ve seen, some companies have struggled. Deere is in an industry that has struggled broadly. The electric car industry hasn’t struggled. It’s growing still, but it’s not growing at the same rate that it was. It will come back. But once again, interest rates are holding them back from making the investments that are necessary. So we’ve got a lot of challenges. They’re going to face the US economy.

That’s no excuse. Nor is there any excuse for the Biden Administration or the State of Illinois for this calamity. For the Biden Administration to have sent $160 million to a Canadian company, before production and with no progress payments, seems like criminal negligence.

*Mark Glennon is founder of Wirepoints.