Five electric buses in Vermont — purchased with nearly $8 million in mostly federal funds — sit idle because they cannot reliably charge in temperatures below 41 degrees. The average winter temperature in Burlington hovers in the mid-20s. The taxpayers who footed more than 95 percent of the bill got buses that were engineered to fail in the one season Vermont is most famous for.

Power the Future, an energy watchdog group, is now demanding that EPA Administrator Zeldin investigate what it calls a pattern of waste and negligence across at least two federal electric bus subsidy programs that together disbursed more than $8 billion during the Biden administration. The group sent a formal letter to Zeldin requesting his immediate attention.

An Arctic blast hammering the East made the dysfunction impossible to ignore — but the problems predate the storm by years.

$8 Billion Out the Door, Almost Nothing to Show

The numbers tell a story that no amount of green branding can paper over. The Biden administration poured $1.6 billion into the "Low-No" emissions grant program through the Federal Transit Administration. Federal officials handed out another $836 million under a 2022 EPA rebate program for electric school buses. And then there was the crown jewel: $7.5 billion spent on the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure program, which, as of late, had produced fewer than 400 charging ports nationwide.

According to Fox News, A 2024 EPA Inspector General audit found that the agency failed to meaningfully track whether the electric school buses it funded were ever actually deployed. The OIG report stated plainly:

"The EPA did not monitor bus deployment status and recipient use of over $836 million of 2022 Clean School Bus, or CSB, Program rebates, despite the Agency stating it would do so."

About 7 percent of participating school districts had completed the processes needed to put buses into service — things as basic as installing charging infrastructure. The rest of the money landed somewhere. Just not on the road.

By October, the Inspector General's office had identified what it called "three material weaknesses so significant that they could lead to material misstatements in the Agency's financial statements." That is auditor-speak for a program that cannot account for where the money went or what it bought.

Vermont's $8 Million Experiment

Green Mountain Transit's five electric buses cost more than $1.5 million apiece. PTF's letter to Zeldin did not mince words:

"These buses were purchased to operate in Vermont's climate, yet reports indicate they cannot be reliably charged in temperatures below 41 degrees. With the average winter temperature in Burlington hovering in the mid 20s, the vehicles, which cost more than $1.5 million apiece, are unusable under predictable winter conditions."

Green Mountain Transit General Manager Clayton Clark pushed back, telling Fox News Digital that his buses went dark because of a manufacturer's battery recall, not the cold snap. He said local media erroneously reported the snow had been the main factor:

"We never would have purchased buses with that [requirement] in Vermont."

Clark said the 41-degree charging threshold came from new recall information from the manufacturer and that the buses had been "working A-OK before this situation." He estimated the wait for new batteries at 18 to 24 months, but framed it as a bump in the road:

"Considering the 12-year life cycle to be out for a few months is not indicative of the program being a failure. This is no different than a safety recall that we would get for a diesel bus."

Except it is different. When a diesel bus gets recalled, students still get to school on the other diesel buses that work in January. PTF President Daniel Turner cut to the core of it:

"At no point does anyone who has a gas-powered bus have to play these games, introducing new sets of variables. We are still sacrificing the children for a pretend cause."

Vermont Isn't Alone

Vermont's fleet is just the most visible failure point. In Maine, a school superintendent reported that her district received four "bad buses" from a now-bankrupt Canadian EV firm. In one incident, an electric bus's brakes failed, and it crashed into a snowbank. School districts in Western New York also had issues piloting the buses. And while those individual stories might look like isolated bad luck, the Inspector General's findings suggest something structural: the federal government wrote enormous checks and never verified whether the product showed up, worked, or served anyone.

Turner pointed out that the dysfunction has real consequences for kids right now:

"These [green] games are ongoing, there are schoolchildren who cannot get to class because they are fixing problems that they themselves created."

A Pattern That Should Sound Familiar

PTF drew a direct line between the electric bus boondoggle and the kind of fraud that has plagued other federal disbursement programs. Their written statement connected the dots explicitly:

"Taken together, these outcomes raise the same red flags now familiar from the Minnesota daycare fraud scandal: large federal payouts with minimal verification, poor oversight and taxpayers left holding the bill."

The formula is always the same. Washington announces a massive spending initiative with a feel-good label. Money flows to grantees with minimal verification. Oversight mechanisms exist on paper but are never enforced. When the inevitable failures surface, defenders insist the concept was sound and blame the execution. The taxpayer never gets a refund.

PTF's statement sharpened the point:

"When hundreds of millions of dollars are awarded without confirmation that buses are delivered, operable or in service, the absence of oversight echoes the failures that are being highlighted in Minnesota."

"When this failure is viewed alongside electric buses that cannot operate in cold weather, school buses that sit idle and grants producing little to no functional infrastructure, a troubling pattern emerges."

The group called for a determination of whether incompetence alone explained the results, or whether fraud and misrepresentation are also at play." That is not an accusation — it is a question that $8 billion in public money demands an answer to.

The EPA Under New Management

EPA spokesman Michael Bastasch told Fox News Digital that the new administration is not standing still. He said the agency is actively revamping the program:

"Under Administrator Zeldin's leadership, EPA is committed to being exceptional stewards of taxpayer dollars and delivering measured results for American families, while still fulfilling Congressional intent."

Bastasch said the overhaul is grounded in President Trump's executive order, "Unleashing American Energy," and noted that Zeldin has already canceled $30 billion in wasteful grants and contracts. That is the kind of corrective action that should have happened before the money left the building — but at least someone is finally reading the receipts.

The Bill Comes Due

Something is clear about cold weather. Theories about energy transition timelines and fleet electrification targets sound compelling in a conference room. They collapse on a 15-degree morning when the bus won't charge, and a kid can't get to school.

More than $8 billion went out the door. The EPA's own inspector general found the agency couldn't track where it landed. Buses sit in parking lots from Vermont to Maine. The charging infrastructure that was supposed to undergird an electric revolution barely exists. And the school districts that trusted Washington's promises are now waiting 18 to 24 months for replacement batteries that may or may not fix the underlying problem.

PTF President Daniel Turner framed the stakes plainly:

"Given the scale of this investment, there must be an examination into whether taxpayers are receiving the reliable, deployable transit assets capable of serving the communities for which they were funded."

Eight billion dollars bought a fleet of buses that can't handle winter. The children who depend on them deserve better than to be passengers in someone else's experiment.