If you’re not completely offered on the United States Postal Service’s new, flattened duck-shaped, gas-powered monstrosity of a mail truck, you’re not alone. The Biden administration on Wednesday made a last-minute plea to halt the USPS’ fleet, claiming the brand new vehicles’ laughably poor gas effectivity would additional worsen the local weather and hinder the federal government’s skill to guide on carbon-neutral transportation efforts.

In a pair of letters first reported on by The Washington Post, The Environmental Protection Agency and The White House Council on Environmental Quality urged The Postal Service to re-evaluate its choice to purchase largely gas-powered autos. A failure to affect these autos threatens to uproot President Biden’s pledge to section out gas-burning autos in federal businesses and buy 100% zero-emission autos for the federal fleet by 2035.

For context, the USPS carried out an environmental impact statement final yr the place it weighed a number of completely different potentialities round including electrical autos to the brand new fleet however finally selected a 90/10% break up of gasoline and electric-powered autos.

Those new gas-powered autos weren’t precisely hyper-efficient although. According to the Post, these supposed upgrades would solely supply a .4-mile-per-gallon gas financial system enchancment over the present 30-year-old fleet. With air-con on, these new clunkers would reportedly common round 8.6 miles per gallon. That’s worse than an unique Hummer H1. The value was sighted because the USPS’s principal purpose for opting to go the largely gasoline route.

Regardless, the USPS announced it had struck a cope with Wisconsin-based protection contractor Oshkosh final February, which might see the company spend round $11.3 billion on as much as 165,000 new autos over the following decade, with a $482 million preliminary funding.

Now, nonetheless, the EPA in its letter stated its environmental issues “were not adequately addressed,” and that the USPS’s closing environmental affect assertion, “remains seriously deficient.” Writing extra broadly, Vicki Arroyo, the EPA’s Associate Administrator for Policy, warned the swap to majority gas-operated autos may hinder the U.S. authorities’s makes an attempt to transition its autos away from fossil fuels.

“The Postal Service’s proposal as currently crafted represents a crucial lost opportunity to more rapidly reduce the carbon footprint of one of the largest government fleets in the world,” Arroyo wrote. “A ten-percent commitment to clean vehicles, with virtually no fuel efficiency gains for the other 90 percent is plainly inconsistent with international, national, and many state GHG emissions reduction targets, as well as specific national policies to move with deliberate speed toward clean, zero-emitting vehicles.”

The letter went on to criticize the USPS’s strategies for figuring out the price of an electrification effort and the feasibility of working a largely electrical fleet. In a press release to the Post following the letter, a spokesperson for the USPS caught to its weapons and stated it merely couldn’t afford the funding mandatory to completely electrify its autos.

“While we can understand why some who are not responsible for the financial sustainability of the Postal Service might prefer that the Postal Service acquire more electric vehicles, the law requires the Postal Service to be self-sufficient,” the spokesperson stated.

The letters sparked renewed criticism of USPS Postmaster General Louis DeJoy who signed off on the brand new autos. Late Wednesday, Virginia House Representative Gerald Connolly, a Democrat in control of the House subcommittee overseeing the United States Postal Service, known as for DeJoy’s resignation, claiming he was mucking up the Biden administration’s local weather agenda.

“This is directly counter to the goals both Congress and the president has set to have an emissions-free federal fleet,” Connolly told The New York Times. “I would love for him [DeJoy] to resign and if he won’t resign, I want the board of governors to fire him.”

Connolly went on to name for an oversight listening to to reexamine the USPS’ contract with Oshkosh. As an alternate, Connolly informed the Times he would assist an modification that may scrap the federal government’s contract with Oshkosh or one which compels the USPS to buy electrical autos.