‘Can’t Make This Stuff Up’: GOP Sen Rips Biden Energy Secretary’s Troubled EV Road Trip

Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa ridiculed Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm’s electric vehicle (EV) road trip during a Tuesday press conference.

Granholm embarked on the trip to promote EVs and the jobs they will create, a selling point of the overall “Bidenomics” agenda, according to NPR. However, her trip faced several challenges related to EV charging, including one that ended with the police being called, which Ernst used as a springboard to criticize the Biden administration’s wider green agenda.

“Folks, you can’t make this stuff up,” Ernst began. “The predictable problem that they had on the road trip, there were not enough chargers. So what did Granholm’s staff do? They got in their gas-powered car and they sped ahead to get in line to save spots with their gas-powered vehicle at those electric chargers. And it was so bad in one location because the gas powered car was blocking all of the other electric vehicles that had to charge. It was a really hot day. A family actually called the police on them. They had a baby in their car that was crying again, really hot day and here’s a gas-powered car.”

The EV Granholm drove for the trip had a hardware issue that complicated charging, some charging stations were broken or inconveniently slow and a Georgia family called the police on a Granholm staffer who had gone ahead of the convoy to reserve a spot at a charging station during her 4-day trip through the Southeast, according to NPR.

“The Biden administration’s greenie push is unreliable, absurd and fully dependent on China,” Ernst told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Let’s call it what it is – a road to nowhere!”

Granholm sought to promote the economic benefits of the EV transition on the trip, telling one South Carolina audience to “imagine how big clean energy industries will be in 13 years,” according to NPR. “How much stronger our economy is going to grow. How many good-paying jobs we’re going to create — and where we are going to lead the world.”

Granholm’s family drives a Mustang Mach-E EV, a model which is assembled in a Ford plant in Mexico that employs about 1,000 workers, according to NPR and Ford. The model has an average list price of about $47,000, according to Ford.

“For over a decade, while our global competitors geared up for the clean energy transition, America lagged behind,” a spokesperson for the Department of Energy told the DCNF. “Now, with President Biden’s historic Investing in America agenda we have over $7 billion to build out convenient and reliable EV charging infrastructure, a portion of which is already awarded to every state, D.C. and Puerto Rico.”

The White House did not respond immediately to a request for comment.