Obama blew $535 million on Solyndra and called it American ingenuity.
Biden just ran the same play on Native American reservations — at ten times the scale.
What federal investigators found sitting in the desert will tell you everything you need to know about who Democrats actually care about.
Biden NEVI Program Spent $300,000 Per Charger in Communities That Earn $44,000 a Year
Hidden in Biden's 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that passed with Republican votes were hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars steered toward EV chargers on Native American reservations.
The pitch was climate justice for communities that had been left behind.
So Biden's team fanned out across tribal lands, signed the checks, and installed the machines.
The math was never going to work.
A new electric vehicle costs between $55,000 and $58,000.
The average household income for Native Americans is $44,000.
Biden installed $300,000 DC fast chargers on reservations where the people living nearby couldn't afford the cars those chargers were built for.
Researchers at EV analytics firm Paren found public chargers in rural and tribal areas are used less than five percent of the time.
A charging station needs to hit 20 percent utilization just to cover its electricity, maintenance, and land lease costs.
Five percent isn't a slow start. Five percent is a machine rotting in a parking lot.
The Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma received $10.7 million to install 112 charging ports across roughly a dozen sites.
The Fort Independence Indian Community in California was handed $15.1 million for a solar-powered microgrid and charging station along US Route 395.
The Standing Rock Sioux Reservation – spanning North and South Dakota – collected $3.9 million for EV chargers on land better known for pipeline protests.
The people actually living on those reservations still drive gas-powered trucks — because that's what $44,000 a year buys.
Broken EV Chargers Nobody Can Fix and No One Is Tracking
When the chargers do get installed, they stop working.
A 2025 US Department of Transportation study found faulty power supply routinely knocks rural and tribal chargers offline even when the equipment itself is intact.
JD Power found one in five EV drivers passing through remote corridors – including tribal areas – couldn't charge due to malfunctions, payment failures, or outages.
In July 2023, a single power outage across the Cherokee Nation left every EV charger in the region dead for days.
UCLA researcher Qiao Yu studied EV deployment on tribal lands and identified the problem nobody in Biden's White House bothered to ask about before writing the checks.
Some of these communities still lack reliable electricity and clean water.
"If you don't have electricity, how can you have EV charging?" Yu told the Daily Mail.
Replacement parts are expensive and arrive slowly on remote reservations, and in many cases nobody nearby has the training to fix the hardware when it fails.
A 2025 Government Accountability Office report found that many federally funded EV projects on tribal lands lacked clear performance targets — and in some cases uptime and utilization went completely untracked.
The federal government spent billions and never asked whether any of it was working.
Biden Ran the Same Con Obama Ran With Solyndra
Democrats have been burning your money on green energy fantasies since Obama.
Obama handed $535 million to Solyndra – a solar company whose biggest investors were his fundraising bundlers – and watched it file for bankruptcy two years later.
The Republican Policy Committee documented that Obama's Energy Department left taxpayers on the hook for more than $2.2 billion in losses: Abound Solar, Beacon Power, Fisker Automotive – every one of them politically connected, every one of them bankrupt.
Biden scaled the operation up.
His 2021 law launched $5 billion for the Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula (NEVI) program, another $2.5 billion for the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure grant program, and $5 billion for the Clean School Bus Program.
Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee demanded answers as early as February 2024 – citing delays, mismanagement, and the fact that 44 percent of states hadn't issued solicitations for NEVI funding after three full years.
Pete Buttigieg stood at a podium in 2021 and promised charging stations would appear "very quickly around the country."
Four years later, after $3.3 billion had gone out the door to states, just $616 million had been awarded to companies – producing roughly 1,000 charging sites total.
That's what Democrats call historic investment.
Trump froze the program in February 2025, called it an "incredible waste of taxpayer dollars," and the House passed legislation to redirect $879 million in unspent NEVI funds to actual infrastructure.
A Biden-appointed federal judge blocked the freeze — because of course she did.
Biden called it investment. The broken machines sitting dark across the Navajo Nation tell a different story.
Sources:
- James Reinl, "These billion-dollar projects were sold as a green revolution for struggling communities," Daily Mail, May 25, 2026.
- "E&C Republican Leaders Demand Answers on the Biden Administration's Ineffective EV Infrastructure Program," House Energy and Commerce Committee, February 26, 2024.
- "Obama-backed green energy failures leave taxpayers with $2.2 billion tab, audit finds," Washington Times, April 28, 2015.
- "The President's Losing Bets on Green Energy," Republican Policy Committee, May 24, 2012.
- "Trump Administration Unlawfully Suspended EV Charger Infrastructure Program, US Judge Rules," U.S. News & World Report, January 23, 2026.
