March 31, 2026
Russell Bargmann is pursuing a Dual Degree Master of Public Policy at the Duke Sanford School of Public Policy and Master of Environmental Management at the Duke Nicholas School of the Environment. Before Duke, Bargmann served for 12 years in the U.S. Senate as a staff assistant and legislative correspondent for U.S. Senator Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and speechwriter for U.S. Senator Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.).
Any serious plan to decarbonize the U.S. economy can’t ignore transportation. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s 2024 Report to Congress, transportation accounts for roughly one-third of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, with around half coming from light-duty passenger vehicles alone.
That reality drove Congress to pass a series of major federal investments to supercharge vehicle electrification during the Biden administration through the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), often called the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
Among their myriad other goals, these laws aimed to modernize American automotive manufacturing, expand electric vehicle (EV) consumer adoption, and support the buildout of a national EV charging network.
In many states, implementation of the EV provisions in these massive federal laws went slowly or became highly politicized. But in Ohio, a state deeply rooted in automotive manufacturing, something different occurred.
Bipartisan leaders in the Buckeye State chose to build. By embracing EV investments, these leaders helped Ohio get a head start on building a well-connected charging network that will make it easier for EV drivers to traverse the state and cement the state’s place as a national leader in automotive innovation.
Bipartisanship in the Buckeye State leads to effective buildout and program delivery.
When Congress passed the IIJA in 2021, it did so with key Republican support, including from Ohio’s own U.S. Senator Rob Portman, who played a central role in negotiations.
Ohio’s leaders had strong incentives to engage in the law’s transportation investments. The state has the second largest auto manufacturing workforce in the country. Elected officials from both political parties recognized that the EV transition could either bypass Ohio or be anchored there.
Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, continuing groundwork laid by his predecessor John Kasich’s DriveOhio Initiative, leaned into the economic opportunities from the transition to EVs. Rather than rejecting federal funds, as some other Republican governors did, state officials and local stakeholders in Ohio largely focused on how to make the programs work effectively.
That decision positioned Ohio to implement the IIJA’s EV investments much more quickly and effectively than most other states.
In this blog, we’ll lay out concrete examples of how collaboration over time led to better implementation of new EV-related funding opportunities like the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean School Bus Program and the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program.
Lesson 1: The Clean School Bus Program and the importance of stakeholder engagement.
Before diving into Ohio’s rollout of more complex EV charging station grants, it helps to look at another IIJA program that was even earlier to roll out after the law’s passage: the EPA’s Clean School Bus Program.
That program allocated $5 billion to help school districts replace diesel buses with electric ones. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) designed it to have a relatively simple rebate structure, minimizing paperwork barriers for school districts in the early application phase.
But “simple” on paper doesn’t always mean easy implementation in practice.
In Ohio, early participation lagged in the first round of applications. With only one month to go before the first application deadline, only three school districts had applied.
That’s when advocacy groups stepped in to get the word out. On the ground, Tracy Sabetta, a partner at Initiative Consulting and then-Field Coordinator for Moms Clean Air Force, found that some of the hardest initial challenges during this first round were simply raising awareness.
Moms Clean Air Force created a fact sheet that shared data not only on positive health benefits from cleaner buses but also the long-term cost savings on fuel and maintenance for districts that chose to go electric. By focusing on these topics, advocates avoided framing the awards as climate-related, which could have been more politically divisive, particularly in rural areas.
As a result of this rapid community mobilization, Ohio school districts ultimately submitted 53 applications in the first round. After more than 2,000 districts submitted applications from across the country, the EPA nearly doubled its first-round funding to $1 billion.
As Dr. Timothy Edwards, the Superintendent of the Amanda-Clearcreek Local School District in rural Fairfield County, said at the May 2024 community celebration of the $790,000 rebate from the program that helped his district purchase two new electric buses: “Overall, I think the best way to describe this program: it’s a win-win for our students, a win-win for our community, and our partners. I’m excited to see where this goes.”
It’s true that program delivery has proven rocky after some of the award announcements. As Canary Media reported in late 2023, many awarded school districts encountered supply chain issues, infrastructure planning challenges, and difficulties coordinating with their local utilities.
In Ohio, advocates partnered with school district leaders and other key stakeholders, primarily under the umbrella of the Ohio School Boards Association to iron out friction points they had encountered while navigating the program. They convened an “Ohio Buses and Clean Air” public meeting in September 2023 and compiled an online resource guide to answer frequently asked questions and concerns about electric buses and provide helpful contact information for local utilities and electric school bus manufacturers
Current state of the Clean School Bus Program:
Like many federal climate-related grant programs, the Trump administration halted the Clean School Bus Program soon after taking office, essentially cancelling the most recent round of applications and leaving approximately $2.3 billion from the overall program unspent.
On February 20, 2026, just one week after it repealed the scientific finding on the dangers of greenhouse gases, the EPA announced a “revamped” version of the Clean School Bus Program that could allow for “a broad range of options” for other fuels, including potentially natural gas, that count as clean buses.
Before funds were frozen, the results of the Clean School Bus Program in Ohio and across the nation were undeniable. According to the Environmental Law & Policy Center, the program helped fund the purchase of more than 160 electric school buses across 20 Ohio school districts. In the Cincinnati region alone, more than 60 electric buses are now taking students to and from school each day. Overall, the program helped more than 1,300 school districts nationwide acquire nearly 9,000 new buses, 95 percent of which were zero-emission, battery electric vehicles.
Regardless of how the program changes under revised federal guidance, long-term success on the ground in school communities will require more technical assistance, collaborative partnerships with local power utilities, and stakeholder education efforts like the ones in Ohio.
Opportunity for Action:
As an initial step for this reimagined version of the program, the EPA just opened up a 45-day public comment period “to seek feedback from fleet operators, manufacturers, school officials, and energy producers on a broad range of fuel options that school bus sectors could use.” It’s quick and easy to add your perspective on why this program matters – the deadline is April 6th, 2026.
Lesson 2: When most other states stalled out in the rollout of federal EV charging grant programs, Ohio stepped on the accelerator.
Although its funding total of $5 billion matched that of the Clean School Bus Program, the IIJA’s National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program was designed quite differently. These differences included more stringent application requirements, detailed technical specifications, and administration by federal and state transportation agencies.
The NEVI program provided $5 billion in formula funding to state transportation departments to build fast-charging stations along designated “Alternative Fuel Corridors” to help alleviate the “range anxiety” cited by many Americans as the reason they are hesitant to switch to EVs.
To comply with federal standards under the law, new charging stations needed to:
- Be located every 50 miles
- Be within one mile of highway exits
- Include high-powered DC fast chargers
- Meet strict reliability and interoperability standards that would make them useable for most EV drivers, regardless of which company made their vehicles
Many states struggled initially to meet the strict requirements in the federal guidance for NEVI, largely because they had little experience coordinating with electric power utilities or finding workable sites for charging stations on private property.
The Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT), however, had a head start. Because of previous targeted investments and strategic initiatives, Ohio had developed a uniquely robust understanding of EV charging infrastructure.
Lesson 3: Long-term planning and learning from past experiences makes the next deployment faster and more effective.
The Prequels: Smart Columbus and DriveOhio initiatives built Ohio’s EV experience and expertise.
Nearly a decade before the IIJA, a sizeable federal transportation grant from the Obama Administration under an earlier federal highway bill, incentivized Ohio leaders to learn how to install EV charging infrastructure in their state.
In 2016, then-Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx announced Columbus, Ohio had won $40 million in federal funds—plus $20 million of additional funds from private partners—through its Smart City Challenge.
These funds were awarded to Columbus, the state’s capital city and home of its flagship research university, The Ohio State University, to create a local testbed for innovative transportation technologies like self-driving cars, smart traffic lights, and EV charging stations. Smart Columbus’s five-year demonstration of smart transportation systems assembled partners from all around Ohio, including Ohio State, ODOT, and American Electric Power (AEP), the largest electric utility in the state.
According to Matt Stephens-Rich, who worked on the Smart Columbus program and now serves as Director of Programs at the bipartisan Electrification Coalition, bringing in statewide partners helped to make transportation innovation, including deployment of EV charging infrastructure, a statewide and, importantly, a non-partisan goal.
In 2018, to scale what was going on in Columbus into a whole-state effort—and cement Ohio’s status as an attractive place for automakers to manufacture next-generation vehicles and their components—then-Governor John Kasich, a Republican, launched ODOT’s DriveOhio initiative to position Ohio as a national leader in “research and development of the high-tech future of transportation.”
In June 2020, DriveOhio released an “Electric Vehicle Charging Study” with detailed needs assessments and recommendations for how to install charging infrastructure that could be easily accessed along every 50 miles of the state’s major highway corridors. This included a publicly available and interactive GIS mapping tool that identified not only ODOT rest stops, Ohio Turnpike Service Plazas, and other public sites like state parks, but also potential private commercial site hosts for charging stations.
To facilitate cross-sector cooperation, DriveOhio also created an online “EV Infrastructure Partner Directory,” which includes contact information for individuals and organizations who expressed a willingness to partner on EV infrastructure projects. Alongside these resources, ODOT launched state-level grant funding opportunities to help private partners implement the plan on some of the private commercial charging sites.
By the time NEVI funds were rolling out, Ohio already had a blueprint in place for building a statewide EV charging network.
Preparation laid the foundation for Ohio’s successful NEVI implementation.
While most other states were struggling to meet the requirements of NEVI, the Ohio Department of Transportation was already busy soliciting proposals for bids to build new charging stations.
A 2024 case study report on Ohio’s NEVI implementation by Atlas Public Policy found that the state’s prior efforts prepared it well to anticipate technically complex federal guidance and meet the multifaceted requirements for administering NEVI’s formula funds that tripped up so many other states. Ohio’s existing plans for its highway corridors aligned well with NEVI’s guidance for “Alternative Fuel Corridors” and helped ODOT identify 30 eligible zones and private partners that would be ideal for NEVI-supported charging locations.
In October 2022, ODOT released the nation’s first Request for Proposal (RFP) soliciting bids for NEVI fast charging locations—before final guidance had even been released by the National Highway Administration. When the Biden administration released updates in their finalized federal rules for NEVI in March 2023, ODOT mandated that applicants comply with all the new requirements and submit updated proposals within five weeks. By moving quickly and adjusting nimbly, ODOT stayed on course to announce its first awards for NEVI projects by July 2023, well before any other states. The first completed location opened before the end of the year.
In addition to supporting the on-time delivery on the state’s NEVI projects, stakeholders in Ohio also put forward multiple successful applications for local and regional-scale charging network projects under the BIL’s $2.5 billion competitive Charging and Fuel Infrastructure (CFI) Grant Program, including a $12.5 million grant to assist the Sustainable Ohio Public Energy Council (SOPEC) in building EV charging stations in the state’s southeastern Appalachian region that were not included in the state’s NEVI Alternative Fuel Corridors.
At the December 2023 ribbon-cutting ceremony for Ohio’s first operational NEVI-funded charging station, Governor DeWine said, “Electric vehicles are the future of transportation, and we want drivers in Ohio to have access to this technology today.”
Because of its swift execution, most of ODOT’s work on NEVI, including the announcement of a second round of awards in May 2024, happened before the Trump administration froze the program, as with many other Biden-era climate initiatives, soon after taking office.
Once Trump’s Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy unfroze the NEVI program in August 2025, with more flexible rules for how states could use their funds, ODOT was ready to get back to work. Breanna Badanes of DriveOhio told Spectrum News 1 in Cincinnati right after the program restarted: “We’re really excited to continue the momentum and move forward with construction of additional stations.”
Within a month of the Trump Administration reopening NEVI, in September 2025, DriveOhio announced that its plans for distributing the final round of funding awards under the program was compliant with the Trump administration’s new guidance and had been approved by the U.S. Department of Transportation.
Lesson 4: Policy whiplash creates uncertainty for EV consumers and manufacturers.
We’ve learned that long-term planning and program stability can make the delivery of infrastructure programs much more successful. The other side of this lesson comes from the harms and uncertainty that result from policy directions taking a radical turn.
Soon after passing the IIJA, Congressional Democrats, including Ohio’s then-U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown, doubled down on climate investments through their landmark 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The IRA established many climate-related tax incentives, including production tax credits to incentivize domestic manufacturing of EVs and components, like batteries, and consumer tax credits to make it more affordable for Americans to purchase EVs.
Those incentives did not last long, however. Congressional Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), signed into law by President Trump in July 2025, repealed or rapidly phased down nearly all the IRA’s EV-related tax credits. The December 2025 rollback of EPA pollution standards for cars and trucks also signaled to American automakers that they could slow their transition away from gas-powered internal combustion engine vehicles. Meanwhile, tariffs imposed by the White House have also placed extreme price pressures on American manufacturing, particularly on automakers who still rely on foreign parts and materials to assemble EVs.
These twists and turns in federal policy signals from Washington make it difficult to assess whether Ohio’s enthusiastic embrace of EV charging infrastructure deployment will translate into broader gains in EV adoption and manufacturing.
Lesson 5: Building out the manufacturing supply chain for the next generation of vehicles requires a consistent and predictable market.
Ohio remains well-suited to help create the vehicles and automotive components of the future – we can manufacture the batteries, cars, delivery trucks, and the buses that will help our communities become cleaner and more efficient.
Realizing this opportunity for investment requires a stable market. The instability caused by the Trump administration’s rollbacks of EV consumer and manufacturing tax incentives and disruptions to supply chains from pingponging tariff announcements has led to increased struggles and uncertainty for new automotive manufacturing opportunities in the region.
In August 2022, soon after the passage of the IRA, Japanese automaker Honda, which has maintained factories in Ohio since the early 1980s, announced it would partner with battery maker LG Energy Solution to build a new $3.5 billion battery plant in Jeffersonville, Ohio, projected to create more than 2,200 jobs. The new battery plant is part of a larger strategy that also included a $700 million retool of three existing Honda factories in the state to make Central Ohio into a “Honda EV Hub.”
Although the Honda-LG battery plant is still on track, Honda did announce in February 2025 that it planned to “build gasoline, hybrid and electric vehicles on the same assembly line” at its Ohio factories, signaling broad uncertainty about where the American auto market might be heading. While Honda remains committed to Ohio, in October 2025, the company announced that it was scaling back production at its Marysville, Ohio factory, citing “an industrywide semiconductor supply chain issue.”
In Lordstown, Ohio, home to one of General Motors’ (GM) largest manufacturing campuses prior to its shuttering in 2019, the prospect of EV projects bringing about a manufacturing renaissance has not panned out.
Lordstown Motors, a startup company, purchased the factory from GM in 2020 with plans to assemble electric pickup trucks. Unlike its competitors such as Rivian, an electric truck manufacturer that has expanded rapidly in the last few years, Lordstown Motors fell into bankruptcy and was forced to sell the factory to Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn, which plans to convert the facility into a new AI data equipment manufacturing site.
In late October 2025, GM said that a nearby joint-venture Ultium Cells EV battery plant in Lordstown would also pause production in 2026 and lay off most of its 1,100 employees; the company cited “slower-than-expected near-term EV adoption.”
Despite all this volatility in the industry, consumer adoption of EVs has continued to climb in Ohio over the last decade, according to data collected by the Alliance for Automotive Innovation. Even if the sunset of consumer EV tax credits under the OBBBA slows the rate of consumer EV adoption, it’s difficult to imagine Americans, or Ohioans, will completely reverse their trend toward purchasing more electric and hybrid vehicles.
What Ohio got right:
Ohio’s EV story isn’t perfect. But it offers some important lessons:
- Preparation matters. Both the Smart Columbus and DriveOhio initiatives laid critical groundwork and fostered substantive and technical expertise.
- Stakeholder engagement is essential, especially at the local level, to achieve buy-in and effective collaboration with key partners in program delivery.
- Bipartisan buy-in reduces friction and makes program delivery a technical and governing challenge rather than a political one.
Whether future federal administrations pass policies to accelerate or slow the EV transition, Ohio has already demonstrated something important: Infrastructure policy succeeds when states treat it as an economic opportunity — not as a political culture war.
Done right, the transition to electric vehicles continues to offer enticing potential to create major economic opportunities along Ohio’s busy highway corridors and a brighter future for the automotive manufacturing industry that has long powered the state’s economy.