Trump's Transportation Department Resets Fuel Economy Standards By Pretending Electric Cars Do Not Exist, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That American Vehicles Were Still Required To Go Farther On A Gallon Of Gas

WASHINGTON. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration on Wednesday proposed what it described as a complete reset of the nation's Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, moving to roll back the targets that for half a century have required new cars and trucks to travel farther on each gallon of gasoline, on the grounds that the previous standards had committed the error of noticing that electric vehicles are sold in the United States.

The proposal rests on a reinterpretation of the Energy Policy and Conservation Act, the 1975 law that directs the agency to set the maximum feasible fuel economy and bars it from assuming the existence of electric vehicles when it does so. The agency concluded that the standards inherited from the previous administration were unlawful because they had quietly counted on Americans buying the very cars the statute instructs regulators to ignore, and that the appropriate remedy was to recalculate the targets as though the electric car had not been invented.

The rollback delivers on a promise President Trump made throughout the 2024 campaign and repeated in office. "We will end the electric vehicle mandate on day one," the President had pledged, a commitment the Transportation Department has now honored by the somewhat later route of a formal rulemaking. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy's agency framed the reset as restoring consumer choice, the choice in question being the option to purchase a vehicle that uses more fuel than it otherwise would have.

The agency's own accounting acknowledges that weaker standards mean American vehicles will burn additional fuel over their lifetimes, that drivers will spend more at the pump across the years they own a car, and that the additional combustion will release additional carbon dioxide into an atmosphere the administration has separately determined is not legally permitted to find it harmful. "The market should decide how far a car goes on a gallon, not Washington," said one official familiar with the rulemaking, declining to specify which part of the market had requested fewer miles per gallon.

Fuel economy standards have, since their enactment after the 1970s oil shocks, doubled the average efficiency of the American fleet and reduced both household fuel spending and the country's exposure to oil-price swings, outcomes the proposal would slow or reverse. The agency noted that the standards remain technically achievable, and that automakers retain the freedom to build efficient vehicles, a freedom now unaccompanied by any requirement that they do so.

At press time, the Transportation Department had confirmed that drivers who preferred a car that went farther on less gasoline were welcome to seek one out, provided the standards it had just deleted had left any on the lot.