This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that covers climate, energy, and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.
In the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Congress voted to invest $5 billion in accelerating a phaseout of diesel school buses across the country, a move meant to protect students from harmful pollution and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
But the Clean School Bus program has been on hold since President Donald Trump took office, with $2.3 billion still unspent.
Last Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency announced what it called a “revamp” of the program, signaling it would no longer favor electric school buses, where 95 percent of the money had been spent under President Joe Biden. Instead, the Trump administration is seeking to move to “a broad range of options,” including buses fueled by natural gas, biofuel, or hydrogen.
Such a shift could lock grant recipients into investments in school buses that generate significant climate pollution for years, but EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said it is designed to provide school districts with increased choice and more affordable options.
“The Clean School Bus program has been a disaster of poor management and wasteful spending of taxpayer dollars,” Zeldin said in a statement. “Today, EPA takes the next step to set the program straight. Americans can rest assured that moving forward, the program will be safe, effective, and use reliable forms of American energy.”
How Clean is “Clean”?
In announcing the changes, the EPA noted that the law has always allowed for a wider range of fuel options than electric school buses. Indeed, the law specifies that money can be used for “alternative fuel” vehicles, defined as “liquefied natural gas, compressed natural gas, hydrogen, propane, or biofuels,” as long as the EPA administrator certifies it will reduce emissions.
But the law does contain a provision requiring that at least 50 percent of the Clean School Bus funding be allocated each fiscal year for “zero-emission school buses.” In the U.S. market, experts say that means battery-electric buses.
“It appears that EPA may be trying to stretch the definition of ‘clean’ school buses to include more buses that run on highly polluting fossil fuels,” said Melody Reis, federal policy director at the advocacy group Moms Clean Air Task Force, in an email. “But the agency is still required to award at least 50 percent of funds to electric school buses.”
The EPA announcement was critical of electric buses, asserting that under Biden, the Clean School Bus program “forced unsafe and unreliable electric buses onto American schools.” It cited the example of Quebec’s Lion Electric, which filed for bankruptcy in 2024 after selling a reported 3,400 buses in the United States. The company’s new investors announced last year that they would not honor warranties on those vehicles.
But other bus companies with electric school bus lines have expressed a continued commitment to the market over the past year, including Blue Bird Corp., headquartered in Macon, Georgia, and Thomas Built Buses, a subsidiary of Daimler Truck North America LLC, which manufactures its vehicles in High Point, North Carolina.
Critics of the Trump administration see the planned changes to the Clean School Bus program as in line with its other moves to halt the U.S. transition away from fossil fuels, especially the EPA’s repeal of the endangerment finding on greenhouse gas emissions one week earlier.
“Once again, EPA is clearly demonstrating that it plans to fund fossil fuels and prioritize polluting corporate interests over our children’s health and our future,” said Katherine García, director of the Sierra Club’s Clean Transportation for All program, in an email. “Considering we have the funding, technology, and charging infrastructure to deploy electric school buses, no child should have to inhale carcinogenic pollution each day on their way to school. Sacrificing young lungs and futures to prop up corporate polluters is indefensible.”
The majority of the nation’s 500,000 school buses are diesel-powered, and an EPA study released just prior to passage of the infrastructure law estimated that 40 percent of the fleet had been in circulation for more than 11 years. Unlike many other diesel vehicles — trucks that haul loads on highways or tractors that plow farm fields — diesel school buses traverse residential areas daily, exposing residents to high levels of particulate matter and other pollutants. Studies have shown a significant reduction in respiratory illness when school bus diesel emissions are eliminated.
But switching to electric buses has been a difficult decision to make for chronically cash-strapped public school systems. A 2024 report in Resources for the Future’s magazine put the average price of an electric school bus at $352,000, or three and a half times the price of diesel buses, which typically cost less than $100,000. Although electric buses have lower maintenance and fueling costs for school districts, those savings typically have not been enough to offset the higher up-front cost of electric school buses unless they are subsidized.
The Clean School Bus program was meant to help school districts overcome the cost hurdle. And by increasing the number of electric buses purchased, the program was designed to drive the kind of investment in manufacturing facilities and supply chains that would lower the cost of the zero-emission vehicles over time.
The revamped Clean School Bus program Zeldin outlined would be far less ambitious. It still could reduce local air pollution significantly, depending on what type of buses districts purchase. But it is likely to offer only modest reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and would not aim for the kind of industrial transformation the Biden plan was seeking.
Great Job Marianne Lavelle & the Team @ Canary Media for sharing this story.
