A federal judge just ruled the EV-charger freeze illegal — $2.74 billion late

The National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program was never complicated: the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act appropriated $5 billion, split evenly into $1 billion a year for five fiscal years, and told the Federal Highway Administration to hand it to states so they could build fast chargers along the highway system.▸ One week after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy took office, an FHWA official told every state transportation director that the money was frozen anyway. It took a federal court until January 23, 2026 — eleven and a half months — to rule that the agency had no legal basis to do that.

By the time Emily Biondi, an FHWA associate administrator, sent her letter to state DOTs on February 6, 2025, states had spent three years doing what Congress asked: writing deployment plans, getting them certified, and signing construction contracts.▸ The court's summary judgment order found that $3.27 billion in NEVI funds — the FY2022 through FY2025 slices of the program — had been apportioned and made available to states for obligation. Of that, states had only managed to actually award or obligate $527 million, according to the Congressional Research Service, before the letter arrived. The letter — which the court said "yanked the NEVI Formula Program's cord out of the outlet" — rescinded every state's plan approval and left the remaining $2.74 billion inaccessible, with no date given for when, or whether, it would come back.

Judge Tana Lin's ruling didn't just criticize the freeze — it found DOT and FHWA had violated the Administrative Procedure Act, vacated the revocations, and issued a permanent injunction barring the agencies from withholding NEVI funds "for any reason not set forth in the IIJA or applicable regulations."▸ That $2.74 billion is, per the order, now unlocked. Whether it stays that way is a separate question: as recently as November 24, 2025 — four months after a preliminary injunction had already restored funding rights to 14 of the plaintiff states — FHWA unilaterally deobligated $54.7 million of Washington State's own $55.7 million in FY2022-2025 NEVI funds, citing no legal authority for the move. Judge Lin cited that episode herself as evidence the agency had not shown "a full commitment to appropriate procedure."

The freeze didn't hit every state the same way — it hit whatever each state had already built its plans around.▸ Pennsylvania had $134.9 million riding on its NEVI buildout and lost access to all of it. Vermont had just awarded $9.3 million to eleven fast-charger projects along its busiest corridors when the letter arrived and had to halt the work outright.

The pattern in the court record is consistent across states: money gets approved, states sign contracts and put crews on notice, and then the contracts stall.▸ In the District of Columbia, a conditional grant agreement with Shell to build NEVI-compliant stations collapsed in June 2025 when the freeze made the District's share of funding unreachable. In Vermont, one of the state's own contractors warned officials it might have to lay off employees if the frozen grant meant it couldn't finish a NEVI-funded project it had already staffed up for.

NEVI money doesn't buy chargers off a shelf — it buys licensed labor.▸ FHWA's NEVI Standards and Requirements final rule requires that every electrician who installs, operates, or maintains NEVI-funded charging equipment hold a certification from the Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Training Program, or complete an equivalent registered-apprenticeship continuing-education track — a federal credentialing layer on top of state electrical licensing, aimed at fixing the reliability problems regulators found in uncertified installations. That requirement draws from a national trade of about 818,700 electrician jobs, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the pool every NEVI-certified installer, in every state named above, comes out of. When a state's funding stalls, it isn't an appropriations line that goes idle; it's a signed contract, and the crew hired against it, that does.

Figures cover the four fiscal years (FY2022-FY2025) apportioned before the freeze; the FY2026 tranche of the $5 billion program, the program's fifth and final appropriated year under current law, is a separate allocation not included in the frozen totals above.