NEVI Program Has Disbursed Only 2% of Its $4.4B Budget After 3 Years, Leaving Highway Charging Gaps Unfilled

The National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program, signed into law via the Bipartite Infrastructure Law in November 2021 with $5 billion allocated, has spent only $94 million (2%) of the $4.4 billion made available to states as of January 2026, producing just 384 charging ports. State DOTs and their contractors face a gauntlet of federal compliance requirements, utility interconnection timelines, and Buy America provisions that create 18-36 month project timelines for what should be straightforward charger installations. Why it matters: The program's glacial disbursement rate means highway corridors remain without reliable fast-charging coverage, so EV drivers on long-distance trips through states like Wyoming, Montana, and West Virginia face 100+ mile gaps between chargers, so potential EV buyers see long-distance travel as impractical and stick with gasoline vehicles, so EV adoption rates plateau below the levels needed to justify further private-sector charging investment, so the U.S. falls further behind its own 2030 target of 500,000 public chargers and cedes EV supply chain leadership to China and Europe. The structural root cause is that NEVI was designed as a federal highway reimbursement program modeled on road construction grants, imposing Davis-Bacon prevailing wage rules, Buy America steel/iron requirements, NEPA environmental reviews, and ADA compliance mandates on $150,000 charger installations -- regulatory overhead designed for $50 million bridge projects that makes the per-port cost and timeline wildly disproportionate to the actual hardware deployment.