Does $3,000,000,000 for 93 postal delivery trucks sound like a lot?

One reason I prefer newspapers to other forms of the credentialed media is that newspapers can, and do, provide readers with some detailed, deeply investigative stories, something that television news just doesn’t do well. Fox News or CNN or MSNBC aren’t going to do the kind of deep digging that Washington Post reporter Jacob Bogage has done. According to the story, Mr Bogage has covered the United States Postal Service since 2020 and reviewed more than 20,000 pages of internal agency and company records for his latest story. Heck, I can’t even imagine CBS News retaining a reporter who specialized in the Post Office.

The Postal Service’s electric mail trucks are way behind schedule

Defense contractor Oshkosh had only delivered 93 trucks by November — compared to 3,000 originally expected by now. The delays put Biden’s climate goals at risk.

by Jacob Bogage | Thursday, December 12, 2024 | 6:00 AM EST

A multibillion-dollar program to buy electric vehicles for the U.S. Postal Service is far behind its original schedule, plagued by manufacturing mishaps and supplier infighting that threaten a cornerstone of outgoing President Joe Biden’s fight against climate change.

The Postal Service is slated to purchase 60,000 “Next Generation Delivery Vehicles,” or NGDVs — mostly electric — from defense contractor Oshkosh, which has a long history of producing military and heavy industrial vehicles, but not postal trucks. Congress provided $3 billion for the nearly $10 billion project in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, one of Biden’s chief legislative accomplishments.

But as of November, the Postal Service had received only 93 of the Oshkosh trucks, the agency told The Washington Post — far fewer than the 3,000 originally expected by now. Significant manufacturing difficulties that were not disclosed to the Postal Service for more than a year have stymied production, according to internal company records and four people with knowledge of the events, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid professional reprisals.

Doing the math: $10 billion divided by the 60,000 anticipated NGDVs works out to $166,666.66 per vehicle. Even if we assume that Oshkosh, which does make a very good front-discharge concrete mixer truck, delivers all 60,000 trucks at the contracted price, that’s a heck of a lot of money per truck. Yes, I know, postal vans are specialty vehicles, but a now Ford F-150 Lightning, at the top-of-the-line price, costs only 57% of the per unit price of the electric mail trucks. Perhaps Elon Musk and his unofficial Department of Government Efficiency ought to look into the price we are paying for this silliness.

Of course, Mr Bogage’s report used “four people with knowledge of the events” who had to leak to him anonymously to keep their jobs. We aren’t told how many of them worked for Oshkosh and how many for the government.

The Post’s article details some of the problems Oshkosh has had in designing and building the vehicles, and the company is producing one vehicle per day, when they were planning on 80 per day at this point.

The wide-ranging production problems have not been previously reported and were not mentioned in an inspector general audit published in October. A senior company executive tried to alert the mail agency to the problems in 2022, but was blocked by superiors, four of the people said.

I can see however many of the “superiors” involved might cease being executives at Oshkosh, but an obvious question remains: if only 93 units of “the 3,000 originally expected by now” have been delivered, why hadn’t executives at the USPS been raising holy Hell about this? This is the kind of thing that an efficient government operation, led by men who were willing to actually lead rather than just push papers, should have been doing, should have already done, rather than let Oshkosh slide on this.

Yeah, the DoGE is going to have a lot of work to do, and it might not be just Oshkosh company heads that roll; it sounds to me like some execs at the USPS need to start learning how to ask, “Would you like fries with that?” as well. Sometimes you just have to be an [insert slang term for the anus here] to get the job done, and too many guys have been nice guys.

Oshkosh stock fell $1.40, 1.36%, to $101.45 on the New York Stock Exchange today, while Terex, Oshkosh’s primary competitor for front discharge ready-mixed concrete mixer trucks, fell only $0.04, 0.79%, to $50.64, on a generally slightly down day in the markets today.

There’s a lot more detail about the problems in Mr Bogage’s original, but the final two paragraphs amused me greatly:

And last January, the Postal Service held another splashy EV event, hosting Biden administration officials in Atlanta to celebrate its first vehicle charging stations.

The EVs parked in the background were Ford eTransits purchased in 2023. More than a thousand of them are already making deliveries.

Yup!