A small Missouri school district will be able to finish paying for the new electric school buses it ordered after EPA last week unfroze funds from the agency’s $5 billion clean bus program.
But the fate of the broader five-year initiative is still unclear.
EPA approved $2.8 billion during the Biden administration for clean buses, most of them electric. But the Trump administration hasn’t publicly said what it plans to do with the roughly $2 billion leftover in the $5 billion program, which remains to be spent over the next two years.
The Ritenour School District, in suburban St. Louis, found itself caught by the shifting politics earlier this month. The district received the first three buses it had paid for under a $9.5 million EPA grant, but district officials discovered in early February that the remainder of their funding was frozen and that they couldn’t pay for the other 21 buses they ordered.
