With geopolitical challenges escalating around the world, the United States has been forced to examine its global position and how other major powers exert their influence.

Increased economic interdependence in the 21st century, namely America’s intertwined trade relationship with China, has exposed security concerns that if left unresolved may undermine the strategic objectives of the United States. Protecting America’s energy security is thus a vital part of this puzzle and must not be sacrificed. However, with the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed tailpipe emission rule, the Biden administration risks compromising American economic independence and energy resiliency.

In April 2023, the Biden administration announced its original plan to require two-thirds of new light-duty vehicles and 46% of new medium-duty vehicle sales to be electric by 2032. Concerns were immediately raised from a variety of stakeholders, and the Biden administration, realizing it overstepped, pulled back the proposal for revision. Recently released updated guidance relaxed the targets set in the original mandate, but the plan unfortunately still remains far too ambitious and will have a number of unintended consequences. 

More than 55% of new light-duty vehicles will still be required to be electric by 2032. This would put most new cars out of reach economically for the average American family, which today makes well below the $100,000 per year needed to comfortably afford an electric vehicle. Not only that, but it would deal a blow to the military security of the United States by forcing Americans to depend on Chinese supply chains for resources that would become vital to powering the country’s transportation sector and could also jeopardize the stability of our electrical grid.

Right now, China controls 60% and processes 85% of the world’s rare earth elements. In recent years the country has flexed its muscles by curbing exports of these critical minerals and by threatening export bans altogether. The problem is that these elements remain integral to electric EV production and as China accelerates efforts to corner the market for key parts of electric vehicle production, mandating American manufacturers produce EVs will put the U.S. on a path of continued Chinese dependency.

This will play directly into the economic fortunes of the communist country and worsen the U.S.-China trade deficit, which the U.S. trade representative estimates sat at $154.0 billion in 2022, up 39% from 2012. That’s why this past January, more than a dozen former military officials, including myself, wrote to President Joe Biden warning how the EPA tailpipe emissions rule could negatively affect our defense stability and how it leaves our markets vulnerable to Chinese intervention.

Mandating such an aggressive EV rollout would also leave us dependent upon an overly taxed electrical grid that is still far too vulnerable to Chinese destabilization. Jumping from the 7% of market share electric vehicles have of new automobiles today to 44% in a little more than five years is far too sudden of a change and would outpace both the ability of the grid to keep up with demand and the decision-making of the American public. An unstable and rapid increase in load on the electric grid of foreign-made batteries would also threaten our national redundancy efforts to secure America’s electric grid from cyberattacks and outages.

As CSO Online reports, an influx of Chinese batteries in critical U.S. infrastructure has already gained the attention of the House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, which has raised alarms on these batteries containing malware that China could use to bring down the energy grid. Craig Singleton, China program director and senior fellow for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, describes, “[s]ophisticated, sometimes undetectable malware on these energy storage stations could pose a threat to the industrial control systems [that] connect to the U.S. energy grid.”

The Biden administration’s new EV mandate goes far beyond American families’ market decisions around EV adoption and blindly abandons America’s energy security, forcing more Chinese batteries to flood the market. By choosing aggressive climate demands over energy and supply chain realities and economic independence, this EPA mandate threatens our national security and economy and must be abandoned before American interests been irrevocably compromised.

Rob Maness, a retired U.S. Air Force colonel, is the former commander of Kirtland Air Force Base and previously served as the vice commander of America’s largest airborne intelligence wing.