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EV fees are out of the budget bill — but they'll be back

EV fees are out of the budget bill — but they'll be back

E&E News30-06-2025
The push to impose fees on electric vehicles appears to be dead in the Republicans' megabill, but it's likely to be a central topic when lawmakers start writing the next surface transportation bill.
Republicans in both the House and Senate say it's important for electric vehicles — and hybrids — to pay into the federal Highway Trust Fund. A big question is how.
Many Democrats and EV advocates have come to accept there will be some kind of fee on the new breed of cars and trucks, although they argue that some of the Republican proposals amount to overkill.
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'Fixing the HTF is long overdue, and Congress must tackle this growing problem,' House Transportation and Infrastructure Chair Sam Graves (R-Mo.) wrote last week in a Washington Times op-ed.
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Hispanic colleges targeted by lawsuit push back in court
Hispanic colleges targeted by lawsuit push back in court

NBC News

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  • NBC News

Hispanic colleges targeted by lawsuit push back in court

The Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities is joining a legal fight over the fate of a federal program aimed at addressing educational disparities in higher education. This week, the association, better known as HACU, filed a motion to intervene in a federal lawsuit that seeks to dismantle the Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) program — which provides federal grants to universities and colleges with a student body that is over 25% Latino. The program created by Congress provides grants to universities already educating the majority of the nation's Hispanic college students to expand their ability to help 'Hispanic students and other low-income individuals complete postsecondary degrees.' HACU is now part of the effort started last month by the Students for Fair Admissions — the same group behind the legal challenges that resulted in the Supreme Court striking down college affirmative action programs in 2023 — and the state of Tennessee to sue the Department of Education over the HSI program. They allege it ' discriminates based on ethnicity ' and are calling on the federal court to deem it unconstitutional. The association representing Hispanic universities also alleges that the lawsuit unfairly characterizes the HSI program, since the added resources from the grants benefit the entire student body of the institution. "We want our side of the story to be heard by the court before they decide on the case," Dr. Antonio R. Flores, president and chief executive officer of HACU, told NBC News on Friday. Flores said HSI-designated schools don't automatically get grants based on the number of Hispanic students on their campus. They must 'compete among themselves' to access the money and must prove that the majority of their students are low-income and that they 'spend less money per student than their peer institutions.' "This is not about preferential treatment. It is about equitable resource allocation for institutions,' Flores said. In court filings Thursday, Students for Fair Admissions and the state of Tennessee did not oppose HACU's motion to join the case as a defendant. The Department of Education has not yet responded to the complaint in court. It also did not respond to an email from NBC News seeking comment on Friday. To identify which colleges and universities serve the majority of the nation's Hispanic students, Congress defined Hispanic-Serving Institutions as those that have at least 25% of its full-time student population be of Hispanic or Latino descent. The HSI designation is based on geography and demographics, Fran Fajana, an attorney at LatinoJustice representing HACU in this case, told NBC News. 'It's not because the institution went out of its way to recruit a lot of Latino students.' The percentage of Latinos with a college degree still lags far behind white students. In 2022, about 21% of Latino adults over 25 had a bachelor's degree, compared to 42% for non-Hispanic whites, according to census figures. Students for Fair Admissions, which is led by conservative activist Ed Blum, referred to the 25% requirement as an ' arbitrary ethnic threshold" when it published a news release about the lawsuit on June 11. "This lawsuit challenges a federal policy that conditions the receipt of taxpayer-funded grants on the racial composition of a student body," Blum said in a statement last month. The Office of Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti said in another statement from that the "rule leaves many needy students out in the cold." "The HSI program's discriminatory grant standards are just as illegal," Skrmetti said in the statement. Their lawsuit is part of a series of legal challenges brought forward in recent years — following the Supreme Court's decision on affirmative action — against schools, scholarships, internships and other educational programs that mention race or ethnicity in their criteria. Once an institution is competitively awarded a grant, there is no requirement in the HSI program limiting how those resources are distributed across the school, Fajana said. "Whether they've gotten the resources to expand their science program laboratories [or]capacity building," she said, "those resources are not limited to Latino students." A 2023 study from the Urban Institute found that the investments made by HSI-designated institutions increased the number of students of all races and ethnicities who completed college and obtained bachelor's degrees. "What is at stake?" Flores said, "Success in advancement of, not just the Latino community, but all of the students who go to HSIs and benefit from the funding."

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