The Problem

Trucking is the backbone of the American economy and a major source of pollution. While the underlying technology of zero-emission trucks has rapidly advanced in the last decade, the new laws and infrastructure needed to support a total fleet transition have lagged behind.

Heavy-duty and medium-duty trucks account for 23 percent of U.S. transportation carbon emissions, with a similarly disproportionate footprint globally. The diesel exhaust pouring out of those trucks poisons the neighborhoods along freight corridors, which are disproportionately low-income and communities of color. Diesel particulate matter from heavy-duty trucks contributes to thousands of premature deaths in the United States every year and to childhood asthma rates in port-adjacent and corridor communities that run well above the national average, with the worst hot spots clustered next to major freight corridors and ports.

The workforce behind those trucks is often exploited and underpaid. Driving freight is one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, in part because federal infrastructure has never funded enough secure overnight parking along the Interstate system. Several hundred thousand independent operators run their own rigs on margins so narrow that a single mechanical failure or missed dispatch ends a small business, and a lease-purchase industry has grown up around the predictable pattern of broken careers and repossessed trucks.

The technology to electrify most of the trucking fleet exists today. Battery electric trucks are simpler machines than diesel, with fewer moving parts and lower maintenance costs. The exhaust aftertreatment systems on modern diesel trucks, the equipment required to meet emissions standards, now add many thousands of dollars to the cost of every new diesel truck sold.

That technological progress has been stymied by domestic policy failures. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 (OBBBA) compressed the Section 45W commercial EV credit to September 2025, triggering a sharp pullback in commercial EV truck orders. The U.S. Postal Service's Next Generation Delivery Vehicle electrification fell behind schedule as production delays, congressional attempts to claw back the IRA's $3 billion in EV funding, and procurement disputes piled up. The EPA's Clean School Bus Round 4 awards were frozen mid-cycle under the new administration, and the order backlog collapsed overnight. Manufacturers paused EV capacity and pivoted back to internal combustion. The products work. What disappeared were the demand signals that kept domestic EV truck manufacturers alive, and several are now going bankrupt.

For even the small number of electric trucks currently on the road, the power grid is struggling to meet current market demands. Truck fleets that commit to electrification commonly face one- to three-year interconnection delays, with larger upgrades taking five years or more, because utility planning and grid upgrades lag behind fleet timelines.

The damage is not just environmental. While American trucking laws and infrastructure have stalled, China has poured federal capital into electric truck manufacturing and battery-swap infrastructure at a scale no American company can match alone. If the United States cedes the electric heavy-truck market the way it ceded consumer electronics and solar panels, America will import the trucks that move American freight.

The Mission

The Mission for America will electrify every segment of American trucking, from delivery vans to long-haul Class 8 tractor-trailers, and prove that U.S. manufacturing can still triumph over the most daunting engineering challenges.

The President will open the Mission with a national address from a traditional hub of truck manufacturing, affirming that the technology to electrify the American truck fleet is ready to be deployed. The failed political leadership and corrupt fossil-fuel influence that have held the industry back will finally be pushed aside. A full fleet transition will deliver measurably cleaner air in corridor and port communities and bring tens of thousands of stable manufacturing jobs back to the heavy-truck states. The federal government will buy the trucks, finance the factories, build the chargers, and collaborate with every fleet operator that commits to the transition. By the end of the decade, every new medium-duty truck sold in the country will be zero-emission, and the long-haul fleet will be on a proven path to follow.

The fleet will turn over from the bottom up, with the medium-duty and short-haul vehicles that are easiest to electrify coming first. Almost every truck Americans see on city and suburban streets falls into this category, from delivery vans to school buses. Most of these vehicles return to a depot every night, allowing them to charge slowly on cheap overnight electricity. For many of these vehicles, the transition is already underway. Amazon has deployed over 30,000 electric Rivian vans, and school districts nationwide have begun replacing diesel buses with electric models. The Mission's job is to supercharge a transition the market has already started. By year 10 (2039), every new short-haul and regional truck sold in the country will be zero-emission, and the on-road fleet will be turning over faster than at any point since the Interstate system was built.

The Mission's hardest engineering challenge is fully electrifying long-haul Class 8 trucking. Long-haul trucks log more miles than any other segment of the fleet and put out a disproportionate share of the country's air pollution and carbon emissions. As of mid-2026, batteries do not yet have the capacity to carry a Class 8 truck through a full long-haul journey on a single charge. While many trucks will be able to charge slowly during the driver's overnight rest, the modern long-haul trucking network relies on trucks fueling up in around 30 minutes midway through a shift.

Two technologies are emerging as the most promising paths to electrifying that refuel. Megawatt charging plugs the truck into a high-voltage electrical outlet, several times more powerful than the fast chargers passenger EVs use today, and refills the truck's battery in around 30 minutes. In battery swapping, the truck pulls into a station and has its depleted battery replaced with a fully charged one. The American truck industry is converging on megawatt charging. Daimler, Volvo, Navistar, and Tesla are all building toward it, and the first commercial megawatt-class chargers are operating at early truck-charging sites in California. China has placed a much bigger bet on battery swapping for heavy-duty trucks. CATL's commercial-vehicle swap network alone passed 300 heavy-truck stations by the end of 2025, anchoring a trunk-line network along major expressways including the Shanghai-Chengdu G42, with state-owned energy companies building alongside it.

The Mission will accelerate the megawatt-charging buildout that American industry has already started, and finance battery-swap pilots and demonstrations alongside it. China continues to expand its swap network for heavy-duty trucks, and the U.S. cannot afford to close the door on the architecture that may win out in the long run. The President will frame the long-haul project as an Apollo-scale federal commitment to grow a new American industry, aimed at one of the last major unsolved decarbonization problems in transport.

Every truck stop on major Interstate freight corridors will be electrified, and the federally owned rest-area system will become the spine of the new charging network. Overnight chargers will go in at every corridor site, with megawatt charging arrays and battery-swap bays concentrated at the highest-volume long-haul corridor stops. The charging data over the first five years of operation will tell the country which architecture wins in the long term.

Every truck in the new fleet has to come off an American assembly line. The federal fleet, USPS, the Department of Defense, and the General Services Administration will place bulk orders with domestic manufacturers in the opening months of the administration, and the RFC will finance the plant retooling that lets every American OEM scale alongside the orders — taking an equity stake for the public by default where the manufacturer will agree, lending on strong public terms where it won't, and standing up public truck production directly to race the incumbents where that gets trucks built faster. The federal government becomes the anchor customer the industry can build factories around — and, where the private OEMs won't move fast enough, a builder in its own right.

The President and RFC leaders will coordinate with stakeholders in industry and labor to identify the workforce needs of the transition. Mayors and governors of the freight-corridor cities and states will line up local permitting, depot siting, and workforce training to match the federal push.

Freight rail will join the Mission, with battery-electric locomotives cutting emissions on existing tracks and rail rights-of-way becoming corridors for the new transmission lines the entire grid needs.

Truck Classes

American commercial vehicles are grouped by federal Gross Vehicle Weight Rating (GVWR) into eight classes. Different classes have different electrification timelines, depending on weight, duty cycle, and how far the truck has to drive in a day.

Class	GVWR	Common Vehicles	Typical Duty Cycle
Class 1–2	Up to 10,000 lb	Pickups, SUVs, light cargo vans	Personal use, last-mile delivery
Class 3	10,001–14,000 lb	Heavy pickups, smaller delivery vans (Rivian EDV)	Last-mile delivery, contractor use
Class 4–6	14,001–26,000 lb	Step vans, box trucks, school buses, beverage trucks, bucket trucks	Local routes, return to depot every night
Class 7	26,001–33,000 lb	City buses, regional delivery tractors, smaller refuse trucks	Local and short regional, return to depot
Class 8	33,001+ lb	Long-haul tractor-trailers, garbage trucks, cement mixers, transit buses	Mix of regional (back to depot daily) and long-haul (multi-day routes)

How Truck Charging Works Today

Charging Type	Power Level	What It Does	Where It Works	Cost to Install
Level 2 (AC)	7–19 kW	Adds 30–80 miles overnight	Depots and postal facilities where vehicles park 8+ hours	~$2,000–$6,000 per unit
DC Fast Charging	50–180 kW	Charges a medium-duty truck in 2–4 hours	Depots and fleet yards, with midday top-ups or shorter overnight windows	~$30,000–$100,000 per unit
High-Power DC	350 kW	Charges a Class 8 tractor in 1–2 hours	Regional haul depots, early corridor stations	~$150,000–$250,000 per unit
Ultra-Fast / Megawatt	750 kW–1+ MW	Approaches diesel refueling speed, with a full charge in under an hour	Long-haul corridor truck stops (emerging)	Not yet commercially priced

Solution 1: Electrifying the Short-Haul and Medium-Duty Fleet

Short-haul and medium-duty trucks, which make up the majority of the U.S. fleet, will be electrified first. These Class 4-7 vehicles include delivery vans, box trucks, school buses, garbage trucks, bucket trucks, paratransit vans, and regional delivery tractors. This segment of the industry is already moving to electric, and Solution 1 will turn that trend into a durable transformation. The Mission will build out the depot charging network, coordinate the utility upgrades that come with it, and use RFC support and incentives to make electric trucks the new standard on America's roads.

Driving adoption

Fleet operator incentives. Fleet operators decide which trucks they actually buy, and the Mission's first job is to make the BEV trucks that domestic OEMs are already building irresistible. The RFC will finance first-mover fleet conversions with low-interest loans, cash bonuses tied to conversion milestones, and a federal warranty backstop on early-production BEV trucks. UPS, FedEx, Amazon, Walmart, and the U.S. Postal Service will be among the first big customers. The federal financing will come with the depot charging buildout, so when a fleet commits to electrification, the chargers will be ready when the trucks arrive.

Buyback and retrofit program. Congress will establish a strategic buyback program for aging diesel trucks, offering cash incentives for fleet operators to retire their oldest, dirtiest vehicles and replace them with electric. For fleets that cannot yet replace their vehicles entirely, the RFC will finance retrofits that strip diesel powertrains and install electric drivetrains. Retrofits will reach 10 to 15 percent of the market and accelerate the transition for operators facing long lead times on new vehicles.

The National Clean Trucking Standard. Congress will establish a standard requiring 100 percent of new Class 4-7 truck sales, plus the depot-based Class 8 vocational trucks that return to a yard every night (refuse trucks, transit buses, and regional day-cabs), to be zero-emission within 10 years, with graduated benchmarks along the way. Long-haul Class 8 follows the moonshot path in Solution 2 rather than a sales mandate, because the technology has to be proven at scale before it can be required. The carrot stack alone cannot fully close the timeline on the OEM side, because no individual manufacturer will commit to full zero-emission sales without certainty that the rest of the market will follow; the Standard provides that certainty and gives every fleet operator and supplier a fixed destination to plan around. The RFC will make compliance both achievable and appealing by ensuring manufacturers have stable orders and fleet operators have access to affordable vehicles and charging.

Depot charging and the grid

Depot-based charging first. The first wave of charging infrastructure will be at fleet depots, postal facilities, transit garages, and distribution centers. Anywhere trucks park for their off-hours. These sites will charge trucks overnight on cheap off-peak electricity, using Level 2 and 180–350 kW chargers that are inexpensive compared to corridor-class equipment. The RFC will finance depot charging infrastructure for fleet operators and coordinate the grid upgrades to support it. This is where the bulk of the action will happen for the first five to seven years.

The RFC as grid coordinator. When a fleet operator commits to electrifying a depot, the RFC will work with the local utility to deliver the power on the fleet's schedule. The RFC will finance front-of-the-meter upgrades (substations, transformers, distribution lines), and the utilities that move on agreed timelines will be first in line for that federal capital.

Stable electricity pricing. A fleet operator who spends millions on charging infrastructure needs to know what electricity will cost for the next decade, not just the next year. Today, utilities can change their pricing plans on short notice (shifting when cheap rates apply, adding penalties for high usage) and suddenly the math that justified the investment no longer works. The RFC will offer fleet operators long-term, fixed-price power purchase agreements that lock in predictable electricity costs for the life of their charging infrastructure investment, so operators can invest in electrification with confidence that the economics will hold.

Smart charging. Most depot charging will happen during the off-peak overnight hours, and smart-charging software will push the optimization further. Trucks parked from 6 p.m. to 4 a.m. can pulse-charge on the cheapest grid prices, the lowest-emissions windows, and the moments when local renewables are producing most. Every federally financed depot charger will include managed-charging controls as part of the standard RFC package, and utilities that offer time-of-use rate schedules tied to grid conditions will be the RFC's first partners for the federally backed transmission build-outs that follow electrified fleet depots. The RFC will also provide an open-source charging-management platform free to every fleet operator partnering on the transition, so depots run on software the fleet owns rather than a proprietary subscription that can lock them into a single vendor for life.

Utility planning integration. Utilities that fold fleet electrification loads into their Decarbonization Pathway Study (DPS), the planning framework established in the Mission for Clean Power, become the RFC's primary partners for the grid build-out. The DPS gives the RFC the data it needs to sequence upgrades around real fleet timelines, and it gives the utility the regulatory cover to invest in transmission and distribution before the load arrives, rather than after. Federal capital follows the planning.

Bidirectional charging. A fleet of electric trucks parked at a depot is also megawatt-hours of battery capacity sitting on the grid. Bidirectional charging, where vehicles send stored energy back to the grid during peak demand, will turn commercial fleets into a distributed energy resource worth billions. The technology is still early. Utilities do not yet have standardized processes for it, and battery wear from extra charge cycles needs further study. The RFC will fund the pilot programs that prove out bidirectional charging with commercial fleets and develop the utility interconnection standards to make it work at scale.

Encouraging industry collaboration and efficiency

Trucks on American roads are often traveling only partially full. Around 20 percent of U.S. for-hire truck miles are driven with empty trailers (closer to a third on long-haul Class 8 operations), and the rest are regularly only half loaded. The trucks themselves are also inefficient to start with, idling for hours, dragging through the air with poor aerodynamics, and running on tires that waste fuel with every rotation. Filling those trucks, and making the ones already on the road run more efficiently, saves fleets money and cuts emissions at the same time. The Mission will treat freight efficiency as a parallel near-term win that runs alongside electrification.

RFC-funded freight collaboration platforms. The biggest efficiency gains come when shippers share trucks. Procter and Gamble showed how this works in Europe, pooling loads with other manufacturers — including Tupperware and a broader consumer-goods collaboration — to cut empty miles. American shippers face a coordination problem, since no single company has the data or the incentive to build the matching platform. The RFC will fund the buildout of open freight platforms, run as public utilities rather than for-profit middlemen, that let shippers post loads, find backhauls, and share capacity. Companies that join get the RFC's best deals on trucks, depot charging, retrofit grants, federal procurement, and corridor charging. The operators that share trucks and data are the ones that grow.

Measure the fleet again. The federal Vehicle Inventory and Use Survey, which once tracked truck capacity utilization across the American economy, went dark after 2002 and was only reinstated by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics with 2021 reference-year data released in 2023. The country flew blind on freight efficiency for nearly two decades. Congress will fully fund a modern, comprehensive truck utilization survey, with the data published openly so fleets, shippers, regulators, and researchers can finally see where the empty miles and half-loads are. The survey becomes the baseline for every other efficiency mechanism in this section.

Upgrades for existing diesel vehicles. Mature, off-the-shelf upgrades like aerodynamic add-ons, better tires, and idle-reduction systems can make diesel trucks meaningfully more efficient, with payback periods often under two years. The RFC will help owners and fleet operators pay for them, bundled with the depot electrification financing, so the diesel trucks still on the road during the transition burn as little fuel as possible on the way out.

Measuring the public-health dividend. A core promise of this Mission is cleaner air quality for every American. The Department of Health and Human Services will stand up a dedicated unit to measure and publish the public-health gains as the fleet turns over, with neighborhood-level air-quality and respiratory-health metrics in the freight-corridor and depot communities that have lived with diesel exhaust for generations. The data will be open, real-time, and tied to specific deployment milestones so the country can see what the Mission is delivering and where it still has work to do.

What this delivers: Every short-haul and medium-duty segment of the American truck fleet — including the depot-based Class 8 vocational trucks that return to a yard nightly — on a path to zero emissions. A depot charging network at fleet yards, postal facilities, transit garages, and distribution centers serving the bulk of the new fleet. Stable rate structures and time-of-use pricing fleet operators can plan around. A National Clean Trucking Standard that fixes the destination. A buyback and retrofit program that retires the oldest dirty diesels. And a parallel efficiency program that cuts the size of the fleet that has to be electrified in the first place.

Solution 2: The Long-Haul Trucking Moonshot

Solution 2 is the long-haul moonshot. This is an Apollo-scale federal commitment to grow a new American industry, with capital and procurement weight that goes well beyond a standard public-private partnership. It covers the R&D that closes the technology gap, the corridor truck-stop network where the new fleet will refuel, and the federal incentives that will pull the long-haul fleet across the line. By year 10 (2039), zero-emission long-haul will be commercially proven and the corridor network will be in place to support it.

Closing the technology gap

Long-haul R&D and demonstration program. The RFC will fund an aggressive R&D and demonstration program from day one. The program will back next-generation battery chemistry research, megawatt-class charging beyond the current MCS standard, swap-compatible pack designs, and the real-world fleet demonstrations that connect lab research to the corridor network the rest of this solution builds. The federal investment will close the technology gap that no individual OEM or fleet can cross alone.

The corridor truck-stop network

Today there are roughly 2,000 full-service truck stops along the U.S. Interstate system and around 1,500 state-operated Interstate rest areas. Most run on diesel pumps, vending machines, and parking lots that were last upgraded in the 1990s. Truckers regularly drive past full lots, sleep in parking garages, and skip meals because there is nowhere safe to stop. The new freight network will fix all of that on the same buildout that delivers the charging infrastructure.

Two refueling situations, two charging tiers. The corridor network has to handle two charging scenarios. When the truck pulls in for the driver's federally mandated 10-hour off-duty rest period, a high-power DC charger at around 350 kilowatts will have plenty of time to fully refill it, and that will become the universal tier at every corridor site. The harder problem is the federally mandated 30-minute break after 8 cumulative hours of driving in an 11-hour shift. A truck running back-to-back long-haul routes or on a team-driver schedule cannot recharge in that window on 350 kilowatts, so the mid-shift refuel needs a faster architecture. Megawatt charging is what the American truck industry has aligned around. The major U.S. truck OEMs are building toward the CharIN Megawatt Charging System (MCS) standard, formally finalized as IEC TS 63379 in early 2026 after years of pre-standardization development. The Mission will scale MCS-rate charging at the busiest long-haul corridor stops where freight density demands it.

Powering the corridor without breaking the grid. A single megawatt charger draws a spike few rural grid segments can handle today, and the corridor network will have thousands of these sites. The Mission solves the load three ways. Every corridor site pairs its chargers with on-site battery storage that fills slowly off the grid and discharges fast into the trucks, flattening the megawatt spikes into a steady draw the local feeder can carry. The buildout is sequenced through the same Decarbonization Pathway Study planning that orders the depot upgrades, so sites land where grid capacity already exists or where transmission is already coming. And the new high-voltage transmission built along freight-rail rights-of-way (Solution 4) feeds the corridor network directly, turning the rail spine into the power spine. Battery-swap sites, which charge their depleted packs slowly on the back end, double as grid buffers on the routes where they run.

Battery swap as the parallel hedge. Alongside the megawatt buildout, the Mission will run battery-swap pilots and corridor demonstrations at the busiest long-haul sites. The architecture matches diesel refueling speed, with 3-to-5-minute pack changeouts compared to roughly 30 minutes for a comparable megawatt charge. It also puts a much smaller, steadier load on the grid. Where a megawatt charger draws a megawatt-scale spike every time a truck plugs in, a swap station charges its depleted packs slowly over many hours on the back end, drawing a lower, steadier load that can be timed to off-peak windows and the cheapest electricity hours. China continues to expand its swap network for heavy-duty trucks, and the U.S. cannot afford to overlook the architecture if it proves out at commercial scale. The U.S. pilots will start on the corridors most likely to demonstrate value, the routes with heavy round-trip and team-driver use, where every minute of driver time off the road costs money and the stations stay loaded enough to earn back their capital. The data over the first five years of corridor operation will tell the country which architecture to scale for each route type.

The stranded-asset bet, and the path to scale. The stranded-asset risk on swap-specific equipment, estimated at roughly 30 to 40 percent of the site cost, is real but bounded, since the building, land, grid upgrade, parking, and driver facilities are all reusable across architectures, and the federal government, not the private operator, accepts that bet. The RFC's purpose is to take the bet the private market cannot. If the pilots prove out at scale, the federal-fleet procurement leverage that anchored MCS adoption in Solution 3 will be redirected to drive OEM convergence on a single swap-compatible battery form factor. The Mission can then scale the architecture nationally on a five-to-seven-year timeline, with the standard developed jointly by RFC, DOE, DOT, and the OEMs themselves, modeled on the COTS-style contracting that worked for SpaceX in the space industry.

Upgrading the existing truck-stop network, private and federal. The RFC will partner with the independent operators that run the existing private truck-stop network to electrify their corridor sites, with each retrofit covering grid upgrades, high-power DC charging, and expanded driver facilities. The busiest long-haul corridor sites will be wired for full megawatt-class charging arrays, and a subset of those sites will also include battery-swap bays so the Mission can run the swap experiment at commercial scale alongside the megawatt buildout. Private operators retain ownership, but the federal financing is conditional on uptime requirements, standardization, and open-access pricing so no fleet gets locked out. On the federal side, Congress will lift the commercial-development restriction on Interstate rest areas (codified at 23 U.S.C. § 111) so the RFC can finance the conversion of the existing 1,500 state-operated Interstate rest areas into full-service truck-stop sites, with charging, swap, driver amenities, and proper food and retail rather than vending machines. Together with the 200 new federal truck stops built where commercial sites cannot reach, the retrofit of every full-service private truck stop and the conversion of every Interstate rest area will form a continuous charging spine along every Interstate freight corridor.

New federal truck stops at the gaps. Where the existing truck-stop network cannot serve the new fleet, including long Interstate stretches, freight corridors with no commercial development, or sites that cannot handle the new grid load, the RFC will build new federally owned truck stops. They will be full-service freight terminals, not gas stations with bigger plugs, with megawatt charging arrays, battery-swap bays, secure parking for hundreds of trucks, and the full driver-amenities buildout that comes with every site in the corridor network. Roughly 200 of these new federal truck stops on the densest freight corridors will fill the gaps the retrofit program cannot reach.

A public charging operator at the core, not the margins. The 200 new federal truck stops and the converted Interstate rest areas need an operator, and that operator will be public. The RFC will stand up a government-owned charging company, modeled on the public-corporation structures used elsewhere in the Mission, to build and run the federal network directly. Growing the private truck-stop industry remains central to the plan — but the public operator is a permanent backbone of the corridor network, not a fallback. Where private operators won't serve a corridor, or won't meet the uptime and open-access standards the network requires, the public company moves in and runs the site itself.

The driver experience. Truck drivers today are killed and injured at rates that would close any other industry, partly because they cannot find safe places to park and rest. The RFC will use its truck-stop financing as a carrot for operators that invest in driver amenities. The most generous loan terms, the largest grant matches, and the priority placement in the corridor network will go to sites that offer secure parking, hot showers, real cafeterias, and sleeping areas. Jason's Law funding, named for Jason Rivenburg, a trucker robbed and murdered in 2009 while parked at an abandoned site he was using because no safe authorized parking was nearby, will be expanded into a multi-billion-dollar driver-facilities buildout running alongside the charging deployment. The federal government will treat the driver as the customer of this network, not the trucking company.

Charger uptime and standardization. All federal and RFC funding for truck-stop electrification will require uptime guarantees, professional maintenance contracts, and enforceable performance standards. First-time charge success rates at public EV fast chargers run between roughly 70 and 85 percent across recent national analyses, meaning one to three in ten charging attempts fail. That is not a failure rate the new freight network can tolerate. Every federally funded charger will have a defined maintenance responsibility, real-time public uptime reporting, and financial penalties for operators that miss the standard. Interoperability comes with every dollar of federal funding. Every federally backed charger will serve every truck, and the RFC, DOE, and DOT will work with industry to make universal-connector convergence the obvious default, the way the passenger EV market converged on the Tesla connector.

Driving long-haul adoption

The corridor network needs trucks running on it. The Mission's loans, owner-operator protections, fleet operator incentives, and federal procurement leverage are designed to give every long-haul operator a reason to make the switch.

Owner-operators as partners. Independent owner-operators — several hundred thousand of them, on the order of 350,000 to 400,000 single-truck operators — run on margins so thin that a single missed week shutters a business. The Mission will treat them as the spine of the long-haul transition, and the deal will be designed to keep their businesses whole through the switch. RFC loans on electric tractors for independent drivers will carry rates and terms no private lender can match, with binding rate caps, no balloon payments, and pauses on payments whenever the truck is in the shop for service or warranty work, since an owner-operator with a parked truck cannot earn. The Department of Transportation will stand up a dedicated office for owner-operator financial protection, publishing fair-lending standards, plain-English contract templates drivers can use to compare any private offer against the RFC loan, and running a national hotline drivers can call when a private lender's terms do not match what was disclosed. The combination of better federal loans and better information leaves the predatory schemes with fewer customers and a shrinking market. Every dollar of long-haul electrification rides on the willingness of these drivers to take the bet.

Long-haul fleet operator incentives. For long-haul fleets willing to commit to the new corridor network, the RFC will offer a richer carrot stack than the one available to medium-duty operators. Low-interest loans on long-haul BEV tractors, cash bonuses tied to corridor-route conversion milestones, a federal warranty backstop on early-production trucks, and priority access to the new corridor charging and swap stations. Fleets willing to participate in the swap pilots get additional incentives, including lower upfront truck costs through battery-as-a-service, refueling time at diesel parity, and a federal warranty backstop on the early-production swap packs.

What this delivers: A national long-haul corridor network with megawatt charging at the busiest sites and battery-swap pilots running alongside as a hedge. A federally financed driver-facilities buildout running in lockstep with the charging deployment. The long-haul moonshot R&D program that closes the technology gap on next-generation batteries and charging. A federal procurement lever ready to scale swap nationally if the pilots prove it out. And American workers positioned to lead one of the most valuable industrial sectors of the coming century.

Solution 3: Building the U.S. Electric Truck Manufacturing Industry

The American truck industry has spent the last two decades losing ground, with foreign competitors out-investing American firms in EV truck capacity year after year. Solution 3 rebuilds the manufacturing base on three tracks at once. The federal government provides the demand signal that no individual fleet operator can deliver; the RFC finances the plant retooling and new production lines that turn that demand into trucks, taking an equity stake for the public by default; and where the private OEMs won't move at Mission speed, the RFC builds trucks directly through public manufacturing corporations that compete alongside them. It covers the federal fleet transition, the procurement model that makes the federal government a customer the industry can build factories around, the plant-level capital that expands domestic production capacity in lockstep with the orders, the public manufacturing track that races the incumbents and guarantees the trucks get built, the parallel OEM tracks for megawatt charging and battery swap, and the North American supply-chain coordination that wins against Chinese competition.

The federal fleet leads by example. The federal government operates one of the largest medium- and heavy-duty fleets in the country, including postal trucks, military vehicles, and agency fleets. Congress will fund the transition of the entire federal medium- and heavy-duty fleet to zero emissions within 10 years. The federal order will anchor domestic manufacturers at fleet scale and prove the technology works in real-world government operations.

Direct-pay procurement on hard timelines. Those orders will follow a direct-pay procurement model — the government paying the vendor directly, on a fixed schedule, with binding delivery deadlines. This replaces the grant-and-waiver maze that strangled the USPS NGDV electrification and the EPA Clean School Bus Round 4 described in The Problem. Vendors cannot build factories on the promise of an annual appropriation that may evaporate. Every RFC procurement and federal fleet contract will be backed by multi-year committed funding (locked in for the full delivery window) so that manufacturers can hire, tool up, and deliver. Direct-pay-with-deadlines becomes the default for clean trucking procurement across the federal government.

Bringing the OEMs along on both tracks. Daimler, Volvo, Navistar, and Tesla are already building MCS-rate Class 8 BEV products, but they are doing it under a brutal heavy-truck price war and uncertain demand. The Mission will give them the demand signal they need to scale. Federal procurement across the postal, defense, and GSA fleets will jointly require MCS-compatible medium- and heavy-duty trucks, on the multi-year funding and direct-pay terms described above. Domestic OEMs that meet the standard get the federal orders, and the RFC will finance the plant retooling and assembly-line expansion that lets each OEM scale production. On the swap track, federal R&D funding will run a parallel program where the major OEMs and their battery suppliers jointly develop a swap-compatible pack interface, with the Mission underwriting the engineering effort no individual OEM wants to bear alone. If the swap pilots described in Solution 2 prove out, American OEMs will have the pack designs ready when federal procurement pivots to swap orders, and the battery-as-a-service revenue model that has reshaped commercial-vehicle economics in China will become available as a second-wave product line.

Public capital, public upside. When the RFC puts public money into an OEM's retooling or a fleet's conversion, its default is to take an equity stake, so the American people share in the value they are paying to create — the stake the government failed to take when it lent Tesla $465 million to help build the cars that made it the most valuable automaker in the world. But the RFC is not dogmatic about structure. Its mandate is to get trucks built fast, and it will use whatever instrument the deal needs — direct equity, low-cost loans, loan guarantees, or a blend of all three. Where a manufacturer or fleet is unwilling to give up a stake, the RFC will lend on terms that are still a good deal for the public rather than let the deal die. Equity is the default; speed is the mandate.

Rescue the EV truckmakers worth saving. The demand collapse described in The Problem pushed several domestic zero-emission truck and component makers toward bankruptcy — companies with working products, trained crews, and tooling the country needs. The RFC will not bail them out to preserve the status quo; it will restructure the viable ones to serve the Mission, recapitalizing them in exchange for an equity stake, folding them into the federal order book, and putting their idle lines back to work building the federal fleet. The capacity the last policy failure stranded becomes the first capacity the Mission turns back on.

Public production that competes with the private OEMs. Financing incumbents is not enough when the country is losing the heavy-truck race and the ten-year timeline is non-negotiable. The Mission will charter public electric-truck manufacturing — one or more government-owned corporations, seeded with the restructured EV-truckmakers above and run like fast-moving public B-corps — to build trucks directly, alongside and in competition with Daimler, Volvo, Navistar, and Tesla. This is the original RFC's aluminum and aircraft playbook. When Alcoa's monopoly throttled wartime supply, the RFC financed Reynolds and Kaiser and built plants directly, and aluminum output exploded. Competing parallel public corporations race the incumbents and one another on transparent metrics — cost, speed, volume, quality — share what works, and guarantee that if any private OEM drags its feet, the trucks still get built at Mission speed. The corporations' profits flow back to the American people, and their very existence is a public yardstick that keeps the whole industry honest on price and pace. As the industry matures, a public plant can stay public, be spun into its own standalone corporation, or be sold — whatever keeps the trucks coming and avoids building a permanent bureaucracy.

North American supply chains. The federal manufacturing push has to acknowledge where the trucks actually come from. A large share of the Class 8 trucks sold in the United States are assembled in Mexico, with components crossing the border multiple times during production. American truck manufacturing is already a North American operation. The Mission will treat it that way. The State Department, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, and the Department of Commerce will coordinate with Canada and Mexico on a shared zero-emission truck manufacturing strategy, with RFC financing available for U.S.-owned plants and joint ventures across all three countries, common workforce and emissions standards that all three industries can plan around, and tariff treatment that supports the cleanest North American supply chain rather than penalizing it. A continental industry that builds and exports zero-emission trucks together is the version that wins against Chinese competition.

What this delivers: A domestic electric truck manufacturing industry with stable order books and falling costs. Domestic OEMs anchored on megawatt charging today, with a path to swap convergence if the long-haul corridor pilots prove it out. Plant retooling financed at scale, with the public taking an equity stake in the upside by default. Public manufacturing corporations building and competing alongside the private OEMs, so the trucks get built at Mission speed no matter what any single company does. The federal fleet leading by example, a procurement framework that makes the federal government the kind of customer the industry can build factories around, and a continental supply chain that builds and exports zero-emission trucks alongside Canada and Mexico.

Solution 4: Electrifying Freight Rail

Freight rail accounts for a small share of U.S. transportation CO₂ emissions, around two percent, but it belongs in the Mission for two reasons. First, intermodal freight ties the trucking transition directly to the rail system. Many truck trailers ride trains for the long-haul portion of their journey, so a clean trucking fleet on a diesel rail backbone is still partly dirty. Second, American freight rail is currently dominated by coal and other extracted fossil resources. As the market for coal collapses during the Mission, the rail capacity now dedicated to moving it will open up for clean freight. Solution 4 makes sure the trains running on those reopened corridors, and the intermodal trains carrying the clean trucking fleet, are themselves zero-emission. The rail rights-of-way themselves also become corridors for the high-voltage transmission lines that benefit the entire grid.

Rail financing rewards service quality. Freight rail's path back has to start with admitting where the industry is. Over the last two decades, Class I freight railroads have cut workforces and lengthened trains under precision scheduled railroading, with regulators and shippers documenting service problems, congestion, and safety concerns as the model spread. A decarbonization push that ignores that underlying decay will fail on its own terms, because nobody invests in cleaner locomotives running through a network in slow-motion collapse. The RFC's rail financing will flow to the railroads that put their own capital into workforce, equipment, and on-time performance, with the most generous electrification deals reserved for the Class I railroads that earn them through documented service-quality investment. The clean-locomotive deployment will move in lockstep with a freight rail system that actually works.

Reclaiming rail capacity from coal. The Mission for America phases coal out of the U.S. power grid, and as demand collapses, the rail capacity that has been dedicated to moving it for a century opens up for clean freight. The RFC will work with the Class I railroads to redirect that capacity toward the intermodal freight that the trucking transition will route onto rail, with new sidings, terminals, and corridor capacity targeted at the routes where coal traffic falls fastest.

Battery-electric locomotives. The near-term path adds battery-electric units to existing train consists (the linked group of locomotives that pulls a train), rather than replacing every locomotive at once. A mixed consist with one or two battery-electric locomotives alongside diesel units will cut fuel consumption and emissions immediately, with no new track or catenary infrastructure required. The RFC will work with both Class I and short-line freight railroads to deploy battery-electric locomotives at scale, starting with the intermodal corridors that carry truck trailers between West Coast ports and inland freight hubs and the short-line and yard operations near population centers.

Overhead catenary where it makes sense. Overhead catenary electrification puts wires above the tracks that power trains directly, the same technology that passenger rail uses worldwide. It provides unlimited range and eliminates the need for onboard fuel entirely. It is also expensive to build. The Federal Railroad Administration will study which freight corridors, if any, justify the investment based on traffic volume, population exposure, and cost-effectiveness. Where the case is strong, the RFC will finance construction. Where battery-electric locomotives can do the job alone, they will.

Transmission lines along rail rights-of-way. Existing freight rail corridors are among the most valuable linear rights-of-way in the country. The RFC will coordinate with utilities to build high-voltage transmission lines along these corridors, bypassing the permitting bottlenecks that delay new transmission everywhere else. This serves both rail electrification and the broader grid, with new transmission capacity that benefits clean power delivery, EV charging, and industrial electrification at the same time. Transit and transmission build together.

An Office of Rail Electrification. Congress will establish a dedicated office within the Federal Railroad Administration to identify electrification candidates, coordinate with freight railroads on deployment, manage catenary construction where it is justified, and serve as the federal counterparty for the RFC's rail financing. The office will publish a continually updated corridor priority list, set technical standards for battery-electric and catenary deployments, and coordinate with the Department of Energy on the next generation of locomotive battery chemistry. Freight rail electrification gets a permanent institutional home rather than living scattered across agencies.

A refundable Investment Tax Credit for battery-electric locomotives. Congress will create a targeted ITC for the purchase of battery-electric locomotives, making the economics work for freight railroads that are otherwise reluctant to invest in newer, early-deployment technology. The credit is refundable and available through direct pay, so railroads do not need tax liability to claim it.

What this delivers: Cleaner air in the urban and port-adjacent neighborhoods that have lived with diesel locomotive exhaust for generations. A freight rail system whose Class I operators are putting their own capital back into workforce, equipment, and on-time performance. Intermodal corridors electrified first, so the clean trucking fleet does not get undercut by a diesel rail backbone. The coal-era rail capacity redirected to clean freight as coal demand collapses. New transmission capacity along rail corridors that benefits the entire grid. And a permanent federal home for rail electrification at the FRA, with an Investment Tax Credit and RFC financing that make the economics work for every railroad ready to invest.

Presidential Leadership

During the campaign, the Mission candidate will swing through freight corridors and the communities they poison in an electric truck, on the model of Harry Truman's whistle-stop tour, visiting the truck stops, fleet depots, union halls, and the manufacturing towns where the country's heavy-truck OEMs operate today. Stump speeches will promise an end to the diesel exhaust that has poisoned freight-corridor neighborhoods for generations, quieter streets where electric delivery vans and garbage trucks replace the morning diesel rattle, and a generational return of high-wage industrial jobs across every part of the trucking economy. Factory workers will return to expanded domestic OEM plants, EV mechanics will replace diesel mechanics as the fleet turns over, electricians will build out depot and corridor charging, transmission and substation crews will work along every freight corridor, and owner-operators will get the federal support they need to thrive in the new system.

During the transition, the president-elect's team will identify the first wave of federal fleet conversions (postal trucks, military vehicles, agency fleets) and the first manufacturing facilities ready for retooling, and will negotiate bulk procurement contracts with domestic OEMs so the orders can be placed in the first months of the administration. Every contract will use direct-pay-to-vendor terms with binding delivery dates and multi-year committed funding. The team will negotiate memoranda of understanding with governors of the major truck-manufacturing states to align state permitting, workforce training, and infrastructure dollars with the federal push. DOT, DOE, EPA, DOD, USPS, and GSA leadership will coordinate around the federal-fleet procurement coalition, the corridor truck-stop financing framework, the Office of Owner-Operator Financial Protection, and the MCS-versus-swap architecture decision tree before inauguration. The Department of Transportation will pre-stage the grid-coordination framework with state public utility commissions so fleet operators are not told to wait two years for power the day they commit to electrification. Legislative counsel will pre-stage the full Day One legislative package so it is ready to pass at inauguration.

On Day One, the President will sign a coordinated package of executive orders:

1. Federal fleet transition. USPS, DOD, GSA, and every other federal agency operating medium- and heavy-duty vehicles will issue zero-emission procurement requirements within 90 days — depot-based medium-duty fleets specified for overnight depot charging, and long-haul and corridor-dependent trucks specified MCS-compatible so the federal order anchors the megawatt-charging standard.
2. Commercial EV tax credits restored. Restore by executive action where possible, with Treasury publishing guidance on direct-pay implementation within 30 days.
3. RFC begins financing. Depot charging infrastructure and OEM plant retooling — taking equity for the public by default — with the first capital deployed within the administration's first 100 days, and the first public manufacturing corporation chartered to build trucks directly alongside the private OEMs.
4. Office of Owner-Operator Financial Protection stood up at DOT. Publish fair-lending standards and plain-English lease-purchase contract templates within 90 days.
5. Office of Rail Electrification chartered at the FRA. Publish the first corridor priority list within 180 days.
6. HHS public-health metrics unit on diesel exposure. Neighborhood-level air-quality reporting goes live within 12 months in freight-corridor and depot communities.

Alongside the executive package, Congress will pass the Day One legislation drafted during the transition. The bills will include the National Clean Trucking Standard, the restored and expanded commercial EV tax credit, the federal medium- and heavy-duty fleet transition appropriation, the charter and capitalization of the public truck-manufacturing corporations, the long-haul moonshot R&D funding line, and the refundable Investment Tax Credit for battery-electric locomotives.

What the Ten-Year Mission Delivers

The First Wave by Year 1 (2030)

• Electric delivery vans and school buses arrive in the first federal-fleet orders, and postal workers driving the new Next Generation Delivery Vehicles report their routes run cheaper, quieter, and easier than the diesel rigs they replace
• A fleet operator electrifying a depot finds the RFC and the local utility working on a single construction schedule, not a two-year waiting list
• An owner-operator worried about a predatory lease-purchase pitch can call a federal hotline and have the contract translated into plain English, with the RFC loan available as a transparent alternative
• The first construction crews break ground on corridor truck-stop electrifications at Pilot, TA, and Love's locations along the priority Interstate corridors
• Factory towns that lost jobs to foreign EV truck makers see their first retooling crews on site as domestic OEMs accept federal procurement contracts
• Freight-corridor neighborhoods have their first HHS air-quality monitors going up, with baseline data published openly so the kids' lungs can be tracked as the fleet turns over
• The first commercial EV tax credits are back in force, and a fleet operator buying a new electric box truck no longer pays a premium that wipes out the savings

The Fleet Turns Over by Year 5 (2034)

• A new electric delivery van or box truck costs about what a diesel one does, with lower fuel and maintenance bills the day it leaves the lot
• Half of every Class 4-7 truck sold in the country is zero-emission, and the first all-electric garbage trucks and city buses are running daily routes in major metros
• Truckers running the Texas Triangle, the I-5 corridor, and the I-95 spine find working chargers at most major stops, with megawatt-class arrays at the busiest sites
• Regional-haul day-cab drivers finish a 300-mile run, plug in at the depot overnight, and head out again the next morning on cheap off-peak electricity, sleeping in their own beds every night
• Kids in port-adjacent and corridor neighborhoods breathe measurably cleaner air, with the HHS monitors showing respiratory-hospitalization rates starting to decline
• Factory towns at the major heavy-truck OEMs are hiring at expanded plants, with EV mechanics replacing diesel mechanics across the maintenance shops that serve the fleet
• The first public electric-truck plant ships its opening run, racing the private OEMs on cost and speed and giving the country a public yardstick for what a clean truck should cost to build
• The first new federal truck stops open on Interstate stretches that never had real driver facilities, with hot showers, sleeping rooms, real cafeterias, and secure parking
• Battery-electric locomotives pull mixed consists on short-line and yard operations through every major rail-corridor population center

The Mission Delivered by Year 10 (2039)

• Every new medium-duty and depot-based heavy truck sold in the country is zero-emission, and the diesel garbage truck, city bus, and delivery van are a memory
• A long-haul driver running coast-to-coast refuels at megawatt chargers or battery-swap stations every 300 miles, eats real food, and sleeps in a safe parking spot at every major Interstate stop
• Every full-service Interstate truck stop is electrified, every federal rest area is converted into a full-service stop, and 200 new federal truck stops fill the gaps, forming a continuous charging spine along every freight corridor
• Freight-corridor neighborhoods that lived with diesel exhaust for generations breathe air at urban background levels, with childhood asthma rates dropping to match the rest of the country
• Owner-operators who took RFC loans own their trucks free and clear after a decade of fair payments, and the predatory lease-purchase industry that once preyed on independent drivers is reduced to a footnote
• Factory towns that build heavy electric trucks — at private OEM plants and the public manufacturing corporations that race them — are exporting across the world, with the domestic industry self-sustaining and competitive without extraordinary federal support, and the public's equity stakes returning profits to the Treasury
• Battery-electric locomotives handle freight routes through major population centers, with overhead catenary deployed on the corridors where the FRA case proved out, and the coal-era rail capacity redirected to clean intermodal freight
• A continental supply chain across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico builds and exports zero-emission trucks together, leading the global heavy-truck market