A new congressional report claims that the Biden-Harris Administration’s attempts to mandate electric school buses in the United States is only benefiting the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as the the materials required for such vehicles come from China.

According to Fox News, the 51-page report by the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations takes a closer look at the White House’s Clean School Bus Program (CSBP), first enacted in 2021. The program appropriated $5 billion from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to force schools across the country to replace conventional, gas-powered buses with “clean” electric school buses (ESBs).

“Costly subsidies for ESBs are a poor use of federal taxpayer money at a time when school budgets are increasingly strained,” the report states. “Currently, it is only the existence of massive taxpayer-funded subsidies that enables ESBs to compete with diesel buses and low emission buses in the market.”

The report points out that ESBs cost significantly more money than traditional buses; while the average regular bus costs about $100,000, an ESB costs at least $381,190.

Beyond the dramatically increased costs and the subsequent financial burden on many school districts, ESBs also involve the use of materials that are predominantly located in China.

“ESB batteries rely on opaque supply chains rife with national security risks and that pose grave human rights concerns, and are to the benefit of adversarial regimes, such as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which largely has a monopoly on certain parts of the supply chain for these products,” the report notes. “Promoting EVs like ESBs means enriching the People’s Republic of China and the CCP because, as Morgan Stanley estimates, 90% of the EV battery supply chain relies on China.”

Furthermore, Chinese companies have been mining lithium in Afghanistan, which has been ruled by the Taliban ever since the disastrous withdrawal of American forces in 2021. This practice has thus been “enriching both China and the Taliban.”

The committee’s investigation also determined that the EPA did not even follow up on the requirements that were mandated from many school districts, revealing that the agency “did not require attestations of truth from applicants, lacked procedures to verify applicant claims, and relied on insufficient self-certification to determine that applicants met EPA requirements.”

“The program, led by the radical Biden-Harris EPA, props up a market that relies heavily upon a supply chain dominated by the Chinese Communist Party,” the committee concluded. “Further, the program was constructed without the necessary safeguards to prevent fraud and incentivizes schools to use buses they otherwise would not choose.”

The rise of electric vehicle (EV) mandates has proven to be one of the current White House’s most radical, yet unpopular, proposals over the last three and a half years. Despite frequent efforts to force auto manufacturers and car dealers to increase the number of EVs produced and sold, consumer demand for such vehicles has remained low as the average American still prefers gas-powered cars. Democrat-run states such as California have been the most aggressive in pursuing mandates to reduce the number of gas-powered cars within the next decade or less.