POTUS Pres. Trump Announces New Fuel Economy Standards
Donald Trump reverses Biden’s CAFE standards, calling them "ridiculously burdensome" and blaming a $5T EV mandate for inflating car prices by 25% while ignoring consumer demand. His administration scraps California’s emissions waiver, cancels EPA tailpipe rules, and fast-tracks smaller, affordable cars—like Ford’s $5B U.S. plant investments, Stellantis’ $13B expansion (5,000 jobs), and GM’s $4B shift from Mexico. Supporters praise deregulation for boosting domestic production (now 51% of sales) and affordability, while critics like Congressman Mike Kelly frame it as a return to market-driven policies. Economic forecaster Kevin Hassett warns Biden’s EV push would’ve required a 25% electricity surge, exposing unrealistic targets. The move signals a shift toward cost-cutting, job growth, and consumer choice over forced green transitions. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
Source
Participants
Main
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donald j trump
admin17:17
Appearances
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kevin hassett
admin00:51
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marsha blackburn
rep/r00:46
r
roger williams
rep/r00:48
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sean duffy
admin02:00
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shelley moore capito
sen/r00:56
Clips
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brad knott
rep/d00:07
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eric schmitt
sen/r00:22
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Speaker
Time
Text
Making Cars More Affordable00:04:07
unidentified
Saying he knows nothing about anything he did say.
According to him uh, he's the most uninformed uh person in the world, and generals and and um people in the military they have been um interviewed several times over the years stating uh, the same things that these people put on a um on recording.
First of all, we are blowing up people way on the other side of the world.
unidentified
You might as well say to uh oh James, did we lose you?
We're going to leave our recorded program here, but you can finish watching it if you go to our website, Cspan.org.
Live now to the White House, where president Trump is announcing new fuel economy standards for American consumers, protect American auto jobs and make buying a car much more affordable for countless American families and also safer.
We're officially terminating Joe Biden's ridiculously burdensome horrible, actually cafe standards that imposed expensive restrictions and all sorts of problems, gave all sorts of problems to automakers and we're not only talking about here, we're talking about outside of our country, because nobody could do it, nobody wanted to do it and it was ridiculous, very expensive.
It put tremendous upward pressure on car prices.
Combined with the insane electric vehicle mandate, Biden's burdensome regulations helped cause the price of cars to soar more than 25 percent and in one case they went up 18 percent in one year.
Today we're taking one more step to kill the Green New scam.
It's part of the greatest scam probably well other than Russia Russia, Russia and a few others.
I could name the greatest scam in American history the Green News scam and it's a quest to end the gasoline powered car.
This is what they wanted to do, even though we have more gasoline than any other country by far.
And people want the gasoline car, they want everything, they want electric, they want any, they want to have lots of alternatives, but they do want the gasoline car.
Right now it's leading the way by a lot uh, the uh.
The car business is a very interesting business, but we want to keep it that way.
I want to thank transportation secretary Sean Duffy, deputy transportation secretary Stephen Bradbury, as well as ceo of FORD, Jim Farley.
Jim, where is Jim?
Let's see.
Hi Jim congratulations, you're doing a great job.
Ceo of Stellantis, Antonio Filosa.
Thank you very much.
Chairman of the National Automobile Dealers Association, Tom Castridoff.
Yes sir, thank you very much, great to have you.
And manager general Motors Orient Plant, John Urbanek.
Great to have you guys here, and you're going to say a few words in a minute about how ridiculous this was, but we're we've just freed you up, so you're gonna have a good day and have a good number of years.
Thanks as well to senators Shelly More Capital Ted Cruise, Kevin Kramer, Marsha Blackburn, Eric Schmidt and Bernie Marino, as well as Representative Sam Graves, Vern Buchanan, Mike Kelly, Roger Williams, Lisa McLean, and Troy Balderson, all great people.
These are great people and I know there's a lot of support long beyond the people that are here.
We had tremendous support on this.
From day one, I've been taking action to make buying a car more affordable.
I signed an executive order to end the unfair, expensive electric vehicle mandate, as you know, where you had to have an electric car within a very short period of time, even though there was no way of charging them and lots of other things.
It would have cost $5 trillion to build the charging plants.
And as you know, in certain parts of the Midwest, they spent to build nine chargers, they spent $8 billion.
So that wasn't working out too well.
That was done before me, by the way.
I wouldn't have let it go forward.
We're canceling the EPA's absurd tailpipe emission standards, one of the most important things that I've never had a group of people come to me more powerfully and really just devastated that they had to do it.
It was killing them than the automobile manufacturers, the tailpipe emission standards.
And I can tell you your people at Ford were coming to me all the time and they were saying like, please, it doesn't do anything and it's killing us.
And it's driving the cost through the roof.
And we revoked Biden's emissions waiver for California so that California communists could not regulate the automobile industry and ruin the entire nation of automobiles.
And they were doing that too.
But we have that now under control also with your governor, who's got much more than he can control.
Now under the new rules being issued today by Secretary Duffy, the Department of Transportation will rescind the Biden fuel economy prices.
And I hate to say that because they were really not economy.
They were really, they were anti-economy.
They were horrible what they were doing to the costs and actually making the car much worse.
But these policies forced automakers to build cars using expensive technologies that drove up costs, drove up prices, and made the car much worse.
The action is expected to save the typical consumer at least $1,000 off the price of a new car, and we think substantially more than that.
Under the Trump administration, $70 billion are now being invested in the American auto industry.
Ford has announced it will invest $5 billion across its Kentucky and Michigan plants.
Stellantis announced that it will invest $13 billion to expand its U.S.-based manufacturing by more than 50% and open new manufacturing facilities across the country.
And I think a big part of that is also the tariffs.
Because of tariffs, they're coming in.
Not only the automobile industry, AI, we're leading China in AI, we're leading everybody in AI, we're leading everybody in everything.
We have the hottest country right now.
I will tell you, a lot of political people behind me, great political people, very successful political people.
We have the hottest country anywhere in the world.
One year ago we had a dead country, and now we have the hottest country anywhere in the world.
And it started from November 5th, but it also started when we did the tariffs, and we've had tremendous support on the tariffs.
It's bringing in trillions of dollars of wealth.
It's bringing in national security.
And I've stopped eight wars, and of the eight wars, five of them have been because of tariffs and trade.
So they're very important.
General Motors plans to invest $4 billion as it brings its manufacturing back to the United States from Mexico.
After falling by 5% under Biden, U.S. auto production has surged by 10% so far this year.
You know, I won the auto workers' vote, but now even the head of the autoworkers said Trump is the greatest president we've ever seen.
And he happens to be right about that.
But we're protecting our autoworkers and we're making it easier for every family to afford high-quality cars.
In other words, we're bringing automobiles back and the manufacturing of automobiles back into this country.
We lost 52% over the years, 52% of our automobile manufacturer.
You see it, closed factories all over the place.
Now they're all opening up.
They're being, in most cases, being knocked down and new ones are being built in that place.
And a big beneficiary is the state of Michigan, but South Carolina, even states that didn't really do too much with the automobiles, they're opening up plants.
It's been amazing.
So between automobile plants, AI plants, and plants of every other nation, really every other type, including chips, we're going to have a big percentage of the chip market very soon, not because of the CHIPS Act, which was horrible and ridiculous, where we just gave these companies billions and billions of dollars.
They just kept the money, but because of what we did with tariffs.
They have to build here, otherwise they're going to have to pay tariffs.
They won't be able to do business in the United States.
And we are bringing, we're going to have a big percentage of the chip industry.
As of about a year ago, two years ago, we had none.
And now we're going to have a very big percentage when it all finishes out.
So I'd like to ask Secretary Duffy to speak, and then Mr. Farley, and then Felosa, and Urbanek, and Castrida.
And also, we're going to ask some of our political leaders to speak.
Because let me tell you, they went out of their way.
This was not easy.
People were brainwashed.
This is a green new scam.
And people were paying too much for a car that didn't work as well.
And now they're going to have a great car that's going to be environmentally friendly, but it's going to cost you a lot less and it's going to work great.
All of the nonsense is being taken out of the cars.
So yesterday at the cabinet meeting, the president was talking about affordability and the way that Democrats talk about affordability is a lie.
Today is a perfect example of that.
So these cafe standards used what was contrary to the law.
The Congress set a rule that says you have to look at combustion engines.
Biden and Buttigieg actually did an analysis using Edge Edge used EVs and hybrids to come up with a 62 mile an hour per gallon standard, which I think the car companies will tell you is completely unattainable.
So they spent a lot of money on technology trying to meet the unattainable standard, driving up the cost of a car, number one.
And then number two, if they couldn't meet the unattainable standard, they had to trade for carbon, costing billions of dollars and again driving up the price of the car.
So Mr. President, what Democrats were doing, we're not making cars more affordable.
They're making them less affordable.
The consequence of that is going to be that more Americans can afford to buy a new car, which means they're going to be safer on the roads because of all the great new technology we have that save lives.
So we'll have less death on American roads.
These rules are going to allow the automakers to make vehicles that Americans want to purchase, not vehicles that Joe Biden and Buttigedge wants them to build, which is important.
But also, this is important for American jobs.
The more cars we sell, the more jobs we have in this country.
And so this is jobs, this is freedom, and this is common sense, Mr. President.
So thank you for your leadership.
And I appreciate what the Senate did with the big beautiful bill and what we've done here today.
One of the other things we're doing, it's separate from this meeting, but I think everybody here would agree with it.
If you go to Japan, where I just left, and if you go to South Korea and Malaysia and other countries, they have a very small car, sort of like the Beetle used to be with the Volkswagen.
They're very small, they're really cute.
And I said, how would that do in this country?
And everyone seems to think good, but you're not allowed to build them.
And I've authorized the Secretary to immediately approve the production of those cars so you'll be able to buy.
They really are.
They actually, some of them are really beautiful, actually.
If you take a look, Honda, some of the Japanese companies do a beautiful job, but we're not allowed to make them in this country.
And I think you're going to do very well with those cars.
Well, no, just that he never stops working, so even when it's on Asian time, he's calling me at midnight in the States.
But he gave me the directive to clear the regulations on this, which we have.
And so if Toyota or any other company wants to make smaller, more affordable cars, fuel efficient, we have cleared the deck so they can make them in America and sell them in America.
And it really gives people a chance to have a car, have a brand new car as opposed to a car that maybe isn't so great.
And so you car companies start thinking about that.
I think it's going to be a tremendous market.
Please, would you like to say something?
unidentified
Thank you, Mr. President.
It's a great day for us at Stellantis today because it's the day where we see CAFE regulation reconciled with real customers' demand.
That's why at Stellantis we decided to invest through Jeep, Gram, Dodge, and Chrysler, $13 billion in the next four years, increasing production by 50%, delivering to the market five new vehicles, and creating 5,000 additional jobs.
That's because we believe in what you, Secretary Staffe, and all your team is doing in this country.
We believe in growth.
We are ready to invest even more.
So thank you very much.
Thank you very much also for this great news of the key cars, which we are very interested in.
Thank you.
And we are very looking forward to working with Secretary Daffey, your team in the future for the next deck.
We support your leadership for this issue that is so important to the auto industry.
I'm here representing the hardworking men and women of Oregon Assembly in Michigan.
The facility, our manufacturing facility there is currently going through a retool so that we can build additional U.S. manufactured pickup trucks and full-size sport utilities for our customers, and we're so excited about that.
And this is largely coming in because of the tariff situation.
We're taking in trillions of dollars, actually, trillions, and we have so many other advantages.
But these great companies are coming back to the United States.
They left the United States.
If somebody was sitting behind this desk that knew what they were doing, that wouldn't have happened.
They would have said, well, you can sell your car here, but we're going to put 100% tariff.
And you would have never had the auto industry leave.
Again, we lost more than 50% of our auto industry.
And now it's all coming back.
And I think it's coming back.
Ultimately, it's going to be bigger.
I believe it's going to be bigger than it was before, actually.
But it's an honor to have you here.
And please, would you like to see the story?
Thank you very much.
unidentified
Tom Capstrada, sir.
I'm the chairman of National Automobile Dealers that represent 18,000 dealers in the country, along with 3,000 heavy-duty truck dealers.
And the actions that you've done as the president and your administration is definitely going to save our customers money.
And you made your promises that let the consumer buy what they want, sir, and you delivered on that.
And the other thing that you delivered was your promise in the big, beautiful bill, the tax deduction on loans that had gone away some years back.
And now that makes it affordable for our buyers that can save money through that loan of the tax, anywhere from several hundred to several thousand.
So again, sir, on behalf of all the dealers and our customers, we appreciate what you and your administrator have done, and of course our legislative support as well, Mr. President.
So if you go out and buy a car, and this is for middle income, but for lower income, no matter what, they never really had deductions.
You know, rich people like deductions, but middle-income people would never really afford deductions, which is very unfair.
You borrow money to buy a car, you're allowed to deduct the interest from your income tax.
And I think that's going to be one of the most, in terms of your industry, I think it's going to be the biggest thing that we're talking about, maybe even bigger than CAFE standards.
People are going to be able to borrow money deducted, so it's going to cost them essentially half, and they'll be...
Why does that beat us price if we're the principal?
You get a pay on ahead.
The American people will always be able to choose what they want to buy.
They don't want to be taken out of a market by people who, quite frankly, don't even drive their own car and saying this is the way you've got to go going into the future and say, well, you may say that, but you're not in the market.
You have no idea.
And I know the business we're in.
At the end of the day, if you were there with me on sales, Mr. President, other than price, what's keeping you from taking the car home today?
It's always price.
The fact that we can build a car that's affordable, that people want to buy, that's the key to it.
What you've done is unlock the most ridiculous statute that ever came in with CAFA.
It wasn't done by the Congress.
It was done by President Obama after the courts failed on it.
So thank you for doing what you're doing.
You're making America great again in every single way.
Sir, I think that there's a massive macroeconomic benefit to what we're doing today.
And the way to think about it is that the car that has the best gas mileage that you could buy that has all the gasoline is a Honda that gets about 36 miles per gallon.
Joe Biden wanted to make every car on average be above 50.
So there's no car made in the U.S. that you would be able to sell two years from now, three years from now, under that rule, because what he wanted to do was make everybody have an electric car, as you know.
But here's the thing: if everybody had an electric car, then nobody would be buying gasoline anymore, and they'd have to take all the miles that they travel and put it on the grid.
And so we would have to increase the production of electricity in the U.S. by 25% over the next couple of years if they had their way.
And so you've really stopped a massive disruption for the economy with this.
And that wasn't the main reason, and yet it certainly is a main reason.
You wouldn't have been able to do it even if you wanted.
It's just so crazy.
That was the mandate which we ended.
Troy, would you like to say something?
unidentified
Great honor.
Thank you.
My family is a former dealer, 48 years, Chrysler Dodge dealer.
And then I got in the political world, sir.
I had more fun in the dealership world, but I miss it, but I still play a big role in automobiles and grateful.
I remember under President Obama when the cafe standards changed, as Mike brought up, and going through those challenging times at the Chrysler dealer before Stellantis came along.
It was Dimer before you guys got it.
So thank you very much for being here and making these changes.
And as you said, that interest on the car loan piece was big.
And I know that Bernie led the charge on that in the Senate and get it into one big, beautiful bill.
That really is a big deal, and people need to understand how big a deal that is.
But the thing I've admired most, you've been in business, you've been in the battles over the years, and you're helping us lead us out.
Most people that are up here have no idea about business or small business.
It makes a big difference.
One is, number two is, I would just say in terms of the tax stuff we're talking about, one of the things that get missed, and I'm in Florida, Sarah Dasota region, is the ability to deduct.
Most people have a small business, they'll have a lawn business, they'll have this, that, they buy a newer used truck.
They can take that deduction, let's say they're in a 20% tax bracket, but the vehicle's 60 grand, they can take 20% of the 60 grand, get a $12,000 write-off.
They can pay their payments for the first year.
That's a powerful tool we don't talk about.
I don't know why.
But at the end of the day, because of what you've put in place, full expensing, that's the tool they would use.
And you could just think about all the people in Florida, just general places.
They're buying old vans or new vans or buying trucks, mainly trucks, and they're getting a deduction.
One of the biggest things in the building is one of the expensing is a powerful tool.
They can write the whole asset off the first year, take that deduction, put $12,000 in their pocket on a $20,000.
Let me mention one other thing.
They got into the e-vehicles, electric cars.
And I'm talking to dealers that come in and come in and talk to me.
And basically, they couldn't sell one.
They couldn't give one away.
And when these companies, or they got in because of whatever political pressure under the Biden administration, and they end up realizing that they got no market, a guy says, the car's been sitting there a year.
I can't get rid of it.
So they don't understand the market.
The people produce the vehicles.
And that's made a big difference in your leadership.
And they were willing to lose money on building two or three electric cars that they couldn't sell in order to make some money on the 150.
Because the 150 is a monster.
I'll tell you what.
No matter where you go, they love that Ford 150.
But isn't it a ridiculous model when you have to build two or three cars that you know you're not going to be selling or not be selling for much in order to really do something that you should have the right to do, which is make a car that you want to make.
Yeah, thank you, Mr. President, and Secretary Duffy and all of us.
You know, one of the last times I was here was when you signed the Electric Vehicle CRA Congressional Review Act that all of us participated in, the beginning of really making common sense because it was going to impact 17 other states and really a large part of our economy.
This is about affordability here.
I'm just going to say one thing.
Well, maybe I already said one thing, so now I'm going to say two things.
When we talk about a car and auto, we sort of talk about just, oh, we need a car.
Do you know what a car does for a family?
You can take your children to school, you can go to the store, you can visit your mother, you can go to church, you can have a job, you have the flexibility that you need.
A car for an American family is about a roadway to prosperity.
Well, thank you, Mr. President, and Secretary Duffy, and to my colleagues that are here.
In Tennessee, we make great automobiles, and we have a fantastic workforce.
And whether you're GM or Ford with their new investment in Tennessee or Nissan or VW or Toyota with the engine plant, what you see is the components that are necessary to build these cars.
And removing these standards and making cars more affordable does mean that more people will purchase them, but it also means we're going to have to make more cars to meet that demand.
So, you know, I'm just sitting here and thinking, like, we have the biggest auto manufacturers in the world.
They're talking about investing billions and they're investing it as we speak, but billions and billions of dollars in our country.
Thank you very much.
And they hear, they're not like, well, maybe we'll do it.
They're doing it because of tariffs.
And they're doing it because of maybe they like the president.
And we're doing things like this for them, which frankly, no matter who you are, this should be done.
And we're doing things like deductibility of interest when you borrow money to buy a car.
You're allowed to deduct it from your income tax.
That is a massive tax cut for people that probably are going to be trying to buy that car anyway.
And I really think that that interest factor is going to be one of the biggest things.
I was proud of that because I thought of it and it seems so simple.
Other people are allowed big interest.
If you're a rich person, you're allowed to have big interest deductions for different things you do.
But if you're a middle-income person who has to buy a car, you were never entitled to anything.
And now you're getting a full interest deduction on the loan.
And I think that's going to have one of the biggest impacts.
But we're here with companies that are investing tens of billions of dollars in our country as we speak.
It's not going to be in two years or three years.
A lot of it's because of the expensing provision in the bill, the big beautiful bill.
But a miracle is happening in our country.
It's a miracle.
This is just the auto industry, but we have other industries where it's the same thing.
They're building all over our country.
And something, this is a revolution is happening.
It's a business revolution.
It's a jobs revolution.
It's a car revolution.
We're bringing back the car industry that was stolen from us because we have people that didn't know what they were doing sitting at this desk.
And they put the wrong people in because they weren't advised properly.
And this is really an incredible thing that's happening.
unidentified
Go ahead, Kevin.
Well, thank you, Mr. President.
And I think in many respects, pretty much everything that Cookie said has been, except that I think what Kevin talks about in terms of the cascading economic opportunity from this one single event is just the tip of the iceberg.
When you think of all the rules and regulations that you have repealed, I think it's more important, frankly, than the tax cuts.
However, in the Working Family Tax Cuts Act, remember we made permanent a lot of really good policy from the first Trump era, not the least of which for small businesses is bonus depreciation.
The opportunity to depreciate the year that you purchase an F-150 for your small business or a large truck for your farm.
I just think we're going to roll into 2026 and we're going to see an escalation of economic opportunity, the likes of which I probably have never seen.
Flilla was keeping a lot of manufacturers out of our country too.
They said, we're not going to, are you crazy?
They thought outside manufacturers thought we were absolutely insane with all of the different things and just made up nonsense.
It was like made up.
It was really made up by people that hate our country.
I really believe.
Does anybody else have anything to say?
unidentified
I'd say about two quick things.
Well, two quick things I think are really important.
So the person who sat behind this desk before you gave $7,500 in subsidies to multi-millionaires who are leasing electric Rolls-Royces, electric Porsches, electric Lamborghinis.
We're getting $7,500 from the taxpayer.
And these Democrats sit on this floor and say that Republicans are for millionaires and billionaires.
We are the opposite of giving $7,500 to multi-billionaires, to least foreign electric vehicles.
Number two, because of your policies, at the beginning of the year, 51% of the cars made sold in America.
Passage of Key Bills00:00:24
unidentified
And you can continue watching this event on our website, c-span.org.
Back now to the U.S. Capitol for live house coverage here on C-SPAN.