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That’s the line from The Simpsons a federal judge used to deliver a legal blow to President Donald Trump, quoting a 1995 episode as she struck down his administration’s freeze on electric vehicle infrastructure funding.
In a preliminary injunction issued from the bench of the US District Court for the Western District of Washington, Judge Tana Lin invoked Homer Simpson’s long-lost goodbye to his mother as a pop culture parable for a very real-world problem: “range anxiety.”
The phrase refers to the fear that electric vehicle drivers might run out of power without a charging station nearby — a phenomenon Congress tried to address in 2021 by creating the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program. The program was designed to install high-speed EV charging stations across the country.
But earlier this year, the Trump administration halted NEVI funding disbursements, prompting a legal challenge from several states and clean-energy advocates. On Tuesday, June 24, Judge Lin ruled against the freeze, declaring parts of the administration’s pause unlawful and lifting the hold on funding.
“In a 1995 episode of The Simpsons, Homer must cut short a tearful goodbye with his long-lost mother after her traveling companions protest that their ‘electric van only has 20 minutes of juice left!’” Lin wrote in the opening lines of her decision.
She noted that Congress created NEVI to directly confront that very anxiety — with the aim of building a national, reliable EV charging network that makes range fear a thing of the past.
The judge’s ruling cited the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which authorized the NEVI program and laid out clear instructions for how funds were to be distributed between 2022 and 2026.
The 58-year-old Lin, a Biden appointee who earned her law degree at New York University, said that the administration lacked the authority to suspend disbursements already approved by Congress.
With the court’s ruling, the Department of Transportation has been ordered to send NEVI funds to 14 states, accelerating the installation of new charging stations along major highways.
Those states are:
- New York
- New Jersey
- Washington
- Colorado
- California
- Arizona
- Delaware
- Hawaii
- Illinois
- Maryland
- New Mexico
- Oregon
- Rhode Island
- Wisconsin
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