RICH LOWRY: EV fail exposes Pete Buttigieg as the little cabinet secretary who couldn’t.

Rarely has a cabinet secretary done so little with such vast resources.

On the CBS show “Face the Nation,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg had to defend the Biden administration’s woeful record of building new electric vehicle charging stations that are key to unlocking its hoped-for EV nirvana.

Host Margaret Brennan asked how it could be that, with $7.5 billion allocated for this purpose two years ago, the administration has managed to build eight.

Not 8,000, or even 80. Eight.

Buttigieg said President Biden plans on building 500,000 chargers by the end of the decade, and — implying this is some sort of accomplishment — “the very first handful of chargers are now already being physically built.”

It’s true that eight is better than zero, and the administration is now only 492,000 chargers away from its goal rather than 500,000 away.

At this rate, though, the Emperor Hadrian wouldn’t have finished his wall prior to the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and we’d still be constructing the Hoover Dam* to this day.

Evergreen:

* Well, they can’t build those, either: As Joel Kotkin wrote in 2010, “When FDR commissioned projects such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, he literally brought light to darkened regions. The loyalty created by FDR and Truman built a base of support for liberalism that lasted for nearly a half-century. Today’s liberals don’t show enthusiasm for airports or dams — or anything that may kick up some dirt. Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Interior Deanna Archuleta, for example, promised a Las Vegas audience: ‘You will never see another federal dam.’”