The Trump administration is rescinding counterproductive Biden-era regulations that made it harder for people to get their clothes and dishes clean, by forcing clothes washers and dishwashers to use less water. Due to the Biden regulations, recently-manufactured clothes washers use so little water that clothes sometimes don’t get clean. To overcome that, and get their clothes clean, some people pour buckets of water into their clothes washer, or install hoses and splitters to add water to their loads of laundry.
The Trump administration’s actions came in response to a lawsuit by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). As CEI President Kent Lassman explains,
the government’s excessive water restrictions on home appliances in court. CEI sued the Department of Energy (DOE) last June after the agency ignored the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’ opinion that the agency does not have the authority to regulate water usage in energy-based appliances, such as dishwashers and clothes washers.
We sued the agency because, as the Fifth Circuit suggested, Congress gave the DOE the authority to regulate energy use of energy-based appliances, but the statute does not authorize DOE to limit water consumption by these machines.
On Friday, the DOE agreed with us! The agency issued three rules that would rescind Biden-era water use standards for clothes washers, compact clothes washers, and dishwashers. The agency’s reasoning is the same as CEI’s: The Energy Policy Conservation Act does not empower the DOE to regulate appliances beyond energy use.
We did it. Together, we persuaded the government to reconsider the limits of its authority to impose appliance efficiency standards. Violating these limits results in reduced consumer choices and appliances that require more time, energy, and labor. Today’s typical dishwasher, for instance, takes more than 2.5 hours to complete a full cycle. And you may still need to pre-wash or rewash items to get a clean load, nullifying the purpose of supposed “green” regulations.
DOE’s new rules set the limit for water use back to the value set by Congress due to a lack of legal authority, just as CEI’s lawsuit argued. Thanks to this turn of events, you may soon enjoy shorter cycles and actual appliance efficiency!
And that’s not all. A second major win occurred earlier this month when President Trump signed House Joint Resolution 20 into law. That resolution used the Congressional Review Act to revoke energy limits for tankless water heaters.
After working closely with executive branch staff, CEI led a coalition letter to Congress asking for this rule to be revoked, calling it one of the worst appliance regulations issued by the Biden administration. It would have effectively banned tankless water heaters by making them prohibitively expensive, adding hundreds of dollars to the cost.
We’re thankful to celebrate these victories with you. But we’re far from done leading the charge against counterproductive rules that encumber you in your own home. On Tuesday, Senior Fellow Ben Lieberman testified before the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability. He called for the repeal of costly energy provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act, which will distort energy markets and impose further burdens.
Our lawsuit against the DOE is not over. We will seek a solution that will endure beyond the current administration.
“The federal regulations that make dishwashers and washing machines worse are also illegal. So claim consumers from Texas and Louisiana in” the “lawsuit filed against the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)” by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, reported Reason Magazine. “While DOE has the authority to regulate the energy used by these appliances, the lawsuit argues, Congress never gave it the power to regulate the devices’ water usage. Therefore, recent rules imposing limits on their water use are illegal.”
The Energy Department only has the authority to “write rules” that are “based on legislative text,” says Dan Greenberg of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which represented the consumers in their lawsuit. “The difficulty is the rules that it’s created seem to rely on authority that’s not in the statutory text that Congress has passed.”
As Reason reported,
Under President Joe Biden, the DOE has been an aggressive regulator of home appliances. It has scrapped numerous Trump-era rules liberalizing efficiency conversation standards for showerheads and dishwashers, and it has attempted to impose stricter regulations on an even wider range of products…Stricter energy efficiency standards are also often counterproductive. Because the machines’ performance has decreased, more people are handwashing their dishes—a process that uses much more water.
The DOE’s regulatory onslaught has run into other legal problems. Back in January, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit blocked the department’s repeal of the Trump administration’s looser energy efficiency standards for dishwashers. The court ruled that the DOE hadn’t properly considered the ways that energy efficiency standards lead consumers to use more energy and water….Of most relevance for this latest lawsuit, the Fifth Circuit ruled that the energy regulations passed by Congress over the years did not give the DOE the power to regulate the water consumption of energy-using appliances such as dishwashers and laundry machines beyond the explicit limits set in statutes. The DOE could regulate the water use of non-energy-using plumbing fixtures, such as showerheads, and it could regulate the energy use of dishwashers and laundry machines, but it could not regulate the water use of the latter machines.
Nevertheless, in February 2024, DOE went ahead and issued new water limits for dishwashers and residential laundry machines.
These water limits are counterproductive, says Greenberg. “Instead of one cycle, you have to do two or three cycles. What you save in water bills you’ll have to pay just as much or more in the cost of increased electricity but also time and increased physical labor…these rules are a mindset of certain regulators in Washington who don’t understand how trade-offs work.”
Even the regulations that the Biden administration had the jurisdiction to impose — such as restrictions on the flow of water in showerheads — are counterproductive. Rules that require showerheads to restrict the flow of water make it harder to get a good shower. People compensate by taking longer showers, which results in overall water use going up rather than down. This not only wastes water, but also wastes people’s precious time.
290 people in an English study “burned through an extra” 4.4 million liters of hot water, and about 15 tons of CO2, over the course of 39 weeks, due to showerheads that restrict the flow of water.
