Can Trump proposed rule pull the plug on bad appliance regulations?

Many Americans dislike federal home appliance regulations, perhaps nobody more so than the current White House occupant, who routinely rails against them at his rallies. Trump has worked with Congress to revoke a few such rules. Now he is proposing a new rule that would raise the bar considerably on any future appliance rules.

There’s a partisan rhythm to Department of Energy efficiency standards for dishwashers, furnaces, air conditioners, water heaters, light bulbs, stoves, refrigerators, washing machines, and others. Republican administrations take a cautious approach to these often-troublesome regulations, but then the next Democratic administration tries to make up for lost time by launching a wave of new requirements. The worst offender was President Biden, who in four short years cranked out a long list of ill-advised measures.

Some of these rules save so little energy that there is no appreciable upside to justify the costs. For example, the latest stove rule is estimated by the agency to save a whopping 21 cents per year on an average homeowner’s gas bill.

Others raise upfront costs to painful levels. Consider Biden’s furnace regulation estimated by the agency to add as much as $867 to installation costs—and some industry sources think this DOE estimate is low. The rule for electric water heaters is projected to raise installed costs by $953.

There’s also a growing tendency towards overkill, especially given that many appliances have already been subjected to multiple rounds of successively tighter standards over the years. This trend includes the latest Biden rule for dishwashers—the fifth time this appliance has been targeted—as well as the seventh for washing machines.

None of this should be happening. The statute under which the DOE sets these rules, the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975, contains a number of safeguards against measures that require the agency to balance the benefits against the costs. But these provisions have often been ignored, especially under the Biden administration, which justified sweeping appliance crackdowns as part of its climate agenda.

The proposed Trump DOE rule works with the consumer protections already in the law, fleshing them out with detailed requirements so they can no longer be sidestepped easily.

For example, the statute expressly forbids any rule that does not result in “significant conservation of energy,” but does not define what is considered significant. Not surprisingly, the DOE regulators can and sometimes do consider anything north of zero to be significant. The Trump proposal sets reasonable benchmarks for significance, including the requirement that a new standard must reduce energy use by at least 10 percent. Bottom line: no more 21-cent stove rules.

Similarly, the original 1975 statute requires standards to be economically justified, but in some cases the agency went ahead with rules likely to cost many consumers more than they save. The Trump DOE proposal requires that no new rule can result in net costs for more than 20 percent of homeowners, and it invites comments on whether that number should be lower. In addition, the proposed rule does not allow new standards that raise up-front costs by more than 10 percent—one small step for housing affordability.

The bad news is that these and other proposed agency-level changes can be undone by the next administration, as the Biden DOE did to reforms from the first Trump administration. But unless and until we have a Congress willing to put these changes into law, this step is the best we can do. The good news is that the reforms in this proposed rule are so commonsensical that a future administration will have difficulty making a case against them.