Making Dishwashers Great Again?

New York Times

13-05-2025

President Trump has complained that toilets these days require him to flush '10 or 15 times.' He has said that the drip from modern shower fixtures leaves him 'standing there five times longer' and gets in the way of coifing his 'perfect' hair. LED lightbulbs, he says, make him look orange.
The president's disdain for modern-day household appliances, which he says have been ruined by energy- and water-efficiency regulations, is about to have far-reaching consequences.
Even as his tariffs have shaken up the global economy, Trump has taken time to sign an executive order aimed at maintaining acceptable water pressure in shower heads. And he has directed the Energy Department to use 'all lawful authority to rescind' or weaken water and energy efficiency regulations for faucets, showers, bathtubs, toilets, washing machines and more.
On Monday, the Department of Energy said it was starting its repeal of a long list of energy and water standards, adding dehumidifiers, microwaves and more to the list. His administration also plans to eliminate Energy Star, the popular energy efficiency certification for dishwashers, refrigerators, dryers and other home appliances.
Many of those rollbacks, experts say, would be unlawful, violating an anti-backsliding provision in underlying statutes.
And as Lisa Friedman and I reported, experts also say this would cost consumers money. The government's own scientists say the water and efficiency rules saved U.S. households an average of $576 on their utility bills in 2024 while cutting the nation's annual energy consumption by 6.5 percent and public water use by 12 percent.
Andrew deLaski, executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, a coalition of environmental and consumer groups, utilities and government agencies, said already-stressed water supplies in many parts of the country would be further strained if the rules were eliminated. 'This is a campaign to undo what has been an incredible American success story,' he said.
The White House declined to comment and the Energy Department did not immediately respond.
Tucked away in the White House's policy documents is a plan to recommend to Congress that it repeal or amend the 1992 Energy Policy Act, as well as other statutes that help underpin the federal government's regulation of efficiency standards.
Trump's move to repeal the standards elevates a longstanding campaign by libertarian and free market groups to push back against what they see as prime examples of government overreach, intrusion into daily lives, and infringement on personal choice, even toilet choices.
It also dovetails with a nostalgia, whether accurate or not, for a simpler past of sturdy, longer-lasting appliances and gushing showers that were subject to few environmental regulations.
The free market groups have piled onto Trump's bandwagon.
'Federal limits on water and energy use have made appliances slower and less effective, frustrating consumers and limiting their choices,' said Devin Watkins, an attorney at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank that has since led the cause against the rules, petitioning the Energy Department for a new, more water-intensive class of faster dishwashers.
The appliance industry has been less outspoken. The Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, which represents 150 manufacturers behind 95 percent of the household appliances shipped for sale in the United States, says that the standards have 'helped achieve decades of successful improvements in appliance efficiency.'
But the group also notes that 'with most appliances operating near peak efficiency, additional meaningful savings are unlikely for some products' without some loss of performance.
The debate over something as innocuous as household appliances reaches back to at least the Reagan era. President Reagan vetoed a bill that would have established appliance energy standards, saying it 'intrudes unduly on the free market' and 'limits the freedom of choice available.' But backed by strong bipartisan support and a public increasingly concerned about water and energy conservation, a version of the measure passed in 1987.
It was another Republican, the first President George Bush, who signed the first bill establishing maximum water usage levels for toilets, shower heads and other plumbing fixtures.
(That led to some early pushback from consumers who complained that their toilets were clogging, and reports surfaced of Americans traveling to Canada to purchase smoother-flowing, black market commodes. Shower heads from this time were lampooned in a Seinfeld episode featuring low-flow showers with comically weak water pressure.)
But after decades of innovation, manufacturers now far more easily meet efficiency standards and claims of poor performance tend to be exaggerated, said Ashlynn Stillwell, an associate professor in civil and environmental engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Moreover, Stillwell's own research indicates that the energy and water saved through higher efficiency products more than pays back over its lifetime. That's one reason the total amount of energy and water used by American households has not grown nearly as fast as the population has, she said.
'It might seem small on the individual scale,' she said, 'but it has moved the needle.'
A clean energy boom was just starting. Now, a Republican bill aims to end it.
Sprawling wind farms in Wyoming. A huge solar factory expansion in Georgia. Lithium mines in Nevada. Vacuums that suck carbon from the air in Louisiana.
Over the past three years, companies have made plans to invest more than $843 billion across the United States in projects aimed at reducing planet-warming emissions, driven by lucrative tax credits for clean energy provided by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
But only about $321 billion of that money has actually been spent, with many projects still on the drawing board, according to data made public on Tuesday by the Clean Investment Monitor, a joint project of the Rhodium Group and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Now, much of the rest, about $522 billion, will depend on action playing out on Capitol Hill.
A draft bill issued on Monday by Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee would effectively end most of the Inflation Reduction Act's tax incentives. — Brad Plumer and Harry Stevens
Read more.
Farmers sued over deleted climate data. So the government will put it back.
The Agriculture Department will restore information about climate change that was scrubbed from its website when President Trump took office, according to court documents filed on Monday in a lawsuit over the deletion.
The deleted data included pages on federal funding and loans, forest conservation and rural clean energy projects. It also included sections of the U.S. Forest Service and Natural Resources Conservation Service sites, and the U.S. Forest Service's 'Climate Risk Viewer,' which included detailed maps showing how climate change might affect national forests and grasslands.
The lawsuit, filed in February, said the purge denied farmers information to make time-sensitive decisions while facing business risks linked to climate change, such as heat waves, droughts, floods and wildfires. — Karen Zraick
Read more.
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