A new lawsuit claims government regulation of dishwashers is illegal

Federal regulations that degrade the quality of dishwashers and washing machines are also illegal. That’s what Texas and Louisiana consumers say in a new lawsuit filed against the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

While the DOE has the authority to regulate the energy use of these devices, according to the lawsuit, Congress has never given it the authority to regulate the water use of these devices. Therefore, the latest regulations imposing restrictions on water consumption are illegal.

“The Department of Energy has the ability to write its own regulations to build on the legislative text,” says Dan Greenberg, general counsel for the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), which is representing consumers in their lawsuit. “The difficulty is that the rules created appear to rely on authority that is not found in the text of the law as passed by Congress.”

The lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas.

Under President Joe Biden, the DOE has been an aggressive regulator of home appliances. It repealed numerous Trump-era rules liberalizing performance interview standards for showerheads and dishwashers and attempted to impose stricter regulations on an even wider range of products.

Manufacturers have objected to the cost of these new regulations. Many consumers think similarly and do not like it when their choice is limited to lower quality products.

Stricter energy efficiency standards are often counterproductive. As the efficiency of machines has decreased, more and more people are washing dishes by hand, and this process uses much more water.

The DOE’s regulatory onslaught has raised other legal issues. In January, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit blocked the department’s repeal of the Trump administration’s repeal of looser energy efficiency standards for dishwashers.

The court ruled that the DOE failed to properly consider how energy efficiency standards lead consumers to use more energy and water. It also found that the department failed to properly consider regulatory changes leading up to the repeal.

Most relevant to this latest lawsuit, the Fifth Circuit ruled that energy regulations passed by Congress over the years do not give the DOE the authority to regulate water use by energy-consuming appliances, such as dishwashers and washing machines, beyond the limits expressly set forth in the statutes.

The DOE could regulate water use by non-energy-using plumbing fixtures, such as shower heads, and could regulate energy use by dishwashers and washing machines, but it could not regulate water use by the latter machines.

Nevertheless, in February 2024, the DOE went further and issued new water limits for household dishwashers and washing machines.

“Instead of one cycle, you have to do two or three cycles. What you save on your water bills, you’ll have to pay the same or more in increased electricity, but also in time and increased manual labor,” Greenberg says. “I think these rules are the result of the thinking of some regulators in Washington who don’t understand how tradeoffs work.”