The House passed a bill on Tuesday that would fundamentally limit the Department of Energy's power to impose energy conservation standards on household appliances, voting 217-190 to amend the Energy Policy and Conservation Act.
The bill, written by Rep. Rick Allen (R-GA), would terminate the requirement that the DOE periodically update energy conservation standards, instead allowing the agency to amend those standards only as needed. It would also create a new process for public petitions on specific energy standards and impose new criteria for whether a conservation standard is economically justifiable and technologically feasible.
According to the Washington Examiner, one additional provision bans the DOE from updating energy conservation standards for distribution transformers.
The vote marks a concrete step in unwinding the regulatory architecture that turned Washington into the arbiter of which washing machines, stoves, and air conditioners Americans are allowed to buy.
The bill didn't materialize out of nowhere. Republicans pointed to a pattern under the Biden-Harris administration: wave after wave of efficiency mandates that made appliances more expensive, harder to find, and in many cases less effective at their actual job.
Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-KY), Chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, framed the legislation as a direct response:
"The true cost of homeownership rose during the Biden-Harris Administration because of heavy-handed government mandates."
Guthrie didn't stop there. He connected the regulatory overreach to the broader green-energy push that treated American kitchens and laundry rooms as fronts in a climate war:
"Unworkable policies created new and unattainable energy standards under the banner of a radical rush-to-green agenda that raises prices and harms American families."
The pattern is familiar. Bureaucrats in Washington set aspirational efficiency targets. Manufacturers either comply by raising prices and cutting performance, or pull products from the market entirely. The consumer, who never asked for any of it, picks up the tab.
The legislation restructures the relationship between the DOE and the appliance market in several key ways:
That last criterion is the one that matters most in practice. Under the old framework, the DOE could set efficiency targets that sounded reasonable on paper but were either ruinously expensive to achieve or simply beyond current technology. The new standard forces the agency to prove its mandates work in the real world, not just in a modeling spreadsheet.
The House wasn't finished. A second bill, the Homeowner Energy Freedom Act, introduced by Rep. Craig Goldman (R-TX), was set for a vote on Wednesday. That legislation aims at the Inflation Reduction Act directly, repealing several sections and rescinding appropriations for:
These programs were sold as helping American families save money. In practice, they funneled federal dollars into programs designed to push consumers toward electric appliances and building standards that neither wanted nor could afford. Repealing them doesn't strip anyone of a functioning dishwasher. It stops the government from bribing the market into compliance with an ideological agenda.
Not everyone cheered the vote. The Appliance Standards Awareness Project warned that rolling back standards could face legal challenges, noting that the Trump administration "could concoct erroneous new analyses or reasoning to justify such a revocation, and dare courts to reject them, with the outcomes uncertain."
The framing tells you everything. When Congress passes legislation through the democratic process, the response from the green lobby isn't to make a better argument to voters. It's to speculate about courtroom strategies to override the legislature. The instinct is always the same: if you can't win at the ballot box, find a judge.
Rep. Allen said in December that the bill would "prevent future administrations from prioritizing a radical rush-to-green agenda over the affordability and availability of reliable household appliances that Americans rely on every day."
That word "future" matters. This isn't just about undoing the Biden administration's excesses. It's about building a statutory firewall so the next Democratic president can't simply pick up where the last one left off. Executive orders come and go. Legislation endures.
Guthrie connected the effort to the current administration's direction:
"As President Trump discusses his vision for reliable and affordable energy, House Republicans are working to support the commonsense work his Administration is doing to make life more affordable for families across the country."
The broader effort is clear. Energy policy should serve the people who pay the electric bill, not the activists who want to redesign how Americans live. The House just voted to make that principle harder to reverse.
Now it moves to the Senate, where the real fight begins.