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By Sam Kazman [ [link removed] ]
“Hang on to your old appliances.” These were the parting words of my dishwasher repairman after his last service call. They weren’t reassuring.
Why did he give this advice? Because the newer models won’t last very long or work very well.
The sorry state of new home appliances is not just one guy’s personal observation. Complaints about the poor durability of new appliances abound on the web, and they’re backed up by authoritative sources. The “Family Handyman [ [link removed] ],” for example, finds that “lifespans for most major appliances have decreased significantly over the past 25 years.” And when it comes to performance, the diminished capabilities of new dishwashers and laundry machines have become legendary—and not in a good way. Decades ago, dishwashers took about an hour to clean and dry a load of dishes; today, they take about two and a half hours, and the dishes often turn out neither clean nor dry.
At the root of this decline in quality are federal energy efficiency regulations, which restrict both the electricity and water that appliances can use. These rules have gotten increasingly tighter since first being issued in 1984.
In 2018 the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), where I was general counsel at the time, petitioned the Trump administration’s Department of Energy (DOE) to loosen its dishwasher regs. Specifically, we asked it to establish a new category of more lenient standards for models that could operate the old-fashioned way, producing clean, dry loads in an hour or less.
Many consumers clearly wanted such dishwashers. DOE received over 2,000 letters regarding our petition, and more than 95% supported it. Many of these letters described in excruciating detail how current dishwashers make it harder to run a household, especially for young families with kids:
“Please mother of God, allow someone to make a dishwasher that will get my dishes for a family of 5 clean enough, fast enough to empty the dishwasher by bedtime!”
“Until we went to my [parents’] house, who have a much older dishwasher ... we had no clue how terrible of a job our newer dishwasher was doing.”
“If regulations don’t get rolled back to sane thinking, we may end up just repairing the old one or do without.”
“On our second dishwasher and still dishes come out smelly and not fully clean with long run times. Spent $900 on a dishwasher that is far worse than my first one bought in the early nineties that cost $200. Aren’t we supposed to be improving?”
“I realized months ago that I have to do my dishes overnight because it takes way too long during the day. I’m older and don’t remember dishes taking so long in a dishwasher.”
“I clean houses and I have to do dishes. The dishwasher takes too long and holds me up from moving on to my next house to clean.”
A larger collection of excerpts from consumer letters can be found here [ [link removed] ].
Moreover, many consumers reported that, stuck with lousy new dishwashers, they resorted to cleaning their dishes in ways that used more energy. They prewashed their dishes, or they ran their machines twice for each load, or they skipped machine washing altogether and did their dishes by hand.
The Daily Caller [ [link removed] ] gracefully characterized CEI’s filing as: “Energy Department Petitioned To Stop Making Dishwashers Even Crappier.” But not surprisingly, environmentalists opposed the petition; in their view, we were aiming to undo decades of progress in curbing wasteful energy consumption. They ignored both the burdens on consumers and the fact that consumers’ offsetting behavior made it questionable whether DOE’s mandates achieved any real conservation all.
Other criticisms of CEI’s petition were more surprising. Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.), head of the House Energy and Commerce Committee at the time, attacked CEI [ [link removed] ] as an “elitist right-wing think tank” aiming to “penalize both the innovators giving us better, more efficient appliances and the consumers who use them.” This was nonsense, of course, because our proposal for a less-regulated category of dishwashers would in no way restrict the availability of higher-efficiency models.
Economist Paul Krugman viewed CEI’s petition as a prime example of “regulation rage” [ [link removed] ]—“a syndrome that afflicts a minority of the population, but it’s real, it’s ugly, and it can do a remarkable amount of damage.”
Then there was the manufacturers’ response: The Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers (AHAM) opposed [ [link removed] ] our petition. Even though it would have made the agency’s standards more lenient, it threatened to upset the understanding that AHAM had reached with DOE under the Obama administration to refrain from tightening its standards further. That regulatory stability would be jeopardized if appliance standards became a political football, changing direction from one administration to the next.
But what’s curious is the use that regulatory advocates made of this industry opposition to CEI’s petition. Typically, when industry backs a deregulatory proposal, Krugman and his like view this as evidence that deregulation will benefit “big business” rather than the public. For example, if AHAM had been pushing dishwasher deregulation, the idea would have been derided as an industry gambit to line its own pockets. But when it came to CEI’s proposal, AHAM’s opposition, not its endorsement, suddenly became an argument against deregulation.
In 2020, two and a half years after receiving CEI’s petition, DOE granted it and established a new, less regulated category of faster dishwashers. The Washington Post criticized [ [link removed] ] DOE’s move as “puzzling” because, it claimed, consumers weren’t clamoring for deregulated washers. Now, it’s true that protesting consumers weren’t blocking traffic in the streets, but it wouldn’t have taken much digging to find evidence of public dissatisfaction. Our filings with DOE provided plenty of it. Additionally, if there really were no demand for faster models, then those machines wouldn’t sell, and the supposedly wasteful consumption feared by the environmentalists would never take place. Could it be that opponents of deregulated dishwashers were simply people who ate out a lot?
But three months later, DOE’s action was among the dozens of Trump administration actions that President Biden targeted for review when he was inaugurated in 2021. The Biden DOE formally repealed the fast dishwasher rule a year later.
The Biden DOE’s action, however, was successfully challenged in a federal appellate court by a coalition of 11 states, which objected to DOE’s restriction on their range of appliance purchases. The court ruled in favor of the states. In strikingly harsh language, it held [ [link removed] ] that DOE had ignored the wasteful effects of the “rewashing, prewashing, and handwashing” that people resorted to in dealing with the “frustratingly slow pace of modern dishwashers.” “They make Americans use more energy and more water for the simple reason that purportedly ‘energy efficient’ appliances do not work. …. So Americans who want clean dishes or clothes may use more energy and more water to preclean, reclean, or handwash their stuff before, after, or in lieu of using DOE-regulated appliances.”
As to whether consumers wanted better washers, the court noted that “consumers supported efficacious dishwashers by a margin of 2,200 to 16.” It concluded by bluntly characterizing the Biden DOE’s treatment of these issues as consisting of “basically nothing.”
Despite its scathing language, the court did not formally enjoin DOE’s action. Instead, as is common in administrative law cases, it remanded the issue back to the agency for reconsideration. The Biden DOE’s last formal action on the matter, issued days before the 2024 election, was to propose [ [link removed] ] a revised rationale for ditching the fast dishwasher rule.
But with Trump’s reelection, DOE’s plan may be reversed faster than a dishwasher cycle. Among the executive orders that Trump signed on Inauguration Day was one on Unleashing American Energy [ [link removed] ]. It discussed “safeguard[ing] the American people’s freedom to choose from a variety of goods and appliances,” including, no surprise, dishwashers.
Prior to Biden’s election in 2020, an editorial on “Why Trump’s Dishwasher Diatribe Matters [ [link removed] ]” noted that “by exposing the link [between unelected bureaucrats and consumer hardships], Trump has a better chance of creating legions of small-government advocates than he would by lecturing audiences about Adam Smith.” If Trump is to succeed in pushing small-government advocacy, it’s only fitting that this process begins in people’s homes. And when it comes to regulatory fiascoes, dishwashers and other home appliances provide a perfect case in point.
Sam Kazman is former general counsel of the Competitive Enterprise Institute [ [link removed] ], a free-market public interest organization in Washington, D.C.

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