A federal appeals court set aside lingering Biden administration regulations on cooking appliances, according to a Tuesday ruling.
Judges for the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit found the Department of Energy (DOE), then under President Joe Biden, illegally refused to withdraw energy efficiency standards for stoves, ovens, and other cookware when states raised objections to the agency not giving required public notice and opportunity for comment.
“The Biden Administration proposed numerous regulations to make home appliances more expensive and less useful,” a three-judge panel unanimously wrote.
The new regulations prompted significant public backlash accusing the Biden administration of attempting to dodge the controversy rather than confront it, the decision noted.
In February 2024, the DOE published a “Direct Final Rule” on energy standards for stoves and cooktops, meaning the agency implemented regulations without public advance notice or a comment period.
In opposition to the energy efficiency rules, 22 states signed onto a letter calling for the DOE to give states and consumers a chance to comment on the regulations before they took effect.
Several states sued over the rules, including Mississippi, Louisiana, Montana, Nebraska, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah.
The Energy Department’s authority over household appliances comes from the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975, which allows the agency to create and implement efficiency standards on a variety of products.
But the act also requires any new standard to “be designed to achieve the maximum improvement in energy efficiency” that is both “technologically feasible and economically justified.”
A new rule is “economically justified” if “the benefits of the standard exceed its burdens,” the judges noted. If the DOE finds the rule meets that threshold, which is determined through a cost-benefit analysis, then the agency has two options for implementing it.
The first involves holding a traditional notice-and-comment period, and the second is through a “Direct Final Rule”—but this pathway has guardrails to be closely followed.
After implementing a “Direct Final Rule,” the Energy Department must solicit public comment on it for 110 days. No later than 120 days after its issuance, the DOE shall rescind the rule if it receives one or more adverse public comments.
In the case of the Biden-era standards, the DOE attempted to pursue efficiency standards on cooking appliances and an effective ban on gas stoves and ranges through the first pathway, but neither ever made it past the public notice and comment period.
“Having failed at notice and comment, the [Energy] Department then decided to bypass notice and comment altogether,” judges wrote in their Tuesday ruling.
The DOE took the “Direct Final Rule” pathway to implement the same rules despite an “avalanche of adverse comments” already against them.
Multiple comments were made in opposition by several states during the 110-day period after the “Direct Final Rule” was implemented, but the DOE found “none of the States’ comments provided a reasonable basis for withdrawing the rule.”
States responded by filing a petition for review by the Fifth Circuit, which the judges granted, while denying the DOE’s request for the petition to be dismissed, calling it an “attack” on the court’s authority to review the matter.
“The [Energy] Department was free, of course, to proceed the way rulemaking agencies normally do,” the federal appeals court said. “What the Department could not do was gloss over public outcry, allow the public to file after-the-fact comments, and then ignore those comments.”
The DOE attempted to show that a joint statement in support of the new energy efficiency standards fairly represented stakeholders because it was filed by industry groups, efficiency advocates, and California, Massachusetts, and New York. However, the comments from these states were not submitted by figures that officially represented them, but by various representatives of state agencies.
Nonetheless, the Energy Department did recognize that these states are not fairly representative of the country as a whole, which was the “understatement of the day,” the Fifth Circuit stated.
“It cannot be contended with a straight face that California, Massachusetts, and New York ‘fairly represent’ a cross-section of States,” the opinion read.
Judges sent the matter back to the Energy Department for further proceedings consistent with their decision.
Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill welcomed the Fifth Circuit’s decision.
“Joe Biden’s attack on consumers had no boundaries, proposing massive regulations on home appliances like stoves and ovens that would make them more expensive and less useful,” Murrill said in a statement.
The DOE did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication.
