A congressional hearing went into the kitchens and laundry rooms of most US households earlier this week—metaphorically speaking.
Members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee discussed the Department of Energy’s energy efficiency standards for household appliances and the Energy Policy and Conservation Act, which allows the DOE to create and regulate those standards.
The biggest issue on the docket, however, was the potential cost savings of energy efficiency as a whole. Republicans claimed high-tech appliances cost too much, while Democrats noted that tax credits to lower the price of energy-efficient home upgrades are being phased out by the president’s so-called One Big Beautiful Bill.
“Donald Trump and Republicans have broken their promise to lower costs, and their reckless policies are making life more expensive,” Representative Kathy Castor (D-FL) said in the hearing. “They want to trap Americans with outdated and expensive technologies forever while the rest of the world moves on without us.”
Republicans’ solution, as explained by committee chair Representative Brett Guthrie (R-KY), would be to ease efficiency standards to lower prices without subsidies.
“It doesn’t make products cheaper to make them more expensive and just subsidize on the back end,” Guthrie said. “What we need to do is allow manufacturers to make products that people want to buy at the price they want to pay for it.”
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Hearing witness Buddy Hughes said this could be done by reducing regulations on appliances that run on natural gas, a non-renewable resource facing bans in multiple states. Hughes is the chairman of the National Association of Home Builders and said his members are “on the front lines of an affordability crisis.”
“One of the biggest drivers of those costs are restrictions on energy choice, appliance standards, and mandates on energy codes,” Hughes said. “Congress can protect families from higher costs by preventing appliance standards from being turned into backdoor gas bans.”
Still, witness Kara Saul Rinaldi, the chief policy officer of the Building Performance Association, said it will cost homeowners less to have their houses built to the highest standards now than to have to update them later.
“A home built today is an existing home tomorrow, and may be part of our housing infrastructure for a century,” she said. “If it is not built with adequate insulation, air sealing, efficient duct work, heating and cooling, and windows, homeowners will be hard pressed to spend the time and money to upgrade their home at a cost significantly more than building the home efficiently in the first place.”