A recent court ruling set new limits on the power of federal bureaucrats to impose unwanted mandates on consumer appliances.
In a Jan. 8 decision, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found that Department of Energy regulators had failed to consider whether their regulations aimed at saving energy would actually work — and, specifically, how people would respond to federal mandates that make it harder for dishwashers to do their job. In the real world, when it takes a dishwasher hours to run through a cleaning cycle, it should be no surprise that many people might opt to hand-wash dishes or run the dishwasher multiple times — consuming even more energy and water than before. The regulators ignored the problem they had created: namely, that their regulations actually created new inefficiencies.
