Whence It Came

Friday, February 14, 2025

Whence It Came

The internet is a place where some people seem to jump up and down all day to get your attention, in effect yelling, “Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!” There’s an ever-changing pattern of methods in the perpetual race to virality. One method in the political realm follows the pattern of “[Thing I didn’t want] is how we got [thing neither of us wanted].” In the second term of this president, we have the returning cliché: “This is how we got Trump.” It is used in the hope of earning yuks and clicks.

Having cleared my throat, for today’s discussion: This is how we got Trump:

Energy efficiency mandates have made home appliances worse—and probably aren’t benefiting the environment

In the article, the Competitive Enterprise Institute solicited comments from consumers in a petition to the Department of Energy in 2018. A representative sample included these remarks:

• “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.”

Most citizens don’t go shopping for home appliances thinking, “I want the model that claims to protect the environment—even if it doesn’t work to do the intended job. Oh, and money is no object.”

This should seem obvious. But apparently it isn’t obvious to people who get jobs in the federal government. There, one might have the impression that the attitude prevails: “We shall graciously allow people to buy a appliances, but only if they meet the criteria we set forth for the daily consumption of water and electricity. Oh, and money is no object. Nor is whether or not the appliances do the job. If the things suck, we’ll tell customers it was the manufacturers who failed them.”

This is a microcosm of the overbearing federal regulatory system, but it’s what keeps people unhappy—I would argue—with the whole of government. It’s the business end of the creature they get to have daily interactions with. It’s the part of the federal government they get to see in action, and grow to resent.

From their perspective, the regulators have a higher calling than good government, more important things to do than making the citizenry feel like they aren’t being impeded in their daily lives. The regulators are serving some loftier goals, and if taxpayers/voters/consumers/citizens aren’t happy, they are welcome to pound sand. “We can’t be fired,” they seem to say, “—even if you could figure out which of us enacted these obnoxious rules.” Intentional or not, they give off vibes of wanting to force people to do the right thing, and they as the administrators have the paternalistic job of knowing what’s best for people, and forcing them to do it whether they want to or not.

The whole Trump-Musk-DOGE complex may make Trump-skeptical and non-MAGA citizens uneasy. But when the DOGE faction promises to smash those smug and self-satisfied parts of the government, many citizens are generally willing to suspend judgment and see how things turn out.