Fifth Circuit Completely Roasts Biden DOE’s Stove and Oven Efficiency Rules
The court voids the rules after determining that Biden’s Energy Department improperly tried to fast-track the measure as a “direct final rule”, which is usually reserved for noncontroversial matters.
During the tiresome Biden era, my Legal Insurrection colleague Mary Chastain and I were frontline reporters covering the administration’s “War on Appliances”.
As a reminder, Biden’s Department of Energy (DOE) came after our:
But the climate cultists were most keen to crackdown on gas stoves.
Now the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has unanimously set aside DOE’s 2024 rules establishing amended energy-conservation standards for ovens and stoves.
🚨 The Fifth Circuit has set aside Biden-era energy efficiency standards for stoves and cooktops, ruling that the Energy Department illegally refused to withdraw the rule after states raised objections requiring ordinary notice-and-comment rulemaking. pic.twitter.com/cOhK2JjOmU
— SCOTUS Wire (@scotus_wire) August 11, 2026
The court held that DOE unlawfully kept the rule in place after receiving critical state comments that provided a reasonable basis to withdraw it and restart the process under normal notice-and-comment procedures.
In a 3-0 decision, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans ruled in favor of seven Republican-led states — Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Tennessee, Texas and Utah — that challenged the Department of Energy’s “direct final rule” for consumer-grade stoves and ovens.
The August 2024 rule was intended to limit how much energy consumers use in kitchen appliances, and to ban an older technology known as linear power supplies.
Circuit Judge Andrew Oldham said the Energy Department should not have fast-tracked the rule, knowing that numerous states opposed a 2023 attempt to enact similar efficiency standards.
He also dismissed the rule as part of a push by former President Joe Biden’s administration to make home appliances “more expensive and less useful.”
Basically, the court tossed out the DOE requirements after determining that Team Biden improperly tried to fast-track the measure as a “direct final rule”, which is usually reserved for noncontroversial matters.
The substantial public controversy and state opposition should have been its first clue that the choice was…unwise.
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” (DFR) pathway to implement the same rules despite an “avalanche of adverse comments” already against them.
Biden-Era Gas Stove Regs Not Fit for Expedited Rule Process, 5th Circuit Says https://t.co/KzPzL2Ajlu
— National Law Journal (@TheNLJ) August 12, 2026
But under the Autopen Presidency, normal rules were simply treated as guidelines that could be ignored.
This decision is a welcome reminder that regulators do not get to evade public scrutiny simply by relabeling their approach.
Circuit Judge Andrew Oldham, who was appointed by President Donald Trump, said the Biden Energy Department should not have attempted to streamline the rule using the Direct Final Rule process because states opposed a 2023 attempt to enact similar efficiency standards, according to Legal News Line.
“The previous administration’s gas-stove measures were among its most controversial energy proposals,” Oldham wrote. “The idea that all that controversy could be elided using the DFR – a mechanism designed for consensus rulemaking – is untenable.”
The Fifth Circuit’s decision is a much-needed rebuke to eco-activist bureaucrats who treated public opposition and basic administrative procedure as obstacles to be bypassed.
Our gas stoves are safe, at least for the time being. Ideally, this ruling should warn future administrations that climate-driven control schemes must still adhere to legal and regulatory processes.
Meanwhile, Mary can continue to enjoy cooking and baking with the appliances she likes best. And I will continue to avoid cooking as much as I can, while appreciating the fact that I can choose not to use either electric or gas appliances.
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Comments
Post a link to the actual Court Opinion
No excuse to omit a link to the actual source document
https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions?from=2026-08-06&to=2026-08-13&group=grouped
Mississippi v DOE 24-60529
A brief scan of the opinion indicates that the basis for overturning the regulation is that the biden administration did not follow applicable procedures. thus the next democrat administration will be able to follow the applicable procedures to get a ban on gas stoves through. Gas stoves tend to be much more energy efficient than electric stoves. The gas stoves causes asthma study was pure junk science.
That’s what Leslie wrote
There’s no reason to believe that following the correct procedures would result in such a regulation being enacted. The states get to object under the correct procedures.
And there definitely is no excuse for linking to an article hidden behind an ” Exclusive Content” paywall the requires your “law firm or department” to register (for some undisclosed amount of money) to access the article. No excuse whatsoever.
If the majority of your readers will not be able to access the article then perhaps it would be better off not to link to the article at all. Or at least find an article that is available to all.
EoT
Bring back the Maytag washer and dryers and the KitchenAid dishwashers built in the 1960’s, the Lawn Boy two-stroke lawn mower, and automobiles with V-8 engines, the floor mounted headlight dimmer switch, and the ‘three on the tree’ manual transmission!
Manual transmissions are the surest way to prevent auto theft. Three on the tree would confuse them even more.
Or a good way to get a burnt out clutch and wrecked synchros if they try to drive it anyway. But at least they’re less likely to get far enough to do all the other damage they do when it runs out of gas.
manual trans a lot easier to push start with dead battery.. We lived on top of a 30 yard hill with a 4% grade. Frequently started the car going down that short hill.
How about 4 on the tree? Had a Subaru Leone in Okinawa with that…
A high school buddy had a Citroen wagon with that.
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And five-tube kitchen radios. And 47% efficiency gravity heaters. And carburetors and point plug ignition!
Yeah, explain a dwell tach and a timing light, which I still have BTW, to a modern. And adjusting idle mixture jets. And how a carburetor operates (Bernoulli’s Principal? Whazzat?).
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Isn’t that what keeps planes in the air?
Eh, I have a car with a floor dimmer. In a manual like my car it’s annoying because I always invariably have to turn off the high beams for an oncoming car at the same time I need to shift. Not being able to flash the lights in the day or having to go clunk-clunk-clunk-clunk at night is annoying too.
Regardless of pretexts, the leftists use any means available to persecute their opponents.
Ever notice that with the exception of growing the scope of government’s involvement in your daily lives, the Left’s answer to pretty much everything else is to get used to lower expectations?
Jimmy Carter tried to convince us that high inflation, high unemployment, and the Soviet Union were all here to stay.
Well, when they grow the scope of government’s involvement in our lives, our expectations also go down. So they have that going for them.
Great news for consumers. Gonna need Congress to act to make it harder for agencies to create regs on consumer products that aren’t based on sound science and have hugely disruptive impacts. Otherwise the next d/prog administration will simply follow the applicable process/procedures to comply with formalities of the APA/rule making to implement their Cray.Cray policy.
Although two of my cars have floor-mounted dimmer switches, please do not bring back the dishwashers of the 1960s and 1970s. They worked poorly, and were so loud they drove people out of the kitchen.
The first-Trump-term Bosch 500-series dishwashers work great and are quiet. Earlier Bosch units had faulty grounds on the power supplies and the control boards would self destruct. (Of course Bosch insisted there was not problem!) Earlier Maytag dishwashers had terrible low quality bearings pressed into the aluminum motor shells. The bearings would corrode and fail, making the dishwasher sound like a chainsaw.
Virtually none of the Fed rules looked at total cost involved. All assumed it would cost nothing to install a new device, which is strongly false. All assumed the cost per delivered joule of energy was the same, when in fact the condensing gas units have a 3:1 (or 5:1 in the northeast) use cost advantage. That is to say the rule-making basis was completely false, and strongly fraudulent. The fraud was designed to induce further fraud in the analysis, finance and installation friends of Democrat politicians.
The court takes issue with the rule not following the process. We took issue with the DoE being able to make that kind of rule in the first place.
Once upon of time, Congress said it’s too time consuming to legislate agency rules for technical details. And no surprise, this is the result we get. If the DoE wants to ban stoves, Congress writes a bill to amend the law, votes on it and sends it to the president. Too bad.
Depending on the gas appliance locations in the house to where the circuit breaker box is located the cost to replace the gas appliance could be a small percentage of the over all price.
Your electrician will have to run a 240v line to the kitchen for the all new stove and depending on the house he might have to tear up some sheet rock to snake the line.
Long after the electrician, the sheet rock guys and the painter have left when you are sitting in your Barcalounger you see dollar signs in the patches that never match.
Good for you with your all new electric range but a few years later your gas hot water heater goes kaput and now you find your circuit breaker box can’t handle the extra load of both your range and hot water heater.
Wash, rinse and repeat when your gas furnace throws in the towel.
Once you pay all of the trades to upgrade your all gas house to an all electric house the appliances themselves will be a very small part of the overall cost.
This is correct, but misses more details. I had MASS-save do an energy audit on my house in Mass. They suggested I install heat-pump water heater and heat-pump clothes dryer. Both electric, and electric rates per delivered joule are about 4 times that of natural gas. OK, and where does the energy come from to be used in the new heat-pump appliances? Sure the motors for the compressor are driven by electricity, but the heat energy comes from ambient heat… which is provided from my gas furnace. Why not just use gas directly? Well that would make it so that “the program” in Mass to install expensive electric equipment would fail.
Yes, it would. The startup and running cost to the homeowner would also be much less, like 1/3 as much. In the end I installed a condensing gas tankless water heater, which was a hassle. But the gas bill went down immediately and has stayed down.
Your energy bills in Mass are paying for the utility companies green initiatives. Isn’t that nice.
Once you pay all of the trades to upgrade your all gas house to an all electric house
And, the great part is, that gas is still being used, because it’s being burned to make the electricity to send for all of those new appliances!
I can look out of my office window and see the 5th CCOA. I’m raising my cup of joe to them.
Your office is in the Quarter?
Congress offloaded the regulatory process to basically unaccountable agencies because they’re lazy creeps. That responsibility needs to be pulled back into congress which at least is theoretically accountable.
Massachusetts does this too. It’s a democratic party hack to make their policies constituent proof. this has to stop. If it doesn’t we might as well get rid of congress,
we might as well get rid of congress,
Ooooh, we’re back to using the four boxes, again, but stacked under a lamp post?
My modern dishwashers have all worked very well indeed. I don’t care that. It takes over three hours because they start the dishwasher after my evening meal and take the dishes out the next morning. My washer dryer combination takes one to one and 1/2 kilowatt hours per load. That is not a typo. The clothing comes out dry and clean every time. I got the Samsung instead of the troublesome GE. The only modern washing machines that I’ve owned that haven’t washed clothes. Well at all have been the top loaders with the spinner plate in the bottom instead of an agitator. Those aren’t worth a darn
Our newish (5 years old) Bosch dishwasher is great – quiet, efficient, but I’ve never seen one that can get dinner knives clean. It’s a mystery.
Fifteen years ago we replaced our 35-year-old split DX and gas furnace system with a new high efficiency two stage heat pump and a high efficiency two stage condensing furnace. We also had some ductwork reconfigured and put the air handler in the basement to get it out of the living area. All in all ~$15K worth of work for greater comfort and considerably more efficiency overall. We’re on the heat pump down to 40 degrees, after that gas heat. I track our electricity and gas usage on a spreadsheet. In the ten year warranty period we saved enough to pay for the new system. If the electricity quits in the winter my little generator can power the furnace.
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Do you load your flatware points up or points down? If you’re doing points up, try pointing them down. Stronger water jets that way.
Now do something about the stupid low-flush toilets. They are absolutely worthless.
The main problem with them is if you’re retrofit an old house with them. The outflow pipe isn’t angled correctly for the low flush mechanisms to work.
Shouldn’t even be an issue. Particularly if it was enacted through regulation and not legislation (passed with a by-name vote).
The problem is newer building codes “require” crap like that, along with other a slew of other “energy efficiency” things like what kind of windows you can have, etc.
There is a very, very important point here. Before Obama nationalized the mortgage market, loans were local and subject to local customs and relationships. My town did not require a residency permit in order to get a mortgage, and there was no requirement that a house be finished before moving in. As a result, young families could move into partially completed houses. Finish it across a few years as the family grew. Not any more!
Today’s houses must be finished before residency: the national mortgage laws require it. Culturally young men are not encouraged to learn a trade, and young women are very much against moving into “starter house” without granite countertops, 2 1/2 baths, AC and built-in laundry.
Small builders and renovators and *strongly* disinterested in dealing with the Section8 crowd. Too many hassles. The nationalized mortgage rules make it so local knowledge cannot keep known deadbeats out of the local mortgage market. So less cheap housing is built because nobody wants it… every body wants good housing for cheap.
These points, combined with the shockingly high intellectual complexity of the 2023 national building code revisions means nobody can build cheap housing, and nobody wants to buy cheap housing. So there is no cheap housing, and people complain without end.
Flush twice.
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If you can get by with just twice.
But it kinda defeats the alleged purpose of saving water….
I read all this and wonder how many people are really having problems and how many people are repeating the problems they hear that others are allegedly having. I had a house where a low flow toilet did not work correctly. A plumber came in and corrected a problem with the outflow pipe at a work fine from that on. And there’s times I’m more full of it than the congressman. I guess I’ve just been lucky or I’m doing something wrong.
The thing that should be tossed is the ability to make these sorts of rules, at all.
I don’t mean they couldn’t be made, but that the bureaucracy should have NO power to set standards not codified by law. If the people want fewer emissions from gas stoves, they should petition their congressmen and get them to write it into law, with a by-name vote. They should never be allowed to restrict the people’s lives through bureaucratic rigmarole – the “making regulations” should only be a power for actual implementation of what the legislature directed. And that direction – by a strict constitutional standard – does NOT include, “Well, you people set the standards.” Take some responsibility if you want to put a straitjacket on the people.
The DOE should not have such power or authority in the first place.
It should serve as an advisory body to the President and to Congress. And regulations suggested should then go through the process originally set by the Framers.
“ And I will continue to avoid cooking as much as I can, while appreciating the fact that I can choose not to use either electric or gas appliances.”
Best line of the day!
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