The Department of Energy’s appliance efficiency standards have been quietly saving American households money since the 1970s — not as a line item anyone notices, but as the bill that didn’t spike as high as it could have. The next round of updates alone is estimated to save each household $160 a year. When your combined net income is $8,800 after taxes and $2,400 goes to childcare before you’ve touched the mortgage, $160 is the difference between covering September and scrambling.
At least 1,662 DOE webpages — including over 300 that had more than 160,000 views in the last month alone — went dark as of July 3, according to a Guardian analysis of Internet Archive data. People were looking for help. The help was there until it wasn’t. The administration deleted the pages within days of proposing to roll back energy efficiency standards for home appliances — air conditioners, heaters, the machines that keep a family’s electric bill from becoming a second mortgage. If enacted, the rollback would undo decades of standards and make it much harder for future administrations to update them.
This is a grid already straining under AI datacenters and more frequent heatwaves, and the efficiency program is the invisible infrastructure that keeps demand from spiking past what the system can handle. The administration just spent $2.7 billion to cancel offshore wind leases and $1.1 billion on coal while deleting the pages that told families how to use less energy. The supply side is being made worse on purpose. The demand side is being made harder to manage on purpose. The information that could help families bridge the gap is being deleted on purpose.
Andrew deLaski, executive director at the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, told the Guardian that “having a functioning air conditioner is a health and safety issue for the elderly, for folks with health conditions, and for the very young.” The efficiency standards are what keep the cost of running those air conditioners from consuming a family’s budget. The next round of updates would save each household $160 annually and ease peak summer electricity demand — exactly what the grid needs when the temperature in Phoenix hits 115 and the datacenter down the road is drawing power like a small city.
There is a particular kind of cruelty in doing this during a heatwave. A heatwave the administration refuses to connect to climate change — the same administration that shuttered NOAA’s climate site and told its scientists not to use the word — is leaving families without the guidance they need. The policy version is not complicated: maintain the efficiency standards, fund the weatherization programs, keep the consumer guidance online. Rich country after rich country has reached for energy support measures during extreme weather because the alternative — families choosing between cooling and feeding their kids — is not a policy disagreement, it’s a moral failure.
The Catholic Social Teaching tradition calls it the corporal works of mercy: shelter the homeless, visit the sick. In a heatwave, keeping a vulnerable person’s air conditioning running is both of those at once. The state has no moral argument for making the air conditioner unaffordable during the season that kills. The DOE efficiency standards were the policy-level infrastructure for doing that work at scale. The administration is abandoning it and calling it freedom.
Pew has been measuring this since before some of these kids could vote, and the line keeps going the same direction. Families are spending more on housing and utilities than their parents did, with less left over. The efficiency standards were one of the few things the government did that quietly pushed the other direction — saving each household $160 a year while nobody was watching. Now the standards are being gutted, the information is gone, and the tips that could help are a dead link.
You’re on your own, kid. The administration made sure of it.