The Trump administration is hiding the information that keeps rural households from burning through their savings during a heatwave.
I write this from a shop with a window air conditioner that has been running almost continuously since the Fourth of July weekend. It is a 10,000-BTU unit, five years old, standard efficiency for what I could afford when the old one died. It keeps the bench tolerable for about eight hours of work. The compressor cycles on, the compressor cycles off, and every time it kicks on I think about the Wisconsin electric co-op bill that lands in the mailbox at the end of the month.
That bill is the fixed arithmetic of a small shop in a county where the median household income is about eighty percent of the state’s. Every dollar that goes to the utility company is a dollar that does not go to parts inventory, or to the mortgage on the land, or to whatever the kids need for school this year. I am not alone in this arithmetic. It is the arithmetic of every rural household I know.
The Department of Energy used to publish the advice that helped people manage that arithmetic. Advice on how to keep a home cool without bankrupting the family. Advice on how to weatherstrip a door so the cold air stays in. Advice on how to set a thermostat so the grid does not brown out at 4 PM on a Wednesday in July. The pages were filed under the department’s “energy saver” section, and as of July 3, according to analysis of Internet Archive records by researchers and journalists, at least 1,662 of them have gone dark.
The deletions happened just as the administration announced a proposed rule to roll back energy efficiency standards for home appliances, including air conditioners and heaters. The department called it ending “Green New Scam Appliance Mandates.” The timing is not a coincidence. The administration has been deleting inconvenient information from federal websites across multiple agencies for months, and the pattern is the same every time: if the information conflicts with the deregulatory agenda, the information disappears.
Let me tell you what the administration is calling “Green New Scam” mandates. The Appliance Standards Awareness Project, a coalition of environmental, consumer, and utility groups, estimates that the next round of efficiency standard updates would save each household an average of $160 annually on utility bills. That is $160 that a family in a rural county like this one could spend on groceries, or on a child’s dental appointment, or on the deductible for the health insurance that keeps the family solvent. The same analysis found that the standard updates would significantly ease peak summer electricity demand, reducing pressure on a grid already strained by more frequent heatwaves and the power demands of data centers.
The administration’s argument is that these standards interfere with consumer choice. This is the Nationalist Shell Game in its purest form — the rhetoric of freedom and independence deployed to justify the removal of information that would actually help people make free and independent choices. A farmer who does not know how to seal the air leaks in his farmhouse is not exercising choice. A small-engine mechanic who does not know how to size a window unit for his shop is not exercising choice. A family that cannot afford the utility bill because the information that would have helped them manage it was deleted from a government website is not exercising choice. They are bearing the cost of a deregulatory agenda that treats information as a liability rather than as a public good.
Andrew deLaski, the executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, put it straight in recent reporting: “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 deleted pages included guidance on keeping a home cool during summer heatwaves. The same week the pages were deleted, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani asked New Yorkers to set their air conditioners to 78 degrees to reduce strain on the city’s electrical grid. Within days, at least 18 of the deleted pages were last recorded as live.
The appliance standards program has been running since the 1970s. It has been a genuine success story — the kind of quiet, unglamorous federal program that saves people money, reduces strain on the grid, and lowers emissions without anyone having to think about it. The strain on the grid is lower than it would have been. People’s utility bills are lower than they would have been. The administration is rolling the clock back not because the standards failed, but because the standards worked, and working federal programs that help ordinary people are ideologically inconvenient for an agenda built on the proposition that the only legitimate function of government is to get out of the way.
The phrase “get out of the way” is doing a lot of work here. Getting out of the way means deleting the webpages that tell a family how to seal their windows. Getting out of the way means repealing the standards that keep a window unit from burning through $200 of electricity in a single month. Getting out of the way means that the information and the standards and the protections that keep rural households from falling through the cracks are simply no longer there, and the people who depend on them are expected to absorb the cost without complaint.
I have been reading Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America again this summer, the way I do every few years. Berry writes about the extractive mind that treats land, labor, and community as expendable inputs to be consumed and discarded. The extractive mind has a name for the information that helps people keep their households solvent at the end of a hot month: it calls it a cost. It calls it a burden. It calls it a mandate that interferes with the freedom of the market. The extractive mind does not have a name for the family that cannot afford the utility bill, or the elderly person who cannot afford to run the air conditioner, or the child who spends a July afternoon in a house that is too hot to be safe. Those are the externalities that the extractive mind does not account for, because the extractive mind does not have to bear them.
The irony is that the administration talks constantly about energy independence. Energy independence is a fine phrase. It polls well. It sounds like the kind of thing a country that produces more oil than any other country in history ought to be able to claim. But energy independence does not mean very much to a household that cannot afford the energy it is supposedly independent in. The real independence — the independence that matters — is the independence of a family that can keep the lights on and the house cool and the bills paid without having to choose between the air conditioner and the grocery run. That independence is not served by deleting the information that makes it possible.
The fans in the shop are running as I write this. The window unit is cycling on and off. The bill will come at the end of the month, and I will pay it, and I will be one of the lucky ones. The land is paid for. The shop is paid for. I have Sara’s school-district insurance. I have enough margin to absorb the cost of a deregulatory agenda that treats information as a burden rather than as a public good. But the margin is thin, and it is getting thinner, and the administration just deleted the advice that would have helped me keep it from getting thinner still.
That is not a consumer choice. That is a theft of the information that keeps rural households cool and solvent. And the administration that calls itself the party of the working family is the one that committed it.