BY DINO GRANDONI with Paulina Firozi for The Washington Post

The Trump administration just finished a major revision of the rules for setting energy efficiency standards for dishwashers and other appliances — just the sort of common household items President Trump regularly tells campaign crowds no longer work properly. The Department of Energy this week put the final touches on new procedures for energy-savings standards for dozens of machines used daily in homes and businesses, including residential appliances like clothes dryers and microwave ovens, commercial equipment like walk-in refrigerators and industrial instruments like distribution transformers on the electric grid. While the Energy Department says the move will save money for consumers and manufacturers, advocates for making appliances more efficient counter that the new rules will only encourage lawsuits from manufactures upset with toughened standards and make it harder for regulators to cut the climate-warming impact of home appliances. Yet advocates for making appliances more efficient say the new rules will only encourage lawsuits from manufactures upset with toughened standards and make it harder for regulators to cut the climate-warming impact of home appliances. Like this? Click to receive free EP Blog updates “It seems to be that they’re issuing this rule to handcuff a future administration,” said Andrew deLaski, who runs the energy-efficiency advocacy group Appliance Standards Awareness Project. With the new rules governing how energy-savings standards are written, Trump’s deputies appear to be addressing one of the president’s more peculiar obsessions — his view that modern appliances just don’t work as well as they used to. Newfangled lightbulbs, for example, give him an ugly orange hue. (“The light’s no good. I always look orange.”) Today’s dishwashers won’t clean plates. (“It’s worthless! They give you so little water.”)Or as Trump complained to a campaign crowd last month in Battle Creek, Mich., “women tell me” they now have to run their dishwashers many times. ‘Women tell me’: Trump says he’s heard from women about inefficient dishwashers Still, the decision to add more steps to the standards-writing process is a peculiar one for an administration that has sought to cut red tape elsewhere in the federal bureaucracy.   Under the new regulation, the department will be required to publish the procedures for testing an appliance 180 days before setting the actual standard for manufacturers. That binding requirement, said deLaski, the energy-efficiency advocate, “will make it harder and more time-consuming to update the standards.” In the past, the Energy Department could tweak the procedures for testing the energy efficiency of machines while working to set the actual minimum efficiency requirements for them. The department also said it only will place standards on manufacturers if the energy savings meet a certain threshold — arguing that a big, 40 percent chunk of the standards issued over the past three decades account for only a small, 4 percent piece of total energy savings. Read the full story