The Claim

Empowered consumer choice for everyday items such as vehicles, straws, shower heads, toilets, washing machines, lightbulbs, stoves and dishwashers, saving U.S. consumers tens of billions.

The Claim, Unpacked

What is literally being asserted?

Two things: (1) the administration took action to expand consumer choice for eight categories of consumer goods, and (2) these actions collectively save U.S. consumers tens of billions of dollars.

What is being implied but not asserted?

That these are a unified, completed set of consumer victories. That efficiency standards were arbitrary restrictions on consumer choice rather than regulations with measurable conservation and cost-saving benefits. That the savings flow to ordinary consumers rather than to manufacturers, energy companies, or other upstream actors. That “consumer choice” is the accurate framing for what is actually a deregulatory agenda serving industrial beneficiaries.

What is conspicuously absent?

The other side of each ledger. Every efficiency standard being weakened exists because it was generating measurable savings for consumers: DOE’s own accounting shows existing appliance efficiency standards saved the average American household approximately $576 per year and reduced national energy use by 6.5% and water use by 12%. The “tens of billions” in claimed savings is presented without the corresponding consumer losses — higher lifetime utility bills, higher water bills, and the foregone energy savings the standards were producing. Also absent: most of the claimed actions were either incomplete, proposed rather than finalized, directed for future review rather than accomplished, or had already been claimed in prior list items.

Evidence Assessment

Established Facts

The eight product categories in the claim correspond to actions at widely different stages of completion as of January 20, 2026. Executive Order 14154 (“Unleashing American Energy,” January 20, 2025) explicitly listed lightbulbs, dishwashers, washing machines, gas stoves, water heaters, toilets, and shower heads and directed agencies to identify and suspend, revise, or rescind “undue burden” regulations within 30 days. This was a directive, not a completed rollback. The separate actions taken over the following year varied significantly: the showerhead definitional rule was finalized (April-May 2025); a presidential memorandum on water standards was issued but not yet fully implemented (May 2025); the CAFE vehicle rollback was still a proposed rule as of the claim date; the paper straw order covered only federal procurement. ¹

The showerhead action was real but narrow: a DOE final rule effective May 15, 2025, repealed the Biden-era regulatory definition of “showerhead” and a separate presidential memorandum directed review of all plumbing-product water use standards. The repeal of the 2021 definitional rule (Federal Register 2025-06476) restores the Trump first-term framework under which each nozzle of a multi-head fixture could individually emit up to 2.5 gallons per minute (gpm) rather than the aggregate fitting within 2.5 gpm. The underlying statutory 2.5 gpm maximum established by the Energy Policy Act of 1992 (42 U.S.C. 6291(31)(D)), signed by President George H.W. Bush, was not repealed and cannot be changed by executive action. Only Congress can modify that statutory ceiling. The practical market impact is limited to premium multi-nozzle fixtures — a niche segment. Industry experts told ProPublica the order “will have virtually no effect because manufacturers have little interest in making showerheads that exceed the current limits.” ²

The paper straw action (EO 14208, February 10, 2025) covers only federal government procurement and cannot override state or local plastic straw restrictions. Seven or more states and numerous municipalities maintain plastic straw restrictions that federal executive orders cannot preempt. The federal government’s straw procurement is a negligible share of national straw usage. This item was separately claimed as a White House win in item #245. ³

The vehicle CAFE rollback was a proposed rule, not a completed action, as of the claim date. The SAFE Vehicles Rule III NPRM was published December 5, 2025, with the public comment period closing January 20, 2026 — the same day the “365 wins” page was published. No final rule had been issued. The CAFE action was separately claimed in items #102 and #335, making this the third time the same vehicle standard rollback appears in the 365-item list. ⁴

The Secretary of Energy announced postponement of seven Biden-era appliance rules in early 2025, but ProPublica’s analysis found only one household regulation — tankless gas water heater standards — was genuinely vulnerable to rollback. Energy Secretary Chris Wright’s announcement described “seven of the Biden-Harris administration’s restrictive mandates on home appliances.” However, three items on the list were commercial equipment standards rather than household appliances, and three others were regulations already past the legal point where they could be undone. The dishwasher and washing machine regulations most aggressively promoted in political messaging were among those that Biden’s team finalized early enough to be protected from rollback. ⁵

DOE’s appliance and water efficiency standards — the same rules being weakened — save the average American household approximately $576 per year in utility bills and reduce national energy consumption by 6.5% and water consumption by 12%. This figure comes from a January 2025 DOE report published immediately before the administration’s deregulatory agenda began. The broader appliance standards program has reduced household and business utility bills by $105 billion in a single year (2024). The claim’s implicit baseline — that these standards impose net costs rather than generate net savings — is directly contradicted by DOE’s own accounting. ⁶

The “tens of billions” figure cannot be independently verified and likely derives from the CEA’s June 2025 report claiming $23 billion in savings from delayed DOE appliance standards. The Council of Economic Advisers’ “Economic Benefits of Current Deregulatory Efforts” (June 2025) listed “$23 billion from delayed DOE appliance standards” among $907 billion in claimed regulatory savings. The CEA report’s methodology counts only avoided manufacturer compliance costs, not the forfeited consumer savings from lower utility bills that the standards would have generated. The same report’s broader $907 billion claim relied on multiplying agency-reported regulatory costs by factors up to 17x to reach larger headline figures. No independent analysis has verified a “tens of billions” consumer savings figure for appliance deregulation specifically. ⁷

The most consequential action against the appliance standards program was not mentioned in the claim: DOGE’s reported cancellation of DOE’s $247.6 million Guidehouse LLP contract that provides the technical backbone for the entire 70-product appliance standards program. Energy experts warned ProPublica that eliminating this contract would “cripple the government’s efficiency standards program” because DOE lacks internal capacity to administer it without Guidehouse’s analytical support. Without this contractor, enforcement of whatever standards exist becomes “next to impossible.” The item later disappeared from DOGE’s website with its status unclear. This operational dismantling of the enforcement mechanism is not framed as a “consumer choice” win because it is not defensible as one. ⁸

Strong Inferences

“Consumer choice” is a rhetorical frame that assigns the benefits of deregulation to ordinary buyers while the quantified savings flow predominantly to manufacturers and energy producers. For each product category: automakers explicitly described the CAFE rollback as something that would “boost earnings” and “offset the cost of tariffs” rather than reduce prices (items 102, 335); the plastics industry celebrated the straw EO and its CEO declared “straws are just the beginning” of a broader deregulatory agenda (item 245); the showerhead change benefits niche premium fixture manufacturers more than it benefits mass-market consumers; and “short-cycle” dishwasher and washing machine classes from the first term were never brought to market because manufacturers had no interest in producing them. In every category, the consumer choice framing positions industry as the passive beneficiary of government overreach being lifted rather than as the active advocate for deregulation serving its own interests. ⁹

The claim aggregates nine overlapping items from the same 365-item list to create a single mega-claim without any of them reaching the bar for completion. Item #245 (paper straws), items #102 and #335 (CAFE vehicles), and item #337 (water pressure) all describe components of this same claim in separate list entries. By restating these partial actions as a unified “consumer choice” win that “saves tens of billions,” the administration creates the impression of a comprehensive consumer protection achievement from a collection of individually contested, partially implemented, or still-proposed deregulatory actions. The practice of bundling claimed wins inflates the apparent scope of the achievement. ¹⁰

The appliance deregulation agenda’s primary beneficiaries — energy producers, plastics manufacturers, auto companies, and niche premium appliance makers — are precisely the industries whose lobbying interests align with weakening conservation standards. The alignment between industry lobbying priorities and the specific product categories named in EO 14154 is not coincidental. The Energy Policy Act’s appliance standards framework was explicitly designed to produce consumer savings that were documented to reach $576 per household annually. Removing those standards does not create $576 in consumer savings from lower purchase prices — it removes $576 in annual utility savings and redirects that money to energy companies as increased consumption revenue. ¹¹

What the Evidence Shows

The administration took several real regulatory actions on consumer product standards in 2025: it signed EO 14154 directing agencies to review appliance regulations on January 20, 2025; it issued a separate showerhead EO on April 9 and a DOE final rule on May 15 repealing the Biden-era multi-nozzle definition; it announced postponement of seven Biden-era appliance rules through Secretary Wright’s announcement in early 2025; and it issued a presidential memorandum in May 2025 directing a broader review of water efficiency standards. These are real administrative actions. The claim’s factual core exists.

But the claim’s presentation systematically misrepresents what these actions accomplished. The vehicle rollback was proposed, not final. Most of the appliance rollbacks Wright announced were either commercial equipment, legally protected from reversal, or not yet acted upon. The showerhead change affects a niche product segment that manufacturers were largely uninterested in exploiting. The paper straw EO covered only federal procurement. Against this incomplete picture of deregulatory action, the claim presents a bold “tens of billions” in savings figure that no independent analysis has verified and that, on examination, derives from CEA methodology that counts only manufacturer compliance cost avoidance while ignoring the consumer utility savings the standards were generating — savings that DOE documented at $576 per household per year.

The “consumer choice” framing deserves particular scrutiny. Appliance efficiency standards are not restrictions on consumer choice — they set minimum performance baselines while leaving full latitude for manufacturers to exceed them and consumers to choose among compliant products. When an efficiency standard for a washing machine ensures the appliance uses 40% less water than 1990s models, the consumer “choice” that disappears is the right to buy a water-wasting appliance. The consumer who pays lower water bills for 15 years and never noticed the regulatory baseline is not experiencing constrained choice; they are experiencing the benefit of a minimum standard operating in the background. Framing that standard’s removal as “empowering consumer choice” is accurate as rhetoric and false as analysis.

The Bottom Line

The claim describes a real set of deregulatory intentions and some completed actions, but inflates their scope, misrepresents their stage of completion, and inverts the consumer interest analysis. The “tens of billions” savings figure is drawn from methodology that counts only compliance costs avoided while ignoring the larger consumer utility savings the same standards were generating. The same actions were claimed separately in at least four other list items (#102, #245, #335, #337), making this a consolidation of padding that was already distributed across the list. Most importantly, the framing of conservation standards as consumer burdens obscures who actually benefits from weakening them: manufacturers avoid compliance costs, energy companies sell more fuel and electricity, and premium fixture makers gain market options — while consumers lose the background savings that efficiency standards were silently delivering to their utility bills every month.

Footnotes

1. Executive Order 14154, “Unleashing American Energy,” Section 2(f), January 20, 2025; White House, whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/unleashing-american-energy. ↩

2. DOE Final Rule 2025-06476, “Repeal of the Definition of Showerhead,” Federal Register April 15, 2025, effective May 15, 2025 (govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2025-04-15/html/2025-06476.htm); Executive Order “Maintaining Acceptable Water Pressure in Showerheads,” April 9, 2025; Andrew deLaski, Appliance Standards Awareness Project, quoted in ProPublica, “Beyond Showerheads: Trump’s Attempts to Kill Appliance Regulations Cause Chaos,” April 11, 2025. ↩

3. Executive Order 14208, “Ending Procurement and Forced Use of Paper Straws,” February 10, 2025, 90 FR 9585. ↩

4. Federal Register 90 FR 87410, SAFE Vehicles Rule III NPRM, December 5, 2025; public comment period through January 20, 2026. ↩

5. ProPublica, “Beyond Showerheads: Trump’s Attempts to Kill Appliance Regulations Cause Chaos,” April 11, 2025; Energy Secretary Chris Wright announcement of seven appliance rules, early 2025. ↩

6. U.S. Department of Energy, report on appliance and water efficiency standard savings, January 2025 (cited in ProPublica, April 11, 2025): average household savings of $576/year; 6.5% national energy reduction; 12% water reduction. ↩

7. Council of Economic Advisers, “The Economic Benefits of Current Deregulatory Efforts,” June 2025, whitehouse.gov/research/2025/06; claims $23 billion from delayed DOE appliance standards as component of $907 billion total. ↩

8. ProPublica, “Beyond Showerheads: Trump’s Attempts to Kill Appliance Regulations Cause Chaos,” April 11, 2025; DOGE “wall of receipts” listing Guidehouse LLP DOE contract cancellation at $247,603,000; subsequent disappearance from DOGE website. ↩

9. DOT press release, “Freedom Means Affordable Cars” (December 3, 2025): Ford, GM, Alliance for Automotive Innovation statements; ProPublica, “Trump’s attack on paper straws is symbolic — but the plastics industry is celebrating,” February 2025; ProPublica, “Beyond Showerheads,” April 2025 (manufacturers uninterested in short-cycle appliances). ↩

10. White House “365 Wins” list, January 20, 2026; cross-reference with items 102, 245, 335, 337 for prior claims of same underlying regulatory actions. ↩

11. DOE appliance standards program savings of $105 billion in utility bills in 2024 (energy.gov/eere/buildings/appliance-and-equipment-standards-program); LED transition savings of $3 billion per year and modern dishwasher/washer efficiency (ProPublica, April 11, 2025). ↩