AUSTIN — This week, the Texas Public Policy Foundation filed a comment with the Department of Energy, criticizing its proposed rule regarding water heaters.
The proposed rule will deprive American consumers of options by effectively removing an entire class of water heaters from the market. The Department did so based on an assumption that consumers are not sophisticated enough to recognize the usefulness of those water heaters’ distinct features.
“Congress specifically instructed the Department to consider the ‘utility to the consumer’ when determining whether it must set different standards for different classes of products,” explained TPPF Attorney Clayton Calvin. “The Department simply disregarded this, deeming the utility in this case inaccessible to average Americans. Ultimately, we’re all harmed when federal agencies engage in this paternalism and flout the law that is supposed to constrain them.”
“Agencies are creatures of statute and only have the power delegated to them from Congress,” TPPF Senior Attorney Autumn Hamit Patterson elaborated. “It is vital that unelected bureaucrats, at the very least, stay within the bounds of their delegated authority.”
A copy of TPPF’s comment can be found here.
Texas Public Policy Foundation is a non-profit free-market research institute based in Austin that aims to foster human flourishing by protecting and promoting liberty, opportunity, and personal responsibility. The Center for the American Future defends the Constitution through legal opposition to government overreach. The Center launches legal challenges at the administrative, district, and appellate court levels on behalf of ordinary people whose lives, liberty, and property are threatened by government action in defiance of the Constitution.
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