Today It’s Your Gas Stove, Tomorrow It’s Your Dishwasher.

“Don’t worry about the dishwasher,” our host told us as we checked out the house where my wife and I were staying in the south of France several years ago. “It’s more than two years old.” I had no idea why I needed to worry about this or any other dishwasher, but I was about to find out.

The year was 2017, and new EU regulations had gone into effect, effectively crippling the dishwashers people had long depended on to clean their dishes. A cleaning machine that cleans is a radical idea, I’m sure, to radical EU regulators. Our host had remodeled his kitchen barely in time to install a machine made the year before the new EU rules regarding water and energy use went into effect. The new washers use so little water and energy that EU truth-in-labeling laws ought to prevent manufacturers from calling these overpriced beasts “dishwashers.”

“Dishwetters” might be more accurate. Or perhaps more accurate still would be “Dishmoisteners.”

If it’s a choice between an appliance that’s been over-regulated to the point that consumers have to pay far more than they used to for a dishwasher that does far less than it should or them standing in front of the sink for 30 minutes every night after dinner, singing, “Tonight we’re gonna scrub like it’s 1929,” then Brussels has already made the choice for them: If you want to buy a dishwasher, you’re still going to have to hand-wash those dishes before they go into the machine.

Here’s where Presidentish Joe Biden steps up to say: You ain’t seen nothin’ yet, Jacque.

In yet another notorious Friday afternoon news dump, Biden’s Department of Energy proposed new efficiency rules for dishwashers sold in the U.S.

If the proposed regulations go into effect — and there’s no doubt that the enviro-cabal running the White House is in favor — water use would be reduced by a third on some standard-sized machines, and energy use would be reduced by more than a quarter.

Consumers already complain that machines that have been made since Obama-era restrictions went into effect a decade ago already don’t properly clean or dry dishes. In the future, they’ll have even less water and energy to work with.

Nobody in Congress voted on these new standards that will carry the force of law. DOE seems to enjoy almost unlimited authority to regulate almost anything that uses energy in the name of reducing carbon emissions.

Under the current rules, dishwashers are limited to five gallons of water per cycle, or 3.5 gallons if they want to wear the federal government’s Energy Star label. Under the proposed rules that snuck out of DOE while everybody was getting ready for the weekend, each cycle will be limited to 3.2 gallons, period. Today’s current five-gallon machines will be “eliminated from the market” unless manufacturers restrict their flow to 3.2 gallons.

Remember what happened when D.C. decided to reduce the amount of water toilets were allowed to use with each flush? Let’s just say it was messy until manufacturers completely redesigned toilet bowls to work with Washington’s whims. I suspect that there won’t be any salvaging today’s five-gallon dishwasher designs, and I know for a fact that increased design and manufacturing costs will be passed directly onto consumers.

Perhaps today’s machines could get away with using less water if they were equipped with more powerful pumps to move it around with more force. That’s going to be difficult, probably impossible, since Biden’s new regs also require machines to reduce their average annual energy consumption from 307 kilowatt hours to 223 kilowatt hours. Just like when we spent a good part of the ’90s having to flush the toilet two or three times to “save” water, you’ll run your dishwasher two or three times to clean one load. You’ll probably have to finish drying them by hand, though, given the new energy limits.

Honestly, it will be easier and certainly cheaper just to go back to hand-washing — and I think that’s the point.

Going back to that trip to France a few years ago, we were sharing that home with sci-fi author (and Instapundit contributor) Sarah Hoyt and her husband Dan. Talking about how bad the E.U. dishwasher had become, Sarah said, “That’s the point of all these rules, to get us used to everything being a little bit worse than it was before.”