In January of 2023, Commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. of the Consumer Product Safety Commissioner (CPSC) ignited a political debate over an unlikely subject: gas stoves. During an interview with Bloomberg on January 9, 2023, Trumka stated that CPSC was considering banning gas stoves due to health hazards. He asserted that gas stoves are “a hidden hazard . . . Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.”
Trumka’s statements set off a political uproar, with Republican lawmakers accusing CPSC of attempting to use its power to surreptitiously advance a climate change initiative. CPSC Chairman Alexander Hoehn-Saric walked Trumka’s statement back just two days later, stating, “I am not looking to ban gas stoves and the CPSC has no proceeding to do so.”
Though gas stoves are used in about 40% of American households, some studies have found that they can emit air pollutants like nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, and particulate matter, which Trumka relied on in calling for the regulation of gas stoves.
Even a year and a half after Hoehn-Saric made clear that CPSC would not attempt to ban gas stoves, Republicans in Congress remain wary of CPSC. On Tuesday, July 23, 2024, the Congressional Subcommittee on Innovation, Data, and Commerce held a hearing on CPSC’s budget. During her opening remarks, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers criticized the politicization of CPSC. She claimed that, in the last five years, CPSC “has started to stray from its core mission in pursuit of a more politicized agenda with initiatives like a rule to ban gas stoves in the name of consumer protection when it is clearly just a backdoor attempt to advance the current administration’s radical green agenda.”
Subcommittee Chair Gus Bilirakis also revived the gas stove issue during his opening remarks at the July 23 hearing. “When we started this Congress last year,” he stated, “we read reports that Commissioner Trumka had discussed the idea of a universal ban on gas stoves in this country. The American people have made it clear to us this type of government overreach is unacceptable.”
At this point, CPSC has indicated that it has no intention of banning gas stoves. Although the Department of Energy released a gas stove efficiency rule earlier this year, the rule was largely scaled back from an initial proposal that would have impacted numerous appliances on the market. The new regulation focuses on efficiency standards for residential cooking products and makes “modest improvements” to existing regulations.
Trumka’s statements and comments regarding gas stoves are just one instance of a larger, more troubling pattern of misbehavior that has drawn the attention of Congress, as we explain in our client alert. His future appears more in doubt than that of the gas stoves he sought to ban.
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