The statutory Manufactured Housing Consensus Committee (MHCC) following a two-day teleconference meeting, voted on February 16, 2024 – as urged by MHARR — to reject the proposed manufactured housing energy standards enforcement rule published by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) in the Federal Register on December 26, 2023.

MHARR, in public remarks to the Committee, called upon members to reject the proposed rule, on the ground that the proposed regulations (as well as the DOE manufactured housing energy standards themselves) were not appropriate for manufactured homes, would do little or nothing to benefit consumers, and would result in destructive price increases that would exclude large numbers of lower and moderate-income American families from the manufactured housing market and the American Dream of home ownership. 

MHARR also provided Committee members with copies of its January 24, 2024 written comments to DOE on the proposed enforcement regulations, which strenuously objected to the proposed regulations on multiple bases. These comments emphasized that DOE, in a conscious and intentional effort to bypass and subvert legitimate and accurate cost-benefit analysis of the proposed manufactured housing standards – as specifically required by the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 and other federal law, – (while rushing to meet court deadlines that it had agreed to) failed to propose or promulgate testing, enforcement and regulatory compliance criteria, and simultaneously failed to consider the cost and cost burden of those criteria in its supposed cost-benefit assessment. Then when it published its December 26, 2023 proposed enforcement regulations, it incredulously maintained – with absolutely no supporting evidence or analysis — that those regulations would have little or no cost impact.

Significantly, the MHCC agreed that DOE’s claims with respect to the regulations and their likely costs were not supported and that the absence of specific compliance benchmarks in the DOE proposed regulations would create confusion and unnecessary cost burdens. 

The MHCC’s rejection of the proposed DOE enforcement regulations, by a nearly-unanimous vote (with one abstention), follows its earlier vote to reject (on similar grounds) DOE’s “final” manufactured housing energy standards rule published on May 31, 2022. At that time, the MHCC recommended HUD adoption of less onerous energy criteria based on the unique construction and characteristics of manufactured housing and the specific needs of manufactured housing consumers. According to HUD, these recommended standards (which, again, differ substantially from the DOE “final” standards) are under review by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) as part of the standard HUD regulatory process.

MHARR will continue to carefully monitor all aspects of the DOE/HUD energy rulemaking process and will take further action as warranted by developments.

cc: Other Interested HUD Code Manufactured Housing Industry Members