A debate over whether the government can require manufacturers to sell energy-saving lights is set to switch back on when the House considers a pending spending measure.

Rep. Michael Burgess, a Texas Republican who successfully pushed last year to stop the Energy Department from using taxpayer dollars to enforce a law requiring light bulbs to become more efficient, plans to offer an amendment this year to extend that ban, his office said yesterday.

Last year, after negotiations with the Senate and the White House, critics of the light bulb standards in the House managed to include the ban in the final spending bill that set DOE's budget for the current fiscal year (E&E Daily, Dec. 16, 2011).

A spokesman for Burgess said the congressman intends to introduce his new amendment whenever the agency's spending bill for fiscal 2013 comes to the House floor. Leadership has not set a date, but "it would be his interest to offer an extension" to the ban, the spokesman said.

The effort to block the efficiency standards is likely to encounter more resistance this time around than it did last year, when manufacturers said they had planned on meeting the standards for this year anyway. Continuing the ban would inhibit further progress in making light bulbs more efficient, Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) said yesterday.

"As I understand it, they said a one-year [enforcement ban] was not an issue because they'd already geared up to meet the standard. But a continuation of a ban on DOE enforcing the efficiency standards is a very big mistake," Bingaman, who chairs the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, told E&E Daily.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who chairs the Energy Appropriations subpanel, said she too would oppose continuing the enforcement ban.

Democrats disliked the ban when House Republicans inserted it last year into DOE's appropriations bill, but its inclusion in the omnibus package that ultimately passed in December was not a deal-breaker. A slew of other policy riders pushed by House Republicans to block a broad swath of energy and environmental policies were dropped from the final bill (E&ENews PM, Dec. 16, 2011).

The standards, which were established in the 2007 energy bill authored by Bingaman, went into effect for the first time Jan. 1, but their enforcement was blocked in the spending bill. Conservative critics panned the standards as an attempt by the government to ban the incandescent light bulb, but the lighting industry said it had developed incandescent bulbs that would meet the standard for this year. Supporters of the standards say savings on energy bills can offset the higher price of more advanced light bulbs.