Donald Trump is nothing if not consistent in his revulsion toward low-flow plumbing fixtures.
During his first term in office, the president waged a crusade against appliances that sacrifice efficacy in the name of efficiency. He would rail from the rally stage against dishwashers that don’t get your dishes clean, toilets that require multiple flushes to eliminate waste, and “other elements of bathrooms” like faucets “where you don’t get any water.”
The president’s personal animus toward low-flow devices was reflected in his administration’s executive orders liberating manufacturers from the constraints imposed on them by the environmental lobby and the politicians beholden to it. It was a fixation that produced little more than scorn and mockery from the elite arbiters of American political discourse.
In 2019, NPR ridiculed the president’s typically “Trumpian nostalgia for a time when showers were strong, toilets used 4 gallons a flush, and lightbulbs burned your hands when you touched them.”
That’s one way of putting it. Another would be to describe Americans’ reasonable longing for a bygone age when the public could shower with confidence that they’d experience enough water pressure sufficient to clean themselves efficiently and without fear of exhausting hot water reserves. It was a time when they didn’t have to give the toilet bowl a second look after flushing, when dishwashers and washing machines didn’t compel you to disable environmental settings or perform excess manual labor to be satisfied with their results, and when the word “efficiency” meant doing a job well and quickly rather than describing merely the amount of material inputs (water, air, oil, gasoline, etc.) they consume in the process.
In keeping with its tendency to defer to leftwing activists at the risk of aggravating the broader public, the Biden administration did away with Trump’s executive orders governing water flow rates. It seemed like a good idea at the time — at least, it did to the climate catastrophists who are eager to sacrifice your creature comforts to their demanding crusade. “The good news is there was no clamoring for products that took advantage of this,” one energy conservation activist said in 2021 of Trump’s executive actions, “and we can put this whole episode in the past.” As Faulkner observed, the past isn’t dead. It’s not even past.
“No longer will shower heads be weak and worthless,” the White House announced on Wednesday. In an accompanying executive order, the Trump administration revealed that it was rolling back regulations governing the amount of water Americans can access from their showerheads. Just as the left and the mainstream press sneered at the president’s quirky fixation with water flow rates in the last decade, they are scoffing with self-assured condescension at the president’s latest executive order. But there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that Trump isn’t nearly as out of touch with the public as his critics are.
Studies cited by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy in a 2022 report found that 66 percent “of consumers want more flow and force” from their showerheads. That finding is consistent with other consumer studies, which have found “that ‘overall satisfaction’ was lower for lower flow showers than for higher flow showers, and also that people were more likely to say that they would buy the higher flow showers.” Similar levels of dissatisfaction are routinely uncovered when consumers are asked to rate their experience with low-flow toilets, washing machines, and dishwashers. Many consumers would be happy to replace their appliances with more environmentally friendly models, but only so long as they function as advertised. Too often, they don’t.
Think about the arcane regulatory framework the administration must navigate just to deliver to consumers a satisfying amount of water. Since the early 1990s, a federal law — that’s right, Congress felt compelled to weigh in on this — has capped the flow from showerheads at 2.5 gallons of water per minute. In 2013, unnerved by the market forces that were providing consumers with showers featuring multiple water conduits, the Obama administration redefined “showerhead” so that the 2.5-gallon limit would apply to all nozzles in a fixture. Consumers who tried to skirt Obama’s environmental regulations by purchasing multi-head shower systems found themselves forsaken until the Trump administration finalized a 2020 rule that applied the federal limit to every individual nozzle.
Set aside the logic that convinced Washington that it was within its remit to dictate precisely how much water Americans should be allowed to access in the privacy of their own bathrooms. Beyond that, this is a ridiculously byzantine framework to apply to something as banal as plumbing fixture flow rates. In lieu of getting the federal government out of the business of dictating the point at which your water consumption preferences verge on avarice, the least the president can do is give Americans access to whatever flow rate they prefer.