US president Donald Trump has signed an executive order rescinding the policy of water flow regulation in showerheads passed by previous administrations.
Announced yesterday, the order was named Maintaining Acceptable Water Pressure in Showerheads.
It took aim at “overregulation” and used showerheads as a “small but meaningful example”, citing the Biden administration’s definition of showerhead under the 2021 Energy Conservation Program for Consumer Products, which limited flow on showerheads.
The White House’s newest order instructed the Secretary of Energy to rescind the “13,000-word regulation defining ‘showerhead'”.
The new definition will be a resumption of a 1992 law that sets the definition of showerhead at a “2.5-gallons-per-minute standard”.
War on water pressure
In a fact sheet released with the order, the administration said that the order was meant “to end the Obama-Biden war on water pressure and make America’s showers great again”.
The Biden-era restrictions limited overall water use in a shower no matter how many nozzles. The Trump administration’s order would allow each nozzle in a shower to produce 2.5 gallons, allowing for multi-nozzle showers to produce more water.
“Under Obama and Biden, the government issued lengthy rules – thousands of words long – redefining ‘showerhead’ as a ‘nozzle’ and making multi-nozzle showers illegal if they collectively discharged over 2.5 gallons of water per minute,” said the White House.
Water pressure in showers has been a concern of Trump since his first term. He has often complained about what he claims are weak water pressures in household water fixtures.
“We’re going to get rid of those restrictions,” said Trump on the most recent order.
“You have many places where they have water, they have so much water they don’t know what to do with it,” he continued. But people buy a house, they turn on the sink, and water barely comes out. They take a shower, water barely comes out. And it’s an unnecessary restriction.”
According to the New York Times, many manufacturers create products that already adhere to the Obama-era rules on water use in showers.
Extra water showers not widely available
“When the Biden administration rescinded the rule in 2021, the Energy Department said it was, in part, because showers that provided the extra water desired by Mr. Trump were not widely available,” said the New York Times.
Citing studies from the Appliances Standard Awareness Project, it said that problems with water pressure are usually more closely related to plumbing rather than the flow rate of fixtures.
Though not directly affected, the contextual documents related to Trump’s most recent showerhead order also took aim at Biden-era regulations on “gas stoves, water heaters, washing machines, furnaces, dishwashers”, which it called “Biden’s dumb war on things that work”.
The order came after a week of international uncertainty over a slew of international tariffs announced by the government, many of which were later rescinded or paused.
On Wednesday, the Trump administration turned its sites towards other sustainability measures by releasing an order called Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry and Amending Executive Order 1424.
This measure empowers departments to “remove Federal regulatory barriers” involving coal production, export and use in the United States.
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