There is no one on earth who thinks about water pressure more than President Trump. His campaign speeches routinely feature long monologues about dribbling faucets, flushing the toilet repeatedly, and dishwashers that have to be run a dozen times.
“So, showerheads,” he said on July 16. “You take a shower, the water doesn’t come out. You want to wash your hands, the water doesn’t come out. So, what do you do? You just stand there longer or you take a shower longer? Because my hair — I don’t know about you — but it has to be perfect. Perfect.”
If your hair isn’t “perfect” like Donald Trump’s, it’s probably because the Democrats limited you to 2.5 gallons of water per minute. Tyranny!
“Dishwashers,” he said, warming to his topic. “You didn’t have any water, so you — the people that do the dishes — you press it, and it goes again, and you do it again and again. So, you might as well give them the water because you’ll end up using less water. So, we made it so dishwashers now have a lot more water. And in many places — in most places of the country — water is not a problem. They don’t know what to do with it. It’s called ‘rain.’ They don’t have a problem.”
And then there’s the toilets.
“People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once,” said the man who appears to subsist on a diet of cheeseburgers and burnt steak.
The same way that Trump has convinced himself that normal Americans despise windmills, LED bulbs, and high-mileage vehicles, the president just knows that we’d all rush out and buy energy inefficient dishwashers for “the people that do the dishes” if only we could.
He’s also under the mistaken impression that he waved his magic wand and granted us our wish. Last week at a visit to a Whirlpool factory, Trump boasted, “They put restrictors on [shower heads]. I got rid of that. I signed it out. That’s common sense.”
In normal times, the president’s hallucination would not be an impetus to federal rulemaking. But these are not normal times, so yesterday the Department of Energy proposed to redefine “showerhead” for the purpose of federal law.
DOE’s current definition considers all of the individual showerheads (which DOE has termed variously as sprays, openings, or nozzles) in a product containing multiple showerheads together for purposes of compliance with the water conservation standard established in the Energy Policy and Conservation Act (“EPCA”). DOE proposes instead to define showerhead as that term is defined in the 2018 ASME standard, such that each showerhead in a product containing multiple showerheads would be considered separately for purposes of determining standards compliance, and only one of them would need to be turned on for testing.
Note that this rule does not “get rid of” the “restrictor.” Instead it allows a multi-nozzle shower head to shoot 2.5 gallons per minute out of each nozzle, as opposed 2.5 gallons in toto. This directly repudiates a 2011 Energy Department memo clarifying that “multiple spraying components sold together as a single unit designed to spray water onto a single bather constitutes a single showerhead for purposes of the maximum water use standard.”
This would appear to be a solution in search of a problem, since Americans seem to be managing this whole bathing thing just fine.
“There is absolutely no need to change current showerhead standards,” David Friedman, Vice President of Advocacy at Consumer Reports, and a former acting assistant secretary for the Department of Energy said on the organization’s website. “Thanks to the standards, consumers have access to showerheads that not only score well on CR tests and achieve high levels of customer satisfaction, but also save consumers money by reducing energy and water consumption.”
But now “cutting regulation” — any regulation at all — is a win in and of itself.
“President Trump promised the American people that he would reduce onerous federal regulations on the American consumer, and this proposed rulemaking on showerheads does just that,” Energy spokeswoman Shaylyn Hynes told NBC.
How redefining a “showerhead” for the purpose of federal standards “reduce[s] onerous federal regulation” Ms. Hynes did not say. But Tea Party Senator Mike Lee applauded the move as striking a blow against tyranny.
Because God gave Americans the right to wash their bums with a firehose, and who is the government to tell us otherwise.
FREEEEEEEEEEDOMMMMMMMM!
Trump Boasts of Putting ‘a Lot More Water’ in Dishwashers & Bringing Back ‘Old-Fashioned’ Bulbs [People]
Trump administration wants to let it flow with new rules for showerheads [NBC]