Biden administration officially reverses Trump-era environmental regulations that allowed showerheads to use more water

• The Biden administration formally reversed Trump-era water conservation standards.
• Trump personally pushed for the EPA to allow shower fixtures to use more gallons of water per minute.

The Biden administration has officially reversed Trump-era relaxations of water conservation standards former President Donald Trump personally pushed for that allowed more gallons of water per minute to flow through showerheads.

Under standards initially set in the 1990s, federal regulations stipulated that all newly manufactured toilets had to use a maximum of 1.6 gallons of water per flush and new showerheads could only use 2.5 gallons of water a minute. Under the Obama administration in 2013, the Environmental Protection Agency tweaked the regulation to also apply that limit to more modern shower fixtures with multiple nozzles.

But when Trump was in office, the EPA relaxed the standard even further to apply the 2.5 gallon limit to each individual nozzle on a showerhead, meaning a showerhead with two nozzles could use five gallons of water per minute.

Because the Trump rule only went into effect a year ago in December 2020, shortly before Trump left office, consumers aren't likely to see much of a difference in their showerheads and water pressure, the Washington Post noted.

"This was a silly loophole from the beginning, and the department was right to fix it," Andrew deLaski, executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, told the Post. "The good news is there was no clamoring for products that took advantage of this, and we can put this whole episode in the past."

Trump, who came to the Oval Office from a real estate and hotel management background, had strong opinions about water usage and water pressure that led to the regulatory change.

At a December 2019 event at the White House, for example, Trump opined at length about his beliefs on water usage and water pressure, saying that the EPA was "looking very strongly" at adjusting regulations.

"We have a situation where we're looking very strongly at sinks and showers and other elements of bathrooms, where you turn the faucet on in areas where there's tremendous amounts of water, where it all flows out to sea because you could never handle it all, and you don't get any water," Trump said in December 2019. "They take a shower and water comes dripping out, very quietly dripping out. People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once; they end up using more water. So EPA is looking very strongly at that, at my suggestion."

"You go into a new building, new house, a new home, and they have standards where don't get water, and you can't wash your hands practically; there's so little water," he added. "And the end result is that you leave the faucet on, and it takes you much longer to wash your hands, and you end up using the same amount of water. So we're looking very seriously at opening up the standard, and there may be some areas where we go the other route, desert areas, but for the most part, you have states where they have so much water where it comes down — it's called rain — that they don't know what to do with it."

In 2020, Trump again raised complaints about the energy standards leading to lower-than-ideal water pressure in the shower. "Because my hair — I don't know about you, but it has to be perfect," he said. "Perfect."

The New York Times reported in December 2017 that Trump, who "is naturally garrulous, and loves to give White House tours...has an odd affinity for showing off bathrooms, including one he renovated near the Oval Office."