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President Donald Trump reignited his strange obsession with water, specifically water pressure, on Wednesday and the result is likely to cost consumers millions on their utility bills.
Trump signed an executive order titled “Maintaining Acceptable Water Pressure In Showerheads” which will repeal regulations put in place by the Biden administration limiting how much water can be used in showerheads.
At a White House signing of the order Trump ranted, “I like to take a nice shower to take care of my beautiful hair. I have to stand in the shower for 15 minutes until it gets wet. … It’s ridiculous.”
A fact sheet sent out by the White House said Trump was going to end “the Obama-Biden war on water pressure and make America’s showers great again.”
But there was no “war” on water pressure. An explainer from the Appliance Standards Awareness Project released last June explained that efficient showerheads cut water usage, helping the environment, and they saved families money on their utility bills.
Consumer Reports examined the showerheads on the market in January and determined that despite Trump’s complaints to the contrary, modern showerheads are not affected by water flow.
“Our testing found that water flow really doesn’t predict performance,” Bernie Deitrick, Consumer Reports’ test engineer in charge of showerhead testing, said. In fact the outlet determined that the highest-rated showerheads used even less water than the federal standards require.
Manufacturers didn’t even want this. Trump reversed water pressure standards in his first administration over their objections.
What is at play here is Trump and his obsessions. Trump is fixated to a disturbing degree on water pressure issues. He has gone on and on about the topic multiple times over the last five years, as the Guardian noted in 2019.
In 2019, he ordered the EPA to investigate the topic.
“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 the water rushes out to sea because you could never handle it. And you don’t get any water. You turn on the faucet—you don’t get any water. They take a shower, and water comes dripping out, it’s dripping out very quietly, dripping out,” Trump said.
The next year, in 2020, he was back on it again. Appearing at a Whirlpool manufacturing plant in Ohio, Trump said, “You turn on the shower—if you’re like me, you can’t wash your beautiful hair properly.”
Perhaps Trump has been having an issue with his water because he doesn’t pay contractors, like plumbers, when his companies contract them to do work. But the water crisis he keeps describing isn’t one that most Americans experience.
Related |Trump thinks he invaded California and turned on a magic water faucet
Or perhaps Trump simply doesn’t know how water and water delivery systems work. Early in his second term, Trump claimed that he ordered forces into California and that they turned on some sort of magical faucet to open up the flow of water to firefighters dealing with the fires in Los Angeles.
It is unclear if this is the same faucet that he claimed during last year’s election was being used to hold back water from Canada, much to the exasperation of actual water experts from Canada.
What is clear about water was that the standards put in place by Biden were helping consumers and the environment, but now Trump’s water obsession has thrown out all of the common sense.
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