I & I Editorial BoardIn the early months of 2025, Donald Trump sensibly began to roll back burdensome regulations that had targeted modern conveniences. Now the House has codified a Trump executive order so that the next Democratic president can’t, with the stroke of an autopen, unwind the progress. Now it’s up to the Senate to match the House’s work and make the deregulatory directive law.
Still fresh into his second term in the White House, the Trump administration, in the words of Marc Oestreich that are so enjoyable to read that we have to repeat them here, “turned its chainsaws on the Department of Energy (DOE), cutting, canceling, or pausing a handful of onerous regulations set to hobble household and commercial appliances.”
“Gone were efficiency mandates that have made dishwashers weaker, A.C. units feebler, and appliances more expensive,” Oestreich wrote in Reason. “A new rollback offers a rare win for function over dogma.”
About six months after Joe Biden took office to begin one of the worst presidential terms in our history, we lamented that the cognitively infirm president didn’t want us to have nice things.
We were riled that Biden wanted “to force low-flow showerheads on the country that popularized showering, overriding an effort by the Trump administration to give consumers more options and reining in a government that believes it has no boundaries.”
Of course it was one of many invasions into private matters that Washington has dispatched from on high. The federal leviathan has regulated household goods ranging from light bulbs and washing machines to toilets and dishwashers. In the latter two examples, toilets now need multiple flushes to do the job that one flush used to do, and dishwashers’ cleaning cycles can now take four to six hours and still leave dishes dirty enough to require further handwashing.
But that wasn’t enough for the last Democratic administration that danced like puppets to the green activists’ shrill, off-key music. The Biden White House imposed efficiency rules on central air conditioning, heat pumps, walk-in coolers and freezers, and gas tankless water heaters.
Trump is no Maytag repairman, but he knows something is broken and needs to be fixed.
The House followed his lead, passing two weeks ago by a 226-197 vote (with the help of 11 Democrats) the Saving Homeowners from Overregulation With Exceptional Rinsing Act, or SHOWER Act, which “provides statutory authority for a revised definition of showerhead for the purpose of federal water efficiency regulations.”
The hope here is that the Senate also passes the bill, setting off a cascade of deregulatory legislation that will wipe out decades of Democrats’ attempt to run our lives from the halls of the administrative state in Washington.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
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