The first article in Jeffrey Tucker’s Bourbon for Breakfast is “The Bureaucrat in Your Shower” from 2006. Although I worked side-by-side with Jeffrey at the Mises Institute, I had no idea American showers had become, in President Trump’s terms, “weak” until a glorious cascade of water came from a shower head in Salamanca, Spain.
Tucker starts his piece about Al Dietemann, head of conservation for the Seattle Water Board. Dietemann ordered some shower heads from Zoe Industries Manufacturing and sent them to BR Laboratories in Huntington, California. Armed with data, Dietemann reported Zoe to the feds, accusing Zoe of “blatant violations of environmental protection laws.”
“Now the heat is on. What’s the big deal? What critical matter of American public life is at stake? It’s all about water flow and gallons per minute,” Tucker wrote.
It turns out, Donald J. Trump has been wondering what the big deal is for a long time because his gorgeous blond locks are at stake. “In my case, I would like to take a nice shower to take care of my beautiful hair. For 15 minutes until it gets wet. Drip, drip, drip. Ridiculous,” Trump said Wednesday in the Oval Office as he signed the directive. “What you do is you end up washing your hands five times longer, so it’s the same water. And we’re going to open it up so that people can live.”
The Executive Order is titled “Maintaining Acceptable Water Pressure in Showerheads.” Trump blames presidents Obama and Biden for America’s weak showers, but it is The Federal Energy Policy Act of 1992 which mandates that “all faucet fixtures manufactured in the United States restrict maximum water flow at or below 2.5 gallons per minute (gpm) at 80 pounds per square inch (psi) of water pressure or 2.2 gpm at 60 psi.”
Zoe Industries had put three heads together as a work around the edict.
Tucker, wrote with his trademark exuberance about Zoe,
They are not water anarchists; we aren’t talking about shower-reg secessionists here. But the company did insightfully observe that the restriction applies on a per-shower-head basis.
So Zoe sells full units that have three full heads per shower! What a solution—truly in the spirit of American enterprise in the best sense. These remarkable units are both brilliant and beautiful, and they comply with the letter of the law. The one that annoyed Bureaucrat Al is the Nautilus II Chrome—and what a piece of work it is!
Tucker points out that the government can’t regulate the length of showers or how many times we flush, so water saving shower heads and toilets are just an inconvenience to consumers.
Noah Feldman, in an opinion piece for Bloomberg entitled “‘Showerhead’ Executive Order Hides a Serious Surprise,” writes,
Donald Trump has issued a new executive order explicitly challenging the Administrative Procedure Act of 1946 (APA) — the law most used by the federal courts to block his other unlawful executive actions. Disguised as a trivial order about (of all things) low-flow showerheads, it is, in reality, an invitation to the Supreme Court to gut the APA. That would be a disaster for the rule of law.
The APA requires “notice and comment” and in this executive order Trump is giving the middle finger to the law and throwing it in the lap of the Supreme Court. Trump’s EO states “Notice and comment is unnecessary because I am ordering the repeal.” Feldman writes, “Again, this is a direct, overt violation of the law.”
That simple everyday annoyance created by government that Tucker wrote about almost 20 years ago will now will likely be heard by the Supreme Court.
