How long does it take you to wet your hair in the shower? A few seconds? A minute?
The president of the United States, who has long complained about being unable to coax more than a dribble or trickle of water from his showers, says it takes him much longer.
“I like to take a nice shower to take care of my beautiful hair,” President Trump said on Wednesday in the Oval Office. “I stand under the shower for 15 minutes until it gets wet. It comes out drip, drip, drip. It’s ridiculous.”
Much of the world was focused at that moment on his trade war, but Mr. Trump wanted to talk about showers. He offered this insight while signing an executive order to loosen restrictions on water flow from American shower heads. The order directs Energy Secretary Chris Wright to rescind a definition of shower heads first implemented by President Barack Obama.
It is the second time that Mr. Trump as president has attempted to redefine a shower head. A rule he introduced in his first term drastically increased the amount of water that showers with multiple nozzles could use. The Biden administration later reversed that change.
“No longer will shower heads be weak and worthless,” the White House said in a news release on Wednesday.
How big of an issue is this, really? And how many ways can you define a shower head?
For Mr. Trump, it has been a long-running crusade.
He has railed for years against low water pressure in bathrooms, an issue in some New York City high-rises. During his first term in the White House, he lamented that his showers did not supply enough water for him to achieve his “perfect” hair, part of a campaign against what he described as excessive government regulation.
“You take a shower, the water doesn’t come out,” he said in 2020. “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.”
At a dinner with Republican leaders in 2023, he repeated his complaint: “You know I have this gorgeous head of hair — when I take a shower, I want water to pour down on me. When you go into these new homes with showers, the water drips down slowly, slowly.”
Mr. Trump’s new order restores language from a 1992 federal law, enacted to conserve water, that prevented new American-made shower heads from spritzing more than 2.5 gallons of water per minute. Some states, including California and Colorado, as well as New York City, have imposed their own lower rates.
As showers with multiple nozzles became more common, the Obama administration ordered the 2.5-gallon limit to be applied to each shower head, not each nozzle.
Toward the end of Mr. Trump’s first presidential term, he set out to redefine what constitutes a shower head.
Previously, it had been defined in federal regulations as “any plumbing fitting designed to direct water onto a bather,” meaning that a unit with multiple nozzles counted as a single shower head.
Mr. Trump’s first administration changed that, defining it as “an accessory to a supply fitting for spraying water onto a bather.” That meant that each nozzle counted as an individual shower head, and each could pump out 2.5 gallons, with no restrictions on the total number of nozzles. It released a diagram showing examples of shower heads with as many as eight nozzles, which could theoretically spray 20 gallons of water per minute.
Back then, Mr. Trump also redefined the bathroom fitting known as a “body spray” to make it a different category from a shower head, and therefore exempt it from the 2.5-gallon limit, because it sprays water sideways instead of downward.
After Joseph R. Biden Jr. became president in 2021, he rescinded Mr. Trump’s rules. Most commercially made shower heads had continued to comply with the Obama-era standard anyway.
According to the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, an energy conservation advocacy group, few manufacturers took advantage of the Trump rule on shower heads, and some opposed it. When the Biden administration rescinded the rule in 2021, the Energy Department said it was, in part, because showers that provided the extra water desired by Mr. Trump were not widely available.
It’s unclear what effect if any Mr. Trump’s new executive order will have. If your water pressure is weak, according to the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, it’s probably because of your home plumbing or because of lime scale buildup on the shower head, rather than anything to do with the flow rate.
Yan Zhuang is a Times reporter in Seoul who covers breaking news.
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