This story first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Donald Trump makes no secret of his loathing for regulations that limit water and energy use by home appliances. For years, he has regaled supporters at his campaign rallies with fanciful stories about their impact. He is so exercised by the issue that, even as global stock markets convulsed Wednesday in response to his tariff plans, Trump took time out to issue an executive order titled “Maintaining Acceptable Water Pressure in Showerheads.”
Contemporary shower fixtures are only one of the items that rankle the president, who complains that “there’s no water coming and you end up standing there five times longer,” making it difficult to coif his “perfect” hair. He has frequently denounced dishwashers that he claims take so long and clean so poorly that “the electric bill is ten times more than the water”; toilets that require flushing “ten or 15 times”; and LED lightbulbs, which he faults for making him look orange.
In his first term, Trump pursued an array of gimmicks to try to undermine the rules. His moves were opposed by industry and environmental groups alike. If it’s possible for regulations to be popular, these ones are. They have cut America’s water and energy consumption, reduced global-warming emissions and saved consumers money. Legal prohibitions stymied most of Trump’s maneuvers back then, and the Biden administration quickly reversed the steps Trump managed to take.
Trump’s executive order on showerheads generated headlines, but it’s likely to have little effect (more on that later). Far more consequential steps have been taken outside the Oval Office.
With the aid of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team, Trump appears to be attempting an end run that could succeed where his past attempts failed: by simply terminating the consulting contract that the Department of Energy relies on to develop and enforce the rules. In late March, DOGE’s “wall of receipts” stated that it had “deleted” a Department of Energy contract for Guidehouse LLP (a PricewaterhouseCoopers spinoff) for “Appliance Standards Analysis and Regulatory Support Service,” producing a listed savings of $247,603,000. That item has now disappeared from the DOGE website, and its current status remains unclear.
This has produced confusion for everyone from appliance manufacturers to government officials to the contractors paid to enforce the rules. If the contract is indeed canceled, experts told ProPublica, it would cripple the government’s efficiency standards program, which relies on the consulting firm’s technical expertise and testing labs to update standards, ensure compliance and punish violators.
“It would have a huge impact,” said George Washington University law professor Emily Hammond, who helped run the program as deputy general counsel at the Department of Energy and now serves on its appliance standards advisory committee. “DOE does not have the internal capacity to do that work. Taking that away pulls the rug out from under the agency’s ability to run that regulatory program.”
Appliance manufacturers seem almost as concerned. “This is not a positive development,” said Josh Greene, vice president for government affairs at A.O. Smith, the largest manufacturer of water heaters in the U.S. Terminating the Guidehouse contract, he said, would create “a wild Wild West” where “upstart manufacturers” are free to import poor-quality products because “they know there’s no one to enforce the rules. That’s not good for American manufacturing and it’s not good for consumers.”
The Department of Energy has made no public attempts to clarify the matter. An agency spokesperson did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment. Emails to DOGE and the White House brought no reply. And Guidehouse officials, reportedly eager to lay low, also offered no response to multiple requests for comment.
The government’s efficiency requirements originated with the Energy Policy and Conservation Act, signed into law in 1975, when the concern was an energy shortage, not global warming. Today, the Department of Energy is required to set rules for energy and water use by more than 70 appliances and commercial products sold in the U.S. The agency must consider imposing stricter standards for each product every eight years, based on what is “technologically feasible and economically justified.” Manufacturers then have three to five years to make their products measure up.
The Energy Department typically stiffens a requirement only after years of study, comment, negotiation and testing (and sometimes litigation) among industry, consumer and environmental groups. The law also includes an “anti-backsliding” provision that bars relaxation of standards that have been finalized. Guidehouse and its subcontractors have for years performed virtually all the necessary technical work; they also maintain a certification database that U.S. authorities use to keep illegal products from being imported.
Republican lawmakers, anti-regulation advocates and right-wing media have long decried the efficiency rules as an impingement on personal freedom, limiting product choice. The early rollout of water-throttling products produced some of the issues Trump complains about, lampooned in a 1996 “Seinfeld” episode titled “The Shower Head.”
But in the decades since, the standards have been widely embraced, dramatically cutting energy and water consumption, reducing emissions and providing plenty of attractive consumer choices. In 2023, Consumer Reports found that “even the simplest and least expensive showerheads can provide a satisfying shower.” Dishwashers and clothes washers clean better while using less than half as much water and energy as they once did. The transition to LED light bulbs, nearly complete, is estimated to have cut energy bills by $3 billion a year and eliminated the need for about 30 large power plants.
In January, days before Trump returned to office, a Department of Energy report estimated that the efficiency standards are now saving the average American household about $576 a year on their utility bills, while cutting the nation’s energy consumption by 6.5% and water consumption by 12%. A 2022 survey by the Consumer Federation of America found that 76% of Americans support the government setting efficiency standards for appliances.
None of that has slowed Trump’s attacks. During his first term, the Department of Energy ignored legal deadlines for considering efficiency updates on 28 products, blocked the long-planned rollout of new lightbulb rules and sought to bypass finalized appliance standards through byzantine legal maneuvers. Among other things, the Energy Department announced special new “product classes” for dishwashers, clothes washers and dryers that completed their “normal” cycle in an hour or less. This would exempt any such “short-cycle” devices that were introduced from the existing limits on water and energy use.
Manufacturers never brought those models to market. Most existing appliances already had a “short cycle” option that did their job well; those short on time simply had to push that button. And by mid-2022, Biden’s Energy Department had reversed Trump’s regulatory moves. The department went on to issue an array of tightened home appliance rules jointly recommended by industry and consumer groups; most were finalized early enough to be immune from congressional rollback.
This didn’t stop Trump from boasting on the 2024 campaign trail that he had changed everything during his first term. He vowed to fix it all again when he returned to the White House. “Eliminate energy efficiency standards for appliances” was on Project 2025’s list of “needed reforms.”
Sure enough, on his first day back in the White House, Trump issued two executive orders targeting the efficiency rules. On Feb. 11, he posted on Truth Social: “I am hereby instructing Secretary Lee Zeldin to immediately go back to my Environmental Orders, which were terminated by Crooked Joe Biden, on Water Standard and Flow pertaining to SINKS, SHOWERS, TOLIETS, WASHING MACHINES, DISHWASHERS, etc., and to likewise go back to the common sense standards on LIGHTBULBS, that were put in place by the Trump Administration, but terminated by Crooked Joe. I look forward to signing these orders.” (In fact, the rules Trump cited were issued and enforced by the Department of Energy, not the Environmental Protection Agency, where Administrator Zeldin presides.)
None of the standards Trump listed were subject to an executive order, or any other kind of rapid rollback. In simple terms, Trump did not have the legal authority to change these rules.
No matter. Energy Secretary Chris Wright — who had listed “affordability and consumer choice in home appliances” among his top nine priorities — took up the cause. Three days after Trump’s Truth Social post, Wright announced that the Department of Energy was postponing “seven of the Biden-Harris administration’s restrictive mandates on home appliances,” which “have driven up costs, reduced choice and diminished the quality of Americans’ home appliances.” Wright’s list of seven affected “home appliances” actually included three types of commercial equipment and three other regulations long past the point where they could be undone.
That left only one household-product regulation that could be challenged. It involved an item that seemed like an improbable symbol of “freedom” and “consumer choice”: the tankless, gas-fueled hot water heater.
The vast majority of U.S. homes have traditional water heaters with 40- to 50-gallon tanks. By contrast, tankless gas products represent 10% of sales. They are about the size of a carry-on suitcase and heat a stream of water on demand. They’re energy-efficient and roughly twice as expensive as standard heaters.
But the rules governing tankless gas water heaters were vulnerable because they were issued in the final weeks of Biden’s term. That meant lawmakers could reverse them under the Congressional Review Act, which allows lawmakers to block a recently enacted agency rule, if a resolution to do so passes both houses and is signed by the president.
Appearing at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 20, Wright drew cheers as he offered a Trumpian litany — “My dishwasher has to run for two hours now, and at the end I got to clean the dishes” — before turning to hot water heaters. “We have a factory in the southeastern part of the United States that employs hundreds of people to build a particularly popular product these days,” Wright said. “It is a tankless water heater powered by natural gas,” which he described as “selling like hotcakes.” So, what did the Biden administration do, he asked. “They passed a regulation that would make that product illegal, and that company would be dead.” But under Trump, declared Wright, waving his arms, “we are fixing that problem. That factory is staying open. … America is back, baby!”
Wright returned to “the hot-water thing” in a FoxBusiness interview a month later. Assailing “nanny-state, crazy, top-down mandates that makes it more expensive for American consumers and businesses to buy what they want,” he said the new rule was going to shut down a factory “just built in the southeast United States.” Wright acknowledged that U.S. law bars elimination of other efficiency updates that he and Trump have targeted because they’ve already been finalized. “We can’t officially get rid of them,” he commented. “So we just pushed back the enforcement date, hopefully, to never.”
Wright’s portrayal omitted significant details. The administration’s actions involve a single beneficiary: Rinnai, a Japanese appliance company with $3.3 billion in revenues last year. In 2022, Rinnai opened a $70 million factory south of Atlanta, where about 250 U.S. workers build “non-condensing” tankless gas water heaters, a major moneymaker for the company.
“Non-condensing” tankless heaters are less efficient and less expensive than “condensing” tankless heaters, which reuse heat from their exhaust gases. As a result, Rinnai wouldn’t be able to continue selling them when the new standards went into effect in December 2029.
That, however, wasn’t going to put the company out of business; it wasn’t likely to shut down its U.S. factory, either, though Rinnai raised that specter in government filings where its U.S. president warned the new standards would make the Georgia plant “largely obsolete … eliminating” all its jobs.
Rinnai sells a broad array of products across the world. It also already sold condensing tankless heaters in the U.S. that met the new standard and were imported from Japan. And Rinnai had plans to make them in Georgia, according to the company’s most recent annual report. (Rinnai agreed to make its U.S. chief, Frank Windsor, available for an interview with ProPublica, then canceled twice at the last minute. The company ultimately declined to respond to questions about its public representations.)
Nonetheless, the company, now backed by the Trump administration, has pursued a multitrack campaign to roll back the new standards. Its efforts appear to be on the point of success. A resolution has passed the House and won Senate approval on Thursday. Rinnai has spent $375,000 on Washington lobbyists since 2023, according to disclosure reports. The company also joined with Republican attorneys general in a court challenge to the energy rule.
Three major Rinnai competitors supported the Biden-era regulations. Wisconsin-based A.O. Smith has actively lobbied against Rinnai’s effort to win a congressional rollback. Greene said blocking the standard will “disadvantage” U.S. companies, which have already invested in more efficient condensing technology, by allowing continued sale of Rinnai’s less expensive competing products. “In this time of ‘America First,’ it just seems to us a shame that where we’re heading is rewarding foreign manufacturers,” Greene said. “There should be a level playing field.”
Meanwhile the administration’s campaign has expanded to multiple fronts. On Wednesday, the Department of Energy announced a review of its procedures for energy standards, which one expert described as a reprise of the first Trump administration’s attempts to create procedural hurdles to updating efficiency standards.
Then there was the executive order on showerheads that same day. It, too, seeks to revive a move by the first Trump administration: to circumvent the limits on waterflow by redefining “showerheads” to include multiple nozzles, each of which could emit as much water as the entire showerhead was previously allowed. The Biden-era Energy Department killed that regulation, and Trump is attempting to bring it back while proclaiming that “notice and comment is unnecessary because I am ordering the repeal.”
That order will have virtually no effect because manufacturers have little interest in making showerheads that exceed the current limits, according to Andrew deLaski, executive director of the Appliance Standards Awareness Project, a nonprofit coalition of groups that support the efficiency rules. “The president is asserting king-like authority,” he added, about Trump’s claim that he does not have to follow administrative procedures.
In the end, DOGE could have more of an impact than a would-be monarch, if it’s able to kill the Guidehouse contract. Then, deLaski said, “it would be next to impossible for DOE to enforce its efficiency standards.”
Doris Burke, Mark Olalde and Pratheek Rebala contributed research.
