The president made the announcement Tuesday on Truth Social.
President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he would move to roll back standards for light bulbs along with water-using appliances such as dishwashers.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, the president
wrote that he is directing Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin to “immediately go back” to environmental standards under the first Trump administration that were “terminated” under the Biden administration.
That includes standards on water flow regarding showers, toilets, sinks, washing machines, and dishwashers, among others, he said.
He also directed Zeldin, a former Republican congressman and New York gubernatorial candidate, to “go back to the common sense standards” on lightbulbs that were established in the first Trump administration but rescinded by the Biden administration.
“I look forward to signing these orders,” Trump also wrote.
President Joe Biden had embraced a host of measures, including new energy-efficiency requirements for household clothes washers and dishwashers that capped water usage. Conservatives had
challenged those rules in court.
In 2019, the Trump administration blocked standards on lightbulbs that would have gone into effect in January of 2020 that were
established under a 2007 measure passed by Congress. That rule mandated that all everyday bulbs use 65 percent less energy than regular incandescent bulbs, which the Biden administration banned from sale in the United States in 2023.
The rules that went into effect in August of that year set up strict efficiency standards for bulbs used in homes and businesses and bans the manufacture and sale of those that don’t meet those requirements. Practical incandescent bulbs, which trace their origin to an 1880 patent by Thomas Edison, can’t meet those standards. Neither can halogen bulbs. The rules also ban imports of less efficient bulbs.
Previously, the Energy Department said that that U.S. consumers can save almost $3 billion annually on their utility bills if they do not use such bulbs. Similarly, it projects that the rules could cut carbon emissions.
However, proponents of incandescent bulbs, including Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), have
said that the Trump administration should bring back incandescent light bulbs. Lee has
argued that the federal government should not have so much control over the market for light bulbs.
Household appliances, showerheads, and low-flow toilets were targeted by Trump during his first term in office,
telling business leaders 2019 that he was “looking very strongly at sinks and showers and other elements of bathrooms where you turn the faucet on ... and 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.”
On Monday, Trump signed an executive order encouraging the U.S. government and consumers to buy plastic drinking straws over paper straws.
“We’re going back to plastic straws,” Trump told reporters at the White House while he
signed the executive order on straws, adding that paper straws do not work well. “I don’t think plastic is going to affect a shark very much, as they’re munching their way through the ocean,” Trump said.
The White House, meanwhile,
said that there has been an “irrational campaign against plastic straws” that has “forced Americans to use nonfunctional paper straws.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
