Trump Took Aim At Toilets, Claiming That Americans Are Forced to Flush '15 Times'
In a meeting at the White House Friday, President Trump vowed to tackle the scourge of low-flush toilets, making the improbable claim that water regulations force Americans to flush 10 to 15 times after using the bathroom.
"People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once; they end up using more water," said Trump. "So the EPA is looking very strongly at that, at my suggestion."
Trump may have been referring to regulations established in the Energy Policy Act of 1992, which decreased the maximum amount of water used in newly-constructed toilets to 1.6 gallons a flush. While consumers did initially complain that the new toilets didn’t flush efficiently, advances in toilet technology, including widened pipes and valves, mean that this really isn’t much of a problem these days.
Related Video: See Wedding Dresses Made Out of Toilet Paper
"You go into a new building, new house, a new home, and they have standards where you don't get water, and you can't wash your hands practically, there's so little water,” Trump continued:
And the end result is that you leave the faucet on, and it takes you much longer to wash your hands, and you end up using the same amount of water. So we're looking very seriously at opening up the standard, and there may be some areas where we go the other route, desert areas. But for the most part, you have states where they have so much water that comes down—it's called rain—that they don't know what to do with it.
Here's the video, via WaPo, of Trump discussing toilet flushing: "We have a situation where we're looking very strongly at sinks and showers, and other elements of bathrooms ... You turn on the faucet and you don't get any water … People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times." pic.twitter.com/pPE0im4RxL
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) December 6, 2019
Trump’s improbable description of a toilet-flushing crisis sound like, well, Trump being Trump. But the effects of his continued deregulatory binge are very real. Last month, his EPA loosened regulations designed to keep chemicals like arsenic, mercury, and lead out of drinking water. Now, he’s ordered a review of water efficiency standards. And though he insisted that "most" states have "so much water that comes down,” a 2014 Government Accountability Office report found that 40 states expect to see water shortages by 2024.
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