Editors at Issues and Insights highlight one positive development on Capitol Hill.
In the early months of 2025, Donald Trump sensibly began to roll back burdensome regulations that had targeted modern conveniences. Now the House has codified a Trump executive order so that the next Democratic president can’t, with the stroke of an autopen, unwind the progress. Now it’s up to the Senate to match the House’s work and make the deregulatory directive law.
Still fresh into his second term in the White House, the Trump administration, in the words of Marc Oestreich that are so enjoyable to read that we have to repeat them here, “turned its chainsaws on the Department of Energy (DOE), cutting, canceling, or pausing a handful of onerous regulations set to hobble household and commercial appliances.”
“Gone were efficiency mandates that have made dishwashers weaker, A.C. units feebler, and appliances more expensive,” Oestreich wrote in Reason. “A new rollback offers a rare win for function over dogma.”
About six months after Joe Biden took office to begin one of the worst presidential terms in our history, we lamented that the cognitively infirm president didn’t want us to have nice things.
We were riled that Biden wanted “to force low-flow showerheads on the country that popularized showering, overriding an effort by the Trump administration to give consumers more options and reining in a government that believes it has no boundaries.”
Of course it was one of many invasions into private matters that Washington has dispatched from on high. The federal leviathan has regulated household goods ranging from light bulbs and washing machines to toilets and dishwashers. In the latter two examples, toilets now need multiple flushes to do the job that one flush used to do, and dishwashers’ cleaning cycles can now take four to six hours and still leave dishes dirty enough to require further handwashing.
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