Low-Flow Toilets and Banned Bulbs, How Washington Moved Into Your House

There is a federal official, somewhere, whose job it is to think about how much water goes down your toilet. I do not mean that as a joke, though it is one. I mean it as a job description. Statutes written in the Capitol have specified the gallons per flush, the lumens per watt and the water flow at your showerhead, and the average American family has never been asked.

That is the story I want to tell, in order, because it is a good test of an old question: how far into the house does the government go? The answer, since 1975, is further than the people who wrote the Constitution imagined, and the mechanism is worth understanding. It is not a conspiracy. It is a sequence of statutes, agency rules and court rulings, each of which seemed reasonable when it was passed. That is exactly why it is worth looking at.

How it started: the 1975 and 1987 statutes

The foundation is the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975, passed after the Arab oil embargo of 1973 had frightened the country about fuel. The law created, among other things, a program for energy conservation standards for consumer products, to be administered by what is now the Department of Energy. The idea was that appliances use energy, energy is a national concern, and the government could set minimum efficiency standards for products sold in the United States. In 1987, the National Appliance Energy Conservation Act established specific standards for a list of household appliances, such as refrigerators, furnaces and air conditioners, and told the Department of Energy to review and update the standards on a schedule.

The pattern was set. Congress declares a goal, delegates the details to an agency, and the agency writes standards that bind every manufacturer and every buyer. The question of whether Congress has the power to regulate how a household appliance works is usually answered by pointing to the Commerce Clause, since appliances are sold across state lines. A person who thinks the clause has been stretched out of shape has a point, but that is a question for a constitutional essay, and the practical fact is that the standards are law.

The toilet: the Energy Policy Act of 1992

The toilet is the famous example. Toilets before the 1990s commonly used 3.5 gallons per flush, and in older homes, more. The Energy Policy Act of 1992 set a national maximum of 1.6 gallons per flush for toilets, along with limits for urinals and showerheads. The standard for new residential toilets took effect in 1994. A conservation goal for water, packaged in an energy bill, with a number chosen by Congress.

You know what happened. The early models, in many homes, did not work well. A toilet that cannot clear the bowl in one flush is a toilet that gets flushed twice, which uses more water than the old one and less patience than any of us have. Manufacturers worked on the problem, and later designs improved a great deal. I want to be fair about that. Engineers solved much of the problem, and today's models, many of them, perform well. But the early years taught a lesson about the way mandates work. When a standard is set by statute and not by the customer, the customer is the one who finds out about the trade-off, at the expense of her Saturday.

This is not an argument that water conservation is silly. In a drought-stricken region, saving water is a serious public aim, and a family that wants to save on its water bill can buy an efficient toilet by choice. The question is who should decide. A homeowner who wants a low-flow toilet can buy one. A homeowner who wants a different design has had that option removed by Congress.

The bulb: the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007

The light bulb was the second great fight. The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, signed by President George W. Bush, included lighting standards that required general-service bulbs to be much more efficient than traditional incandescent bulbs. The standards took effect in stages beginning in 2012, and the law also set a later "backstop" efficiency requirement of 45 lumens per watt, scheduled to apply from 2020 if the Department of Energy did not adopt a different rule.

People called it a "ban." The law did not mention any one technology by name, and manufacturers developed more efficient halogen bulbs and compact fluorescent lamps, and later LEDs. The phrase "ban" is shorthand for a standard that traditional incandescent bulbs could not meet. A fair critic would say the shorthand is not misleading. A product that cannot be sold because it does not meet the standard has been banned, whatever the euphemism.

Here is the steelman for the standard. One: LED bulbs last much longer than incandescent ones and use a fraction of the electricity, so a household saves money over the bulb's life. Two: the technology improved, prices fell and most buyers now choose LEDs voluntarily. Three: lower electricity use reduces the need to generate power. All three points are true.

Now the answer, in numbered form.

1. If the product is better, it did not need a ban. The thing about a better product is that people buy it. The shift to LEDs was driven by the technology and the falling price, and the mandate arrived when the market was already moving. A rule that follows the market takes credit for it.
2. Savings on average are not savings for everyone. A bulb in a closet that is on for ten minutes a week has a very long payback. A person with a medical condition, or a decorative fixture that needs a particular kind of light, or a tight budget this month, may have good reason to want a different product. A national rule has no room for any of that.
3. The standard locks in the government's idea of a trade-off. Light quality, color, dimming and cost are all matters of taste. The efficiency number is one factor among several.
4. The bigger point is the principle. If Congress may set the light output per watt of your bulb, it may set anything. The only limit is political nerve.

The agency: how the Department of Energy sets standards

The statutes set the frame, and the Department of Energy writes the details. It is a process, and it is worth knowing how it works.

Under the 1975 law and its amendments, the Department must review the standards for covered products on a statutory schedule and may issue a new rule that tightens a standard if it is "technologically feasible and economically justified," a phrase that governs much of the process. The agency looks at the savings to consumers, the effect on manufacturers, the energy saved and other factors. It publishes a notice of proposed rulemaking in the Federal Register, takes public comment, and issues a final rule with an effective date, usually a few years out.

The detail that matters most is the anti-backsliding rule. The statute provides that the Department may not prescribe an amended standard that increases the allowed energy or water use of a covered product. On that reading, once a standard is set, it can be tightened, but it cannot be loosened, though in 2025 the Department itself argued that the provision does not stop it from rescinding some standards, and that dispute is live. That is a ratchet. A policy with a ratchet is a policy that turns only one way, and the only way to stop it is to change the statute.

This is a fair place to state the objection to the whole structure. Congress delegated a wide range of choices about the shape of American household goods to an executive agency, and a ratchet makes the delegation hard to undo. That is the mechanism the administrative state uses. It takes a decision that the people's representatives should make and moves it to a body whose members the people do not elect. The Supreme Court's decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024) changed the way courts treat agency readings of ambiguous statutes, ending the practice known as Chevron deference, so a court now exercises its own judgment on what a statute means. That does not repeal the standards. It does mean the agency has to rest its rules on the actual text of the law.

The showerhead fight

The shower is where the argument turned into a story. The 1992 law set a maximum flow of 2.5 gallons per minute for showerheads. For years, manufacturers built fixtures with multiple nozzles, and a question arose: does the limit apply to the fixture as a whole or to each nozzle? If it is the whole fixture, a showerhead with four nozzles must keep the total flow under the limit. If it is each nozzle, the total could be higher.

In 2020 the Department of Energy, under the Trump administration, issued a rule interpreting the definition so that the limit applied to each nozzle, which would allow multi-nozzle fixtures with a higher total flow. President Trump had publicly complained about weak showers, which made the rule a political event. The next administration moved to reverse it. I am deliberately keeping the details light, because the rule changed more than once and the exact dates and wording are in the Federal Register. The point is the structure. A fixture's water flow was decided by an agency's reading of a word in a 1992 statute, and the reading changed with the administration. That is the sort of choice that should be made by the elected Congress, in the open, with the right to vote someone out for getting it wrong.

Note that the lighting rules went back and forth in the same way. The Department adopted a broader definition of covered bulbs, later withdrew it, and later a different administration adopted it again. A product category's legality depended on which party held the executive branch. A rule of law is supposed to be more stable than that.

The strongest objection, answered

The strongest objection to everything I have said is that these standards work. They save energy and water, they save households money, and the savings are measurable. A conservative who cares about the family budget and about waste should welcome a rule that cuts the utility bill.

I accept the premise that many standards have saved money. I reject the conclusion. First, a benefit does not settle the question of authority. The Constitution is not a cost-benefit analysis. It assigns powers, and a good result does not make an unenumerated power enumerated. Second, the savings are estimated by the agency that wrote the rule, and agencies have a habit of finding that their rules pay off. A claimed saving is a forecast. Third, people value things the agency's model does not count: the quality of light, the strength of a shower, the freedom to choose. A person who prefers a different trade-off is not irrational. He just has different priorities, and in a free country he is entitled to them.

How a citizen comments on a proposed rule

Here is the practical part, and it is the step that changes outcomes. Every proposed federal rule goes through public notice and comment, under the Administrative Procedure Act. Anyone can file a comment, and the agency is required to consider the significant ones and respond to them in the final rule.

1. Find the proposal. The Federal Register is published daily and is searchable online. Federal rulemaking dockets are collected on the government's regulations website. Search by the agency name, the Department of Energy, and the product, such as "showerheads" or "general service lamps."
2. Note the docket number and the deadline. Every proposal has a comment period, commonly thirty to sixty days. A comment after the deadline may not be considered.
3. Read the summary. The notice explains what the agency proposes, why and what it estimates the effects to be.
4. Write a focused comment. Identify the rule by name and docket number. State one or two specific points. Cite the part of the proposal you are responding to. Give facts from your own experience, such as the cost of a product or the way it performs, and say what you want the agency to do.
5. Submit it in the way the notice requires. Usually that is through the online form. Keep a copy.
6. Follow the final rule. The agency publishes responses to comments in the final rule. Read how your point was handled. If it was ignored, that is the stuff of a legal challenge, and a record of public comments helps.

Remember the scale. The Federal Register published 3,248 final rules in 2024 and 2,441 in 2025. Our Straws, Bags and the Other Small Sacrifices That Only Make Us Feel Green piece looks at what happens when the small sacrifices pile up, and the red tape page on this site tracks federal regulation in one place.

The Founding view

When the Framers wrote the Constitution, they put lawmaking in Article I, Section 1: "All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States." The words are "all legislative Powers." The theory was that the people who make the rules should be the people who answer to voters, so that a bad rule can be punished at the ballot box. When a rule is made by an agency, the lines of accountability blur, and the citizen is left to write a comment and hope.

I do not want you to hear a call to ignore efficiency, or to despise conservation. A thrifty family is a conservative thing. The point is that thrift is a virtue when it is chosen. When it is commanded, it is a regulation, and the right question to ask of any regulation is who decided, and who can undo it. For more examples, see A Thought Experiment on the Federal Kitchen Inspector Coming for Your Stove, a satire that follows the logic to its end, and The Electric Car Mandate Is a Choice Washington Makes for Your Driveway and How Fuel Economy Rules Killed the Small Pickup and Supersized the SUV for the same pattern in vehicles. See The Air Got Cleaner While the Economy Grew, and the Numbers Show How for the case for regulation at its strongest and why prosperity did the heavy lifting.

The case in brief

1. The Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975 and the National Appliance Energy Conservation Act of 1987 gave the federal government the power to set efficiency standards for household products.
2. The Energy Policy Act of 1992 set the 1.6-gallon limit for toilets and 2.5-gallon-per-minute limit for showerheads, and the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 set the bulb standards that ended the traditional incandescent.
3. The Department of Energy writes the details through notice and comment, under a rule against backsliding that lets standards tighten but not loosen, and definitions such as the showerhead rule have swung with each administration.
4. The savings can be real, but a benefit does not settle who has the power to decide, and a thrift that is commanded is a regulation.
5. Citizens can comment on any proposed rule through the Federal Register and the federal rulemaking site, and the agency must consider the significant comments.

What you can do: Search the Federal Register for one open Department of Energy proposal on a household product, read its summary and file a short comment before the deadline.