Eleven House Democrats jumped party lines to vote with their Republican counterparts in a bid to overturn regulations pushed during former President Joe Biden’s tenure.
According to Fox News, the House of Representatives voted 226-197 to overturn Biden-era regulations effectively aimed at restricting how strong shower heads could be.
Federal law already caps how much water a shower head is allowed to emit.
During the Biden administration, regulators took a broader view of that rule. They concluded that showers equipped with multiple nozzles had to be treated as a single unit, meaning the total water flow across all heads could not exceed the legal maximum.
The practical effect was straightforward: the more nozzles a shower had, the weaker each one became.
Multi-head systems were effectively throttled, trading water pressure for regulatory compliance.
“Washington bureaucrats have gone too far in dictating what happens in Americans’ own homes,” Rep. Russell Fry, a Republican from South Carolina, said of the regulations.
“This is about defending consumer choice, pushing back on regulatory overreach and standing up for commonsense policy.”
Fry sponsored this bill, known as the SHOWER (Saving Homeowners from Overregulation with Exceptional Rinsing) Act. It was a direct response to the Biden-era rules that sought to cap shower head effectiveness.
“That rule was widely criticized as overreach and emblematic of a broader regulatory agenda targeting everyday household appliances,” Fry said earlier in a statement. “The SHOWER Act is a smart fix that reaffirms each shower nozzle is just that — its own shower head — and should be treated accordingly under the law.”
Federal regulators spent years stretching appliance rules so far that they had to literally redefine a showerhead.
The SHOWER Act restores sanity, protects consumers, and—don’t worry—won’t leave anybody high and dry. pic.twitter.com/8ziORXsVz5
— Congressman Russell Fry (@RepRussellFry) November 20, 2025
Maine Democratic Rep. Jared Golden, one of the 11 defecting Democrats, had a simple response when asked about the bill.
“Shower pressure is a good thing,” he said.
“It seems like the Democrats want to tax you out of existence and overregulate you,” Rep. John McGuire, a Republican from Virginia, said. “So [the bill] is a step in the right direction. Less regulation.”
The SHOWER Act is a response to an April executive order from President Donald Trump, who decried the Biden-era regulation.
“Overregulation chokes the American economy and stifles personal freedom,” Trump wrote in April. “A small but meaningful example is the Obama-Biden war on showers: Twice in the last 12 years, those administrations promulgated multi-thousand-word regulations defining the word ‘showerhead.’”
The accompanying fact sheet to that executive order also took specific umbrage with the over-complication of the term “showerhead.”
“Twice in the last 12 years, those administrations put out massive regulations defining the word ‘showerhead,’” the fact sheet called out. “The Biden definition was a staggering 13,000 words. The Oxford English Dictionary, by contrast, defines ‘showerhead’ in one short sentence.”
“Under Obama and Biden, the government issued lengthy rules — thousands of words long — redefining ‘showerhead’ as a ‘nozzle’ and making multi-nozzle showers illegal if they collectively discharged over 2.5 gallons of water per minute,” the fact sheet explained.
In particular, Trump called out that the “changes served a radical green agenda that made life worse for everyday Americans.”
The SHOWER Act will now proceed to the Senate, where seven Democrats must break with their party for the bill to eventually reach Trump’s desk.
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