The charger is designed to not use as much electricity when charging and maintaining the battery. Rather than actually fix their power grids (because it sounds like they've managed to spend all their money on useless stuff AND ran out of water!) it sounds like they are legislating away the problem by worrying about that quarter amp difference of jump start battery chargers. Totally sounds like a West Coast solution. "Oh, it'll cost us several hundred million to update our power grid that we've ignored the last 50 years? Hmm, well, I'm broke so how about we make everyone be more efficient instead so that we can ignore the power grids until I'm retired."
Mind you, I'm all for being more efficient, but sometimes you can do too much to fix something that is really a symptom of a problem instead of trying to fix the problem itself.