Manufacturers of children’s products, along with their political allies, are making an eleventh-hour push to ease a series of upcoming safety regulations. And, as The New York Times reports, with the House now in Republican hands, the opponents of such regulations are gaining support.
One of the prime targets is a Consumer Product Safety Commission public database. It is being developed to enable consumers, before making buying decisions, to check safety complaints and injury information on cribs, strollers and other items. The database is scheduled to go online in three weeks.
Mike Pompeo, a Kansas Republican who is among the freshmen lawmakers in the House, recently succeeded in getting an amendment passed that would strip money for the database from an appropriations bill. He argues that the database needs to be modified to help protect manufacturers from bogus complaints and lawsuits.
“I’m an engineer. I love data. But I know what people put online,” he said at a recent House subcommittee meeting. “I think this is a plaintiff’s bar dream.”
Another unpopular measure among the manufacturers is a regulation to require third-party testing for lead content in toys and other children’s items.
The resistance from manufacturers comes less than three years after the adoption of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act. Passed in response to a series of recalls of, among other things, Chinese-made products tainted with lead, the act provided for tougher consumer protection. The act increased both the budget and the staff of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which had shrunk over the previous decades.
Supporters of the new regulations say that the recent pushback is ideological. “You have folks who are seeing that there is a chance to undo consumer protections that they never liked in the first place,” Ami Gadhia, policy counsel for the safety-advocacy group Consumers Union, told the Times.
Others, such as Rick Locker, a lawyer for toy industry groups, dispute this. He said that the 2008 law, which some of his clients supported, was philosophically sound, but did not do a good job of clarifying how it should be implemented.
Even the chairwoman of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Inez Tenenbaum, a Democrat, has said some adjustments are needed in the law, including exempting products such as bicycles and books from lead testing.
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