NCHR Letter for the Record for Hearing on the Consumer Product Safety Commission Budget

July 22, 2024

The Honorable Frank Pallone
Ranking Member, Committee on Energy and Commerce
2322A Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515

Dear Ranking Member Pallone,

We write in strong support for the important work being done by the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), a small independent modestly funded federal agency with enormous responsibilities that help save lives every day. We look forward to hearing about the agency’s recent accomplishments at today’s hearing.

The mission of the CPSC is to protect the public from unreasonable risks of illness, injury, or death associated with more than 15,000 different types of consumer products, including children’s products. We all depend on the CPSC to protect ourselves, our families, and our friends from unsafe products. The agency’s ability to take strong action based on clear health and safety evidence helps to keep the marketplace and all of us safer. When Congress supports the work of the CPSC, we are all protected from the risks of products already on the market, as well as new types of products.

Those of us who have met with families who lost their children due to unsafe consumer products will never forget the terrible pain they live with – pain that is especially unbearable because those deaths were preventable, in many cases caused by products that had known risks that had previously been reported. We are grateful to CPSC for reducing the time between when products are determined to be dangerous and when they can no longer be legally sold. The agency has also stopped dangerous products from being stockpiled before rules go into effect, a strategy used by some companies to keep dangerous products on the market despite those known risks.

CPSC works with the private sector to accomplish what we all want, removing unsafe products from the market. This resulted in more than 300 hundred voluntary recalls last year, and is likely to accomplish even more this year. In addition to voluntary recalls, the agency is warning the public about unsafe products that have not yet been voluntarily recalled. These recent accomplishments are impressive and are part of the important history of the CPSC.

• For those of us old enough to remember repeated warnings about children being trapped in old refrigerators, it’s important to know that during the last 25 years these deaths have almost been completely eliminated, with the most recent occurring in 2007.
• Thanks to CPSC’s mandatory safety standards for cribs, crib deaths have been decreased by approximately 80%.
• Baby walkers used to result in tens of thousands of Emergency Room visits each year. After CPSC issued mandatory safety standards in 2010, these injuries have dropped dramatically.

The structure of the CPSC ensures that it will never have a radical agenda. We understand that there will always be disagreements on specific products or specific strategies. However, CPSC has been an effective agency in so many ways – for example, protecting children from lead exposure in toys and children’s products. At the May 2024 public CPSC meeting on the agency’s future priorities, we urged the agency to determine the risks of lead, toxic chemicals, and flammability of playground surfaces made from synthetic rubber and recycled tires, and we hope that Congress will support CPSC evaluating these materials in order to keep our youngest children safe.  All of us care about consumer safety, and especially the safety of our children and grandchildren.

Sincerely,

Diana Zuckerman, Ph.D.
President
National Center for Health Research

CC:
The Honorable Janice Schakowsky
Ranking Member, Innovation, Data, and Commerce Subcommittee
Committee on Energy and Commerce

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