A New Era for Consumer Product Safety
It’s been a little over a month since the president signed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008, which reformed product safety law and bestowed more resources and responsibility upon the oversight federal agency, the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The CPSIA is a welcome improvement to product safety regulation, giving the CPSC the resources it needs to protect the public. As we’ve mentioned before, highlights of the bill are that it requires that children’s products be tested before they are sold and bans lead and toxic phthalates in toys; requires the CPSC to create a publicly accessible consumer complaint database; increases civil penalties that CPSC can assess against violators; and protects whistleblowers who report product safety defects. In short, this bill makes big, important changes in product safety law.
So what has the CPSC been up to since the bill’s passage? About two weeks ago, the agency held a public meeting to discuss its work in implementing the new law and built a web site devoted to CPSIA implementation. The web site contains summaries and interpretations of the new requirements, and a helpful timetable referred to as CPSC “Required Actions” under the Act, which lists its tasks (a majority of which is rulemaking) for the coming months and years. Conspicuously absent from its “Required Actions” list, however, is the consumer complaint database – a crucial part of this product safety overhaul.
Development of the database is
something to watch. The agency was less than enthusiastic about the
database when Congress was debating the CPSIA. Now the agency has less
than six months to draft and submit its database plan to Congress.
Curiously, the staff said little about the database at the public
meeting, except noting that building it is contingent on receiving more
resources from Congress. In testimony earlier this year, Nord said that
the database would cost $20 million to set up and $2.5 to $3.5 million
per year to maintain.
In
addition to the database, the new law requires about 40 new
rulemakings. The timelines are “very ambitious,” Nord said more than
once to her audience of mostly industry lawyers. No doubt the CPSC has
been handed a gargantuan task. But that is to be expected after so many
years of mediocrity and neglect in the product safety arena. In less
than six months, the agency will have acted on the phthalates ban, toy
standards, the product database and the requirements for recall
notices. By the time the one-year anniversary rolls around, it will
have addressed the ban on lead in toys, tracking labels for children’s
products (if the agency chooses to implement rules for this
requirement), durable children’s products, cribs, infant/toddler
products and the final regulation for civil penalties. After the last
few years of unprecedented recalls and injuries suffered by American
consumers, these costs and tight deadlines are little price to pay to
put up the database and promulgate so many vital new rules.