US Senator Dick Durbin and his colleagues weren’t toying around on Capitol Hill last week when they brought in some of the key players from the summer’s rash of toy recalls, totaling more than 20 million toys from toy makers including Mattel.
Durbin, whose interest was piqued after a gift he’d bought for his grandson was recalled, had a clear mission with the hearings: uncover where things went wrong and find a solution. But things weren’t that easy.
Acting head of the US Consumer Product Safety Commission Nancy Nord was particularly adept at the art of dodging the question, as Dana Milbank of the Washington Post details here. While Mattel’s chief Robert Eckert apologized and admitted that his firm had made mistakes that it is now rectifying, Nord was evasive at times, on topics that one would expect the head of the country’s product safety commission might know.
She couldn’t answer , for example, whether the new pact announced earlier in the week between her agency and their Chinese counterparts to ban lead paint in US-bound toys was anything new since the US already had a ban of the paint in place. She also didn’t have an answer for Sen. Amy Klobuchar on what percentage of toys the CPSC tests for lead paint or other hazards.
Nord did call out a CPSC worker named Bob, who apparently is the sole toy tester for the agency. His name was brought up after Durbin showed a photo of the junky room where he works (seen here if you scroll down). Nord said it was one of the labs at CPSC’s “incredibly inefficient” toy testing facilities in Gaithersburg, Maryland. Bob, who Nord called “our small parts guy” who concentrates on drop testing toys, is getting some attention in this blog.
There’s no question after the hearing that the CPSC is in a pretty bad state. Compared to 1980 when it had some 970 employees, the agency now only has 400 people in place to handle all safety concerns for homegrown and imported products. In addition, its budget has been slashed in recent years and is now $63 million. (Consumer Reports wrote about the budget earlier here.) Plus, the group has not had a permanent chairman in more than a year and has not been able to achieve the quorum needed to made decisions. (Legislation has allowed them to temporarily work with the two-person governing body.)
Legislation has been drafted to give the agency some teeth. Durbin filed legislation earlier this summer (the Consumer Safety Modernization Act) designed to give the CPSC additional funds and staff, as well as other changes.
Two other senators, Mark Pryor and Daniel Inouye, introduced a bill last week called the CPSC Reform Act of 2007. The bill gives additional funding and staff to the group, improves the number of agents at US ports, and calls for independent third party safety certification on imported children’s products. The bill also has harsher penalties for toy companies that break the rules, including increased fines and possible jail time.
Can these bills breathe new life into the CPSC and will that make a difference? The problem is far reaching and the solutions need to be as well.
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