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Consumer Product Safety Commission to be axed [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-04-19
Trump wants to get rid of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau so we can be ripped off by banks and scammers without recourse. Now he wants to get rid of the agency that makes sure the things we buy don't kill us or our children. Remember seeing a recall of something for a choking hazard? The Consumer Product Safety Commission is the one that let you know.
Here's the CPSC.gov opening page right now.
You won't know that it's gone. It's like getting rid of food and drug testing at the FDA.
The game plan was leaked to a real doctor. He was looking at it because it was a preliminary budget for the Department of Health and Human Services. Here's the whole document. (PDF). It's also about how the Department is being reorganized. The bottom of the page says "Not For Distribution - 4/10/2025." Page 54.
Read what it says. The Assistant Secretary for Consumer Product Safety does it all. The staff gets absorbed into the Assistant's office.
"The Budget eliminates CPSC and reduces funding CPSC's administrative and support functions that can be carried out by existing StaffDivs within the Office of the Secretary."
The Assistant Secretary will be under the HHS. It says "ASCPS will continue carrying out CPSC's mission to protect the public from unreasonable risks injury or death from consumer products through education, safety standards activity, regulation, and enforcement."
Notice that there is no talk anymore about product testing. What sort of deal is this going to be with education? Regulations are something that Trump has said every agency has to put a one year expiration date on. What happens in a year? You have to actively renew them, every single year. Exactly how is an under secretary going to do any enforcement? You figured it out. There won't be any.
Education. Teach people how to test stuff they buy themselves. That's not very good. What happens when your child chokes to death on something that could have been taken off the market?
What exactly are "safety standards activities?" Activities. Putting together puzzles? No, wait a minute, you could choke on each of those pieces, too.
Find a reason to get rid of this Commission. I can't. There are certain things that only a government agency can do. This is one of them. You can't farm it out to contractors.
Two things the CPSC can be lauded for is from 1973 to 2019, crib deaths were reduced by 80%. From 1972 to 2020 pediatric poisoning dropped 80% and in children under 5 by 83%.
Courtney Griffin, Director of consumer product safety at the consumer Federation of America said, "This plan is a reckless, extreme step toward dismantling Americans' safety. Without a strong CPSC, dangerous products will flood American homes, and bad actors will face little risk of enforcement or recall. Greedy companies will profit while all of us, especially children, pay the price with our safety."
The top of the page I showed says that it's pre-decisional. So was the leak of the Dobbs decision. They're normally isn't much difference between pre and done. This is the plan.
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