Kevin Wolf/AP Photo
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) speaks during a news conference with Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), left, and Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), May 14, 2025, in Washington.
In 2007, a law professor named Elizabeth Warren had an idea to better regulate mortgages and financial products. In her essay introducing the concept in Democracy Journal, she made a common-sense claim. “Nearly every product sold in America has passed basic safety regulations well in advance of reaching store shelves,” she wrote. “Just as the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) protects buyers of goods and supports a competitive market, we need the same for consumers of financial products.”
Implicit in this pitch is the assumption that everyone—Democrats, Republicans, whoever—supports safety in consumer products. Making sure that the things Americans buy every day do not poison, maim, or kill them was an utterly uncontroversial concept in 2007.
But that is no longer the case. Last month, the Trump administration began the evisceration of a domestic agency critical to safeguarding Americans’ health and well-being. And there has been tragically little outrage over this break with the obvious and banal consensus of the past.
In 1972, Richard Nixon signed the Consumer Product Safety Act into law. For over a half-century, the CPSC’s bipartisan commissioners has tested for lead in toys and other products, worked with companies to issue and publicize recalls, informed manufacturers of everything from bikes to refrigerators on how to make consumables that won’t harm customers, and taken action when companies violated the rules and endangered the public.
Almost immediately after its formation, industry groups and their sympathizers in the Reagan administration sought to draw and quarter the agency. Despite repeated attempts at assassination, the CPSC managed to stay alive, surviving even the first Trump administration. But this spring, Elon Musk’s minions showed up.
Two DOGE employees, Nate Cavanaugh and Justin Fox, were dispatched to CPSC headquarters in early May to issue an ultimatum: Cooperate or else. Receiving a less forceful commitment than anticipated, the White House’s emissaries relayed the news, and Donald Trump summarily fired all three Democratic CPSC commissioners. With only two commissioners left, the agency no longer has a quorum to establish new rules on product safety.
The Democratic commissioners are currently suing the administration for their jobs back, but the Supreme Court has mostly signaled that they will give presidents the power to fire leaders at independent commissions on a whim.
As the CPSC case and others like it wind their way through the courts, the agency is already starting to show signs of failure.
According to a public CPSC hearing on May 13, after many staff elected to take buyouts offered by DOGE, the agency can no longer staff ports with inspectors searching for lead and other harmful chemicals on goods entering America from overseas. Meanwhile, former and current CPSC employees say that the small-business office, which helps guide manufacturers on how to make safe products, is no longer at functioning capacity. And there’s a question as to whether the agency has any teeth while operating without a quorum and with hobbled staff capacity.
The Supreme Court has mostly signaled that they will give presidents the power to fire leaders at independent commissions on a whim.
While many recall efforts see businesses working side by side with the commission to fix problem products, when a business refuses to comply, it is enforcement actions that force them to the table. One former CPSC employee cited an action against Peloton as a prime example.
According to the CPSC’s announcement, between 2018 and 2019 Peloton received over 100 reports of adults, kids, and pets getting dragged under its treadmill machines, resulting in broken bones, lacerations, and in one case, the death of a child. The settlement resolved claims that Peloton ignored these reports and knowingly distributed recalled treadmills to consumers. Peloton ultimately agreed to a $19 million fine in addition to maintaining an enhanced compliance program and internal control system, with reports delivered to the CPSC for five years.
This dual approach of carrot-and-stick enforcement has made the CPSC one of the most effective regulatory agencies in government. Since its formation, the CPSC notes a precipitous decline in avoidable deaths and injuries. Kids dying inside refrigerators has been eliminated, residential fires are down 43 percent, fire deaths are down 47 percent, infants dying from cribs intended to keep them safe has been reduced by 80 percent, and pediatric poisonings are down by the same margin.
Some current and former CPSC employees speculate that GOP fury toward the agency didn’t really pick up until Democratic commissioner Richard Trumka Jr., son of the late AFL-CIO president, remarked that the commission could ban gas stoves over their health impacts. The GOP took the comment and ran with it, going so far as to propose legislation safeguarding the sanctity of gas ovens. Trumka quickly clarified that there would be no ban in the immediate future and that the CPSC never even initiated a proceeding on the matter. But the damage was done.
Meanwhile, lobbying disclosures show that the industry never relented in pressuring the CPSC to weaken enforcement and allow them to save money by putting the public at risk. As the Prospect documented in 2019, the lobbying shop Bracewell LLP emerged as the go-to shop to fight the CPSC on consumer issues. From kids being strangled by window blind adjusters to CO2 poisoning from generators to power machine decapitations, Bracewell has taken on any case, big or small.
E-commerce giants Amazon and Alibaba have both spent years lobbying the CPSC to reduce its efforts to police the platforms for selling recalled products on their websites. Today, Amazon, whose founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos has cozied up to the Trump administration with a million-dollar inauguration fund donation, is engaged in a protracted legal battle over this responsibility.
In 2024, the CPSC issued a decision and order against Amazon, targeting 400,000 products it found dangerously below safety standards. Among the products were “faulty carbon monoxide (CO) detectors, hairdryers without electrocution protection, and children’s sleepwear that violated federal flammability standards.” In a lawsuit filed against the CPSC, Amazon claims that it is just a platform for third-party sellers and shouldn’t be held responsible for kids lit aflame. If we don’t sell flammable kids’ pajamas, the logic seems to go, someone else will.
But unlike the first Trump administration, where industry-friendly commissioners were installed on the CPSC’s rulemaking body, this time the plan seems to be to gut the agency wholesale and ship the remaining dregs to the Department of Health and Human Services for RFK Jr. to toy with. While stopping short of a march in the streets, Democratic lawmakers have penned a strongly worded letter to OMB director Russ Vought, demanding an end to the attack.
Despite the letter’s seeming impotence, the fate of the CPSC might not yet be fully sealed. The Supreme Court has already batted down one lawsuit attempting to rein in the CPSC brought by Consumers’ Research, a onetime pro-regulation publication that, after being purchased by a right-wing publisher, has focused on attacking the CPSC and ESG investment companies for “woke” capitalism.
In order to dismantle the agency, Congress would have to pass legislation. And while lawmakers are more than happy to swing the hammer at an alleged ban on gas stoves, defending products that lead to dead kids in swimming pools and under treadmills is sure to be a harder sell.
“The elimination of CPSC and incorporation into this Administration’s troubled HHS put future product safety progress at risk,” Alex Hoehn-Saric, a recently fired Democratic CPSC commissioner and former chair, told the Prospect. “Product safety gets lost within a large department with competing priorities, and without an independent CPSC, there will be far less accountability and transparency. Commissioners act as a check on each other. This ensures that CPSC’s actions are open to the public and deters political pressure from being used to favor one company over another. HHS has a tremendously important job, but I don’t want product safety to become an afterthought in the HHS machine.”
