The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) may be getting a facelift if either House or Senate bill becomes law. Consumer advocates say that a facelift is a long time coming as the Commission has been the subject of criticism in the past year – especially after nearly 30 million children’s toys were recalled in 2007 for containing lead paint.

What does the CPSC do?

According to the CPSC’s website, www.cpsc.org, the Commission is responsible for protecting the public from unreasonable risks of serious injury or death from more than 15,000 types of consumer products including those that pose a fire, electrical, chemical, or mechanical hazard or that can injure children. It claims that deaths, injuries and property damage from consumer product incidents cost the nation more than $800 billion annually.

Senate and House bills

Both the Senate and the House have introduced bills. The Senate’s bill to update the CPSC would:

• Provide whistleblower protections to corporate employees who disclose safety violations
• Create a public database of consumers’ safety complaints
• Significantly increase the cap on jury awards against manufacturers
• Allow state attorneys general to enforce product safety standards
• Raise the civil penalty cap per violation from $8,000 to $250,000
• Increase the agency’s budget over the course of seven years, from last year’s $64 million, to $155 million in 2015
• Raise the cap on fines against companies that don’t report safety violations from $1.8M to $20M

The House of Representatives’ bill is a watered-down version of the Senate bill. It would increase the CPSC’s staff and budget and expand its ability to test unsafe products, but would only raise the cap on fines against companies that don’t report safety violations from $1.8M to $10M – which is $10M less than the Senate’s version.

Both bills would provide the CPSC with more money and more employees to meet its objectives – both of which have been cut over the last several decades. The CPSC had nearly 1,000 employees in the 1970s; today, it has less than 500. According to news sources, only 15 inspectors are responsible for inspecting the estimated $600 billion worth of toys that come into the U.S. each year.