Consumer Inq

The Bush administration put the fox in charge of the henhouse. It's tough to see it any other way when you read Sunday's excellent New York Times story detailing how officials with industry ties and anti-regulation ideology have derailed efforts to protect Americans, and especially America's children, from dangerous products.

In one of the sorriest examples, Eric Lipton tells how the head of the CPSC's poison prevention unit resigned after she was unable to require inexpensive child-resistant caps on a hair relaxer that had burned toddlers.

The reason? The White House wanted a cost-benefit analysis — even though poison control is one of the few circumstances where the agency can act without delay.

"We are talking one to two cents per package here for something that we know is toxic," said the former official, Suzanne Barone. "The other option is just to wait for more children to get hurt. It is just kind of sad."

Her conclusion was that the commission's attitude on oversight adds up to "buyer beware" — the every-consumer-for-himself regime that effective regulation is supposed to supplement. Caveat emptor has ancient roots. But it's not always sufficient for a modern marketplace full of complex, technological and often-hazardous products.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission has been a target of Republican administrations since Ronald Reagan was president, and President Bush has plainly been following the same script. But maybe the pendulum is about to swing again.

The recent, massive recalls of Chinese-made toys, pet food and other hazardous products are drawing attention to the special risks posed by imported consumer products. Here's one that may come as a shock: Our federal law's preference for so-called voluntary standards may be part of the problem, because Chinese manufacturers interpret voluntary as exactly that, according to Lipton's article.

"Time and again, through the translators, they made clear they did not understand this concept," according to an engineer who served as an aide to former Commission Chairman Harold D. Stratton. "What they told us was, ‘As far as we are concerned, voluntary means we don’t have to.'"

That's why some rules have to be mandatory — and one more reason that it's high time to fix this system.

Responding to the furor over the recalls of tens of millions of toys, and perhaps running scared about their impact on Christmas sales, leading U.S. toymakers have taken a remarkable step, according to a story in today's New York Times: They've asked the government to impose mandatory safety-testing testing standards for all toys sold in the United States. (Read the story here.)

The proposal was approved quietly last week at an association board meeting, the report says. The plan calls for requiring companies "to hire independent laboratories to check a certain portion of their toys, whether made in the United States or overseas," the report says.

Why a mandatory standard, if leading companies already claim to do such testing — and are promising to do more, as Mattel promised recently in the midst of a string of corporate embarrassments?

The answer illustrates an often-overlooked advantage of mandatory safety and health standards for products, which even the best manufacturers, swayed by anti-regulatory ideology, seem to fight: Because mandatory standards help maintain a level playing field.

If all toymakers have to do such testing, the price of toys at Walmart and Toys R Us may rise a few cents. But at least toymakers who monitor the manufacturing process more closely — which they all should have been doing already — won't suffer a competitive disadvantage for being more vigilant.

Meanwhile, the pain for Mattel and other China-dependent toymakers is offering a boon to some other brands. Read here, on The Inquirer's Web site, about how such brands such as Playskool, Brio and GeoMag are benefiting from competitors' recalls.