CPSC Rebuilds After Years of Decay

For the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the path to greater vigilance over hazards posed by lead-tainted toys, defective water heaters and flaming deep fryers starts with 10 X-ray fluorescence analyzers (cost: about $30,000 apiece), a couple of dozen port inspectors ($3.2 million) and a new testing lab (initial cost $8 million).

After decades of budget cuts left the agency ill-equipped to police a rising tide of imports, the CPSC has begun to recover. Congress last fall gave the CPSC $17 million on top of its $63 million annual budget -- the agency's biggest one-year cash infusion in more than 20 years.

Despite the new money, "change here will not come overnight," said Pamela L. Weller, counselor to Commissioner Thomas H. Moore. "The agency declined over time and it will take time to rebuild."

For example, even in the midst of the recent furor over lead in toys, the agency had only one stationary XRF machine to screen products for lead. (It performs chemical tests to confirm the presence of lead.) Last fall, it bought 10 more, including nine portables. The handheld gadgets have been around for more than a decade.

While there is consensus on the agency's immediate needs -- more staff and better facilities -- its spending priorities are a matter of debate. Congressional leaders still must reconcile two product-safety bills that recently passed the House and Senate. Acting CPSC chairman Nancy A. Nord told House appropriators last month that the agency will have a hard time meeting mandates in both bills without more money.

For now, though, the agency's focus is on staffing. It started the year with just fewer than 400 employees, less than half what it had in 1980. Nord testified last month that the agency will have 444 employees by Oct. 1. The CPSC has posted ads for chemists, toxicologists, paralegals and statisticians, a step toward restoring the technical expertise it lost in recent years, Weller said.

To house the new employees, the CPSC is reclaiming space in its Bethesda office tower that it gave up under previous budget cuts. It plans to hire more investigators who will be stationed around the country, and has begun assembling a team to monitor imports at the nation's largest ports. Currently, ports are just one responsibility of the agency's field staff.

The CPSC also wants to move out of its testing facility in 1950s-era buildings in Gaithersburg, and into a new lab by the end of 2009.

A third major priority cited by agency officials is upgrading and integrating the agency's multiple data systems, on which it relies to keep abreast of product-safety trends.

"It's not sexy but it's necessary," said Julie Vallese, a CPSC spokeswoman.

Legislation pending in Congress would extend spending increases. The House and Senate passed product-safety bills that would increase the agency's budget to $100 million by 2011, and to $155.9 million by 2015, respectively.

Nord has taken issue with some of the requirements in the bills, including a new publicly searchable database of consumer complaints that would be mandated by the Senate measure. (The House bill would require the agency only to study how best to create such a database.) Currently, the agency collects consumer complaints but they are not accessible to the public without Freedom of Information Act requests.

Nord testified last month that the database would cost $20 million to build and at least $3 million a year to maintain. Some consumer advocates who support better disclosure of product-safety hazards say Nord inflated the estimate to undermine support for the database, which is unpopular with business groups. Manufacturers don't want the database because, they say, it could lead to the release of inaccurate information and trade secrets.

The CPSC said the estimate is based on the cost of similar databases at other agencies. "My argument would be to figure out how to do it for less," said Pamela Gilbert, a former CPSC executive director who is now with the law firm of Cuneo, Gilbert & LaDuca. "It's an incredibly important project."