Commissioners Tussle Over CPSC Budget Request's Language on Reducing Testing Costs for Industry
The Consumer Product Safety Commission’s request “fails to meaningfully address the burdens our testing regulations have imposed,” said Commissioner Nancy Nord of the Consumer Product Safety Commission. In a statement explaining her decision to vote against CPSC’s fiscal year 2014 budget request, Nord decried the commission for its rejection of an amendment committing CPSC to action on reduce the costs of its testing and certification requirements on businesses. Nord’s amendment would have mandated a proposed rule, or at least a commission briefing package, to reduce some burdens.
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On April 10, CPSC requested $117 million for FY 2014, an increase of $2.2 million over its FY 2013 budget. According to Chairman Inez Tenenbaum, the increase was necessary to cover maintenance and operations costs for import surveillance, purchase laboratory equipment, improve CPSC’s international operations, and maintain salary and expense levels for CPSC staff, among other things. The budget request passed 2-1, with Chairman Tenenbaum and Commissioner Robert Adler in favor, and Commissioner Nord against. Nord said this is the first budget request she has dissented from since taking office in 2005.
“To be clear, had Commissioner Nord proposed listing burden reduction as an ongoing project in the budget, I would have accepted it,” said Commissioner Adler in a statement. “Unfortunately, Commissioner Nord insisted that we commit -- before analyzing the comments and accompanying data -- to developing a briefing package and proposing an NPR. This is reminiscent of the Red Queen’s non sequitur, ‘Sentence first. Verdict afterwards.’”
“Voting against an entire agency budget, as Commissioner Nord did, because a majority will not accept a three-sentence amendment on premature activity is simply an irresponsible act driven by a personal political agenda with absolute disregard for the well being of this agency, its staff, and the hundreds of millions of consumers we are obligated to protect,” said Chairman Tenenbaum.
Action Necessary on Reducing Burdens, Says Nord
“The responsibility to regulate in the least burdensome way is inherent upon us as competent regulators, and it was even more forcefully pressed upon us by Congress when it passed Public Law 112-28 in 2011,” said Nord in her statement. The law allowed for CPSC regulatory action to reduce costs associated with its testing requirements. CPSC sought public comment on ways to reduce the burden, and proposed 16 ways to reduce the burden of third-party testing in response, adopting nine of them. According to Nord, the commission whittled down this number to four proposals in a subsequent operating plan.
The amendment eventually adopted by Tenenbaum and Adler in the FY 2014 budget request said CPSC would conduct more data analysis and/or technical review on ways to reduce burdens. Nord’s amendment was more ambitious -- it said the commission would propose a rule, or at least put together a briefing package, on concrete actions it would take to reduce costs. According to an April 17 blog post by Nord (here), she was told that “the budget is not really the appropriate place for burden reduction, that our operating plan would be the better vehicle.”
But Nord had agreed to use the operating plan to provide for burden reduction in negotiations for the FY 2013 operating plan, said Tenenbaum. The commission agreed to this mechanism “because it was well understood that it would be premature to commit resources to any further activity until the agency had received public comments from the [requests for information],” the chairman said.
“This thoughtful approach, which is the proper planning process for balancing burden reduction work with the Commission’s core mission of safety, was not enough for Commissioner Nord and she voted against the entire budget,” said Tenenbaum. “Subsequently, she attempted to stoke the fears of CPSC’s regulated community by issuing a statement minimizing the agency’s past burden reduction actions and making the claim that Commissioner Adler and I ‘do not plan to use any resources to reduce testing burdens’ in FY 2014,” she said.
But the FY 2013 operating plan wasn’t written until halfway through the fiscal year, when most agency resources were already committee, said Nord in her blog post. “That’s the regulatory equivalent of ‘when we get around to it.’ It’s not consistent with either the law or our obligation as public servants to regulate with no heavier hand than necessary to reduce unreasonable risks to consumers.”