Consumer database faces fight
Nobody knew what was wrong with 20-month-old Jacob Esses when he collapsed in October at his family’s Arkansas home and vomited colorful little beads.
“I was flailing,” his mother Shelby Esses said, recalling the terrifying day doctors tried to revive her toddler while she frantically looked for information about the toy he had eaten. “There were no answers anywhere.”
Today, Jacob is fine. The toy, a children’s craft kit called Aqua Dots, has been recalled after it was discovered the beads contained a chemical that metabolizes into the so-called date-rape drug.
But Esses has joined parents, consumer groups and lawmakers to push for an Internet database where consumers could post complaints and search for comments about potentially dangerous products, such as Aqua Dots.
Industry groups are vigorously fighting the proposal, arguing such a database would do little to help consumers and would force companies to disclose trade secrets. “There is no filter,” said Ed Krenik, a lobbyist for the power tools industry.
The dispute over the database is at the center of this week’s debate in the Senate over how to strengthen the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s oversight of some 15,000 types of consumer products.
The push to overhaul the federal agency comes after a year of toy recalls during which millions of playthings were found to contain elevated levels of lead paint, dangerous magnets or other hazards.
In the case of several products, parents had been complaining to the agency about potential problems for months before manufacturers and retailers agreed to recalls. But regulators issued no public warnings while they investigated the claims and conferred with company officials about whether a recall was needed.
Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.), who is pushing a bill to overhaul the safety commission, notes that products can remain on shelves for months while agency officials review complaints. “Parents really have no way of knowing that these are dangerous,” he said.
Pryor has proposed that the commission collect complaints from consumers, as well as from hospitals, firefighters and others who may find potentially hazardous products, then post the complaints on an Internet database that anyone could search.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which regulates vehicles, auto parts and car seats, has been making consumer complaints available almost since its inception in the mid-1960s. It has maintained that information online for more than a decade at www.safercar.gov.
Every year, NHTSA processes about 75,000 complaints, which agency officials post with the expectation that consumers will evaluate them for their credibility and relevance, said agency spokesman Rae Tyson. “We don’t put up a lot of roadblocks,” he said. “It’s all designed to make it as easy as possible.”
But industry groups -- which have been waging a decades-long campaign to limit the reach of the Consumer Product Safety Commission -- strongly oppose the creation of a similar database by the consumer agency.
“There is a risk that some of this information could unduly alarm consumers,” said Jason D. Oxman, a spokesman for the Consumer Electronics Assn., a member of a coalition led by the National Assn. of Manufacturers that is fighting the database.
“This could be just an unfiltered kind of stream of consciousness.”
Industry groups also say they are worried that a provision allowing the agency to post “any additional information it determines to be in the public interest” could enable the agency to publicize information that companies share with federal regulators. That could lead to the disclosure of confidential business information, said National Retail Federation vice president Steve Pfister, and “stifle the communication between companies and the [agency] that is so vital to ensuring product safety.”
Industry groups have found some allies on the Republican side of the aisle, and in the White House, which this week released a statement announcing that the Bush administration is “strongly opposed” to the database.
The president and many GOP lawmakers also are fighting provisions in the bill to give state attorneys general more power to enforce federal product safety laws and to grant new whistle-blower protections to employees who report violations.
A coalition of Senate Democrats and some Republicans on Tuesday turned aside an attempt to eliminate the database -- along with several other provisions opposed by industry -- by defeating a move by Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) to substitute House legislation for Pryor’s bill.
The House late last year passed a more modest bill to reauthorize the Consumer Product Safety Commission. It requires only that the feasibility of a database be studied.
But Pryor and others behind the database say they expect more fights as debate continues in the Senate and later when lawmakers meet to reconcile the Senate bill with the House legislation.
“We’ve tried to build in safeguards,” said Pryor, who has suggested that companies be allowed to respond to any complaint in the database. “But we’re trying to make the process more transparent. . . . I think there is a compelling public interest.”
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