Last Friday, Donald Trump fired, without cause, three members of the US Consumer Product Safety Commission who were appointed by Democratic presidents, in a move toward eliminating the agency altogether. Never mind that, under current law, he can’t legally do that to Senate-confirmed members of an independent commission. He wanted to do it, Russ Vought told him there’s no such thing as an independent commission, and never mind anything else.
The CPSC is the agency that makes sure that the products we buy won’t kill or injure us, with the power to recall unsafe products like stand-up child carriers that can collapse and hurt the baby, wheeled ice chests that can crush or amputate fingers, or kitchen and bathroom faucets containing lead, which can leech dangerous amounts of that neurotoxin into drinking water.
CPSC also has the most delightfully weird social media team of any federal agency, but we don’t think that’s why the Trumpers are out to kill it.
Who exactly voted to have more lead added to their water by a faucet they bought on Amazon? For all the whining from conservatives about the “nanny state,” there certainly wasn’t any chorus of rightwing calls to eliminate the CPSC, was there? Is this all happening because some asshole twentysomething who has Elon Musk’s ear thought we need to bring back back those pointy lawn darts that can penetrate kids’ skulls? (“Well sure, three kids died, but they’re fun!”) Or maybe it’s a move to prevent the CPSC from sending SWAT teams to confiscate Americans’ gas stoves, not that the agency was planning that anyway.
Yeah, actually, now that we think about it, it probably isn’t just manufacturers of dangerous shit who want to get rid of the CPSC. There’s no shortage of libertarian-minded idiots who think we should let the invisible hand of the free market deal with dangerous products — but only after it’s mangled by a defective ice chest handle.
Commissioner Robert Trumka Jr., who was appointed by Joe Biden, said in a letter shortly after his shitcanning that he plans to fight his dismissal because it’s illegal, writing, “See you in court, Mr. President.” He noted in the statement, which he posted to Twitter just after his firing, that he and the other two commissioners were shown the door after voting against allowing Musk’s artless DOGErs to work at the agency. He also reminded the president of federal law, which says commissioners can be removed for “neglect of duty or malfeasance in office but for no other cause,” as if a mere law can constrain Great Leader.
Trumka added that “CPSC’s livesaving work is far too important to take this lying down,” pointing out that the agency is working on regulations aimed at putting an end to fires caused by badly-designed e-bike and scooter chargers, and to prevent babies dying in their sleep in unsafe infant rockers, building on the agency’s 2019 ban of Fisher-Price’s “Rock ‘n Play” sleepers, which were linked to more than 100 infant deaths before they were recalled.
Besides, Trumka upset the Right when he inadvertently helped launch the gas stove panic in 2023, after he told a journalist, accurately, that “Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.” He clarified the CPSC wasn’t considering any such ban, but the idea that armed agents have been tearing stoves out of people’s homes is firmly embedded in the wingnut imagination anyway. Well worth letting some infants die in their sleep if it means removing the agency that might limit sales of precious gas stoves.
Even before the commissioners’ firings, the DOGEboys were already busy firing as many of the 500 staffers on the CPSC as they could shitcan, because bureaucracy is bad and people should be free to buy electric pressure cookers whose lids don’t stay locked during cooking. Caveat emptor and all that, including serious facial burns.
The CPSC is just one of the agencies on a Trump budget hit list, the focus of a proposal to zero it out and transfer some of its duties to the Department of Health and Human Services, where the health and safety of Americans can be left up to a guy who thinks it’s perfectly fine to take his grandchildren for a dip in a stream full of raw sewage and e. coli. You shouldn’t really trust your health to a guy who’s just going through the motions like that.
Remember, while most Americans want the government to make sure the products we buy won’t harm us, Trump and those around him are of a much more Gilded Age, anti-science bent: Experts don’t know anything, and people should be free to drink raw milk if they do their own research and decide that deadly bacteria won’t hurt them as long as they exercise a lot, eat their veggies, and don’t get vaccinated. All they need to do is make sure they drink carrot juice and get plenty of sunshine, and voila! Their “natural immunity” will make them invulnerable to disease.
MAGA’s — and especially Secretary Poopswimmer’s — ongoing war on science and regulations is infused with a deep stream of such eugenic thinking: only the weak children will die of measles, so really, there’s no need for vaccines. (This is dangerous pseudoscience). We saw it during the pandemic, when Donald Trump favored the idea that most people won’t die from COVID, so let’s encourage the virus to spread. Why bother suppressing the spread of the disease when that would only slow “herd immunity”? (With COVID, widespread “natural” immunity never arrived, but we did get a substantial part of the population vaccinated, at least.)
The eugenics argument is always just below the surface of MAGA health talk, at least when it’s not right out in the open: Only the weak and expendable will die, so why do the rest of us need a nanny state to protect us? Which is pretty convenient if you’re young and healthy and believe you’re invulnerable.
You don’t have to look far for similar defenses of unsafe products. Yesterday, Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar posted video of a little girl who explained that when she was a baby, she was poisoned by “water beads,” a toy product that has sent thousands of kids to emergency rooms because they’re both a choking hazard and can contain dangerous substances. Predictably, the comments are full of people insisting that we don’t need the CPSC, we need good parenting and a ban on bureaucrats (and also a ban on vaccines). Also, the little girl was Black, so there were racist memes about that, too.
While libertarian, eugenics-based thinking is increasingly popular with the MAGA base, it’s only one motive for eliminating health and safety agencies, and maybe not even the most influential. In the case of the effort to erase the CPSC, libertarian eugenics happens to go hand in hand with good old-fashioned greed, as Harold Meyerson explains at The American Prospect. Opposition to safety regulations doesn’t only come from manufacturers of faulty products, but also from retailers, especially from
Amazon, which the Commission ruled last year needed to recall products found to be dangerous that were sold on its platforms, and to refund the consumers who’d bought them there and returned them in response to the recall. Amazon went to court arguing that it’s only a delivery service, like FedEx and UPS, but the keen-eyed commissioners at the CPSC apparently noticed that Amazon actually has a platform that markets goods online. […] Sensing a certain weakness in these lines of argumentation, Amazon then sued to have the courts declare the CPSC unconstitutional.
Amazon and other companies are similarly keen on eliminating the Federal Trade Commission, which likewise keeps big businesses from doing whatever the hell they want. That conveniently fits in with the culture warring agenda that has become habitual for the Right.
So hey, we guess our headline is wrong. Plenty of people — a minority, but a loud and dangerous one — actually voted for this shit, and we need to mobilize sane Americans to make sure they don’t kill us.
Right-Wing Raw Milk Trend Going Just As Well As Expected
Give Us Gas Stoves Or Give Us Death! Maybe Even Both!
[American Prospect / Verge / CBS News / Guardian]
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