Trump Plan to Nix Product Safety Agency Evokes Uncertain Future

A White House proposal to restructure an independent product regulator is drawing mixed reactions, as some decry what they see as an attempt to politicize consumer safety while others view the move as a means of elevating coordination and response.

The Trump administration’s fiscal year 2026 budget proposal would consolidate the functions of the Consumer Product Safety Commission under an assistant secretary for consumer product safety within the Health and Human Services Department, a recommendation echoed in the CPSC’s own funding request.

Many consumer advocates say the move is part of a movement to hamstring consumer protection regulators and will lead to many more defective and dangerous products flooding the marketplace.

“There is a pipeline of violative and harmful household products that are entering the United States, and the Trump administration has the sole federal regulator of those products in its crosshairs,” said Daniel Greene, senior director of consumer protection and product safety policy for the National Consumers League. “Should these proposals be implemented, the result will be more unnecessary deaths and more unnecessary injuries.”

Former Commissioner Richard Trumka Jr.—one of the Democratic CPSC members suing the administration over their terminations—called the proposal “catastrophic.”

The move would effectively end safety-related rulemaking from the CPSC, which has a number of pending regulations related to dangerous products that were supposed to be delivered by September and which likely won’t come to fruition now, he said in an interview.

“If you don’t have these rules, you can talk all you want about ‘hey, we’re gonna still go really hard on enforcement,’ but if you’re not putting new rules out there, what are you enforcing?” he said. “We can’t freeze in time; we have to adapt with the market and this would not take that course.”

Without that federal agency oversight, private litigation will have to “step up to protect consumers,” Trumka said.

But others argue that the restructuring could better address safety goals by treating dangerous products as a public health crisis.

Ashley Haugen, a consumer product safety advocate and founder of the nonprofit “That Water Bead Lady,” posted on LinkedIn that putting the CPSC under HHS could lead to faster coordination and access to more public health research.

As it stands now, the CPSC is a small agency with limited authority that is tasked with overseeing thousands of products, she said.

Shifting those functions to HHS “could bring product safety into the healthcare system,” Haugen said.

Political Independence

Created in 1972 through the Consumer Product Safety Act, the CPSC is tasked with addressing unreasonable risks of consumer products through safety regulations, data collection, and coordinated recalls.

Because the agency is a product of federal statute, Congress would need to authorize any restructuring—and Trumka doubts the votes are there.

Political independence is critical to the agency’s safety mission, said Courtney Griffin, the director of consumer product safety for the Consumer Federation of America.

The proposal to bring the CPSC’s functions under HHS risks turning a consumer watchdog into “just another voice in a massive bureaucracy,” and placing CPSC functions under a cabinet-level agency “increases the risk that these important safety decisions may be swayed by politics instead of evidence, instead of science, or instead of the public interest,” she said.

The Consumer Federation of America, which says it’s dedicated to advancing consumer interests, announced a condemnation of the proposal Monday.

The National Consumers League similarly has asked Congress to reject the request, and it was among more than 150 advocates that sent a letter to Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought opposing the plan. The Consumer Federation of America co-signed the letter.

Current CPSC leadership, however, view the proposal as a means of better protecting consumers.

Acting CPSC Chairman Peter Feldman told agency staff that the move would actually expand the agency’s core safety mission.

“Aligning CPSC as a component of HHS—alongside institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health—would elevate consumer product safety as a vital component of the national public health strategy,” Feldman wrote in an internal email that was reviewed by Bloomberg Law.