Federal regulators fly high while industry pays the tab

China, Hong Kong, San Francisco, New York, Spain, New Orleans and a golf resort on Hilton Head Island, S.C. — those are some of the places that the nation’s top overseers of consumer safety have felt compelled to visit in recent years. The bills, incidentally, were paid for by the makers of children’s furniture, toys and a fireworks trade organization.

Isn’t it strange that Acting Consumer Product Safety Commission Chairwoman Nancy Nord and her predecessor, Hal Stratton, couldn’t be sure that the American public was being protected against faulty products without going to Asia or Europe to check it out in person? And isn’t it too bad that their fact-finding skills were not honed to the extent that they thought to ask if, perhaps, lead-based paints were being used on toys or dangerous chemicals being used in glues?

The Consumer Product Safety Commission was created in 1972 by the Consumer Product Safety Act to protect “against unreasonable risks of injuries associated with consumer products.” An example of the importance the Bush administration has placed on the commission’s work is its willingness to allow the three-seat commission to operate with only two members for the better part of a year and Nord’s own resistance to congressional efforts to give her agency a larger staff.

Misplaced priorities

Apparently Nord’s position is that it is more important for the chairman to make industry-paid fact-finding or glad-handing trips than for the agency to have professionals on staff who can investigate complaints.

The CPSC is the only government regulatory agency to take that position. The Securities and Exchange Commission, The Washington Post reports, “does not accept host-paid travel reimbursements or in-kind payments from any organization regulated by the agency.” The Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Communications Commission also prohibit decision makers from accepting outside travel payments.

To do otherwise invites public suspicion under the best of circumstances, and a feeling of public betrayal when there is evidence that the public safety is not being adequately protected.

For Nord and Stratton to claim or suggest that the only way for them to be fully aware of what is happening in the industries they are supposed to be regulating is to accept free travel insults the intelligence of the American public.

If it is important enough for the head of a federal agency to go to Hong Kong or New York to see how fireworks safety is tested or what the newest toys on the U.S. market will be, then the agency should pay for the trip. If it’s not that important, then perhaps the chairman should stay in Washington and find a better way to spend his or her time in service to the taxpayers.