WASHINGTON - A Senate panel voted Tuesday to overhaul and boost funding for the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and House Democrats called for the agency's head to resign.
They said her opposition to the changes proves her unfit for the job.
The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee backed by voice vote the measure to raise fines on companies selling unsafe products in the first overhaul of laws governing the agency in 17 years. Business groups and the Bush administration oppose the proposal in part because of a provision giving state attorneys general the authority to enforce federal safety laws.
"The American public knows that we've seen a record number of recalls, and they expect us to act," said Sen. Mark Pryor, D-Ark., the bill's author and chairman of the consumer safety subcommittee. "This agency just has not been able to keep up with changes in the marketplace."
The agency's acting chairman, Nancy Nord, in a letter to Pryor and panel Chairman Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, said that the legislation would overwhelm her 400-person agency with requirements to issue new rules and handle a flood of complaints from companies worrying about higher fines.
The measure "could have the unintended consequence of hampering, rather than furthering, consumer product safety," she wrote.
Pryor said Nord is "out of step" with the American public in her views, and House Democratic leaders went further, calling for Nord to resign.
Nord "doesn't understand the gravity of the situation," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, DCalif., who urged President Bush to demand Nord's resignation.
The administration dismissed the suggestion.
"We continue to support Acting Commissioner Nord," said White House spokesman Emily Lawrimore. "We would encourage the Congress to put politics aside and begin working with us on meaningful reform."
Pryor's legislation, introduced last month, has the support of Inouye and Dick Durbin of Illinois, the second-ranking Senate Democrat. It would be the first legislation reworking the law governingthe Consumer Product Safety Commission since 1990.
Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., who also backs Pryor's bill, unveiled separate legislation Tuesday that would set up a new office in the Commerce Department to coordinate oversight of agenciesthat inspect food and regulate other products sold to U.S. consumers.
In the House, Rep. Bobby Rush, D-Ill., is working on legislation similar to Pryor's, and Pelosi said she hopes a measure can arrive on the floor this year.
"We want to achieve a very strong bipartisan vote on this," she said. "The trust that parents across this country would like to have in the federal government is completely unjustified when we see how lax the Consumer Product Safety Commission has been," Pelosi said at a news conference Tuesday.
Pryor's measure focuses on increasing staffing and testing facilities at the agency and requiring outside safety tests for imported toys, which industry groups support. It also includes five legal changes, which manufacturers and retailers say would discourage them from cooperating with government regulators and not help consumer safety.
The bill would raise the maximum fine on companies that sell unsafe products to $100 million from less than $2 million now and allow more criminal prosecutions of corporate executives. It would also allow public disclosure of internal agency documents on flawed products.
The measure would empower state attorneys general to enforce federal consumer-safety standards. The possibility of a patchwork of 50 interpretations of laws in separate states has been one of the top complaints from industry groups and the Bush administration.
"Allowing individual states to enforce these standards on their own will cause significant uncertainty in the marketplace as the safety status of individual products may vary depending on jurisdiction," Allan Hubbard, director of the White House National Economic Council, wrote in a letter to Inouye earlier Tuesday.
Information for this article was contributed by Colleen McElroy of Bloomberg News.
Front Section, Pages 4 on 10/31/2007