As readers of this blog should already know, consumer-protection policies sometimes go wrong. Last week, I had the chance to attend a panel discussion about several examples, moderated by Timothy Carney at the American Enterprise Institute. Entitled “Uber competitive: How bogus consumer laws hurt taxis, toys, and braids” (you can watch the panel at the link), naturally the topic of CPSIA regulations came up. As Randall Hertzler of the Handmade Toy Alliance argued in his remarks to the audience, some of our CPSIA regulations have made competing or just staying in business much more difficult for small- and medium-sized firms making perfectly safe products. This ultimately gives consumers fewer choices and higher prices.
Even liberal Slate blogger Matt Yglesias agreed that health and safety agencies tend to under-estimate the costs and over-imagine the benefits of their work, leaving consumers with net losses. Matt was particularly concerned about pure compliance costs, the paperwork costs of figuring out the regulation and documenting compliance that do virtually nothing to make consumers safer but cost big companies money, small companies jobs or existence, and consumers choice and affordability.
The worst part may be that these costs actually lessen companies’ ability to make consumers safer, because every dollar they spend identifying the hoops and deciphering just how to jump through them is a dollar they can’t spend on innovation, including safety innovation. I have been dismayed by the repeated refusals by some at CPSC to consider the full effects of our rules before imposing them, and this habit is starting to get noticed outside the building. I hope these growing voices lead us to make our work better before Congress has to step in and force us to improve.
1110 Series: If We Wanted Your Opinion…
Published May 8, 2013 1110 Series , Burden Reduction , Certification , Children's Products , Comment Request , Congress , CPSIA , Uncategorized 3 CommentsOver the past couple days, I’ve talked about how the Commission hid the ball on costs and actively avoided clarity for product bans when we proposed to amend our certificates of compliance rule, the 1110 rule. Today, the issue I wanted to highlight is not our failure to make the rule as intelligible as it should be; it’s my colleagues’ refusal to seek intelligibility in our own deliberative process, specifically in how the new rule will deal with products that are exempt from testing to any applicable safety standard.
Our staff originally proposed what I thought was an acceptable approach: If your product is subject to multiple rules and exempt from testing for only some of them, then you have to certify to the ones in force and claim your testing exemption(s) for the rest. But if your product is exempt from testing under any applicable standard—whether your product has one or more testing exceptions—you don’t need a certificate just to say that. To me, this seemed not only a reasonable opportunity to minimize unnecessary burdens but also more consistent with the law, which bases certificates on testing. Requiring a certificate with no information other than an exemption is wasteful and contrary to the purpose of the testing regime.
My colleagues were uninterested in these benefits. Arguing that having more pieces of paper to shuffle would expedite work at the ports, they amended the proposed rule to require companies to create, provide, and maintain certificates that say nothing more than, “I’m exempt from testing to the standard.” Although I do not think such a certificate is necessary, I thought public input on the question could be helpful, so I proposed returning to the staff’s original language and asking for comment on the safety, efficiency, and cost implications of my colleagues’ approach. My colleagues were not interested in asking a question, and decided to plow ahead. (My colleagues did less-than-helpfully note that the public could still comment on the approach.)
The rule they insisted on might turn out to be the efficient one. We might hear from commenters that consistency in certificates is more useful than skipping hollow ones. What baffles me is my colleagues’ refusal to even solicit public input on the point, particularly when they are claiming benefits that, if real, the regulated community would likely endorse. Dogged refusal to invite any other perspectives is not the hallmark of reasoned decision-making.
Tomorrow, we’ll continue this discussion of the areas where the 1110 rule could use improvement before it’s final.