Conversations with Consumers

Tomorrow, after 8½ years, my term as a member of the Consumer Product Safety Commission ends. It has been quite a ride—smooth at times, bumpy at others, but always interesting. I will let others judge my successes and failures, but I have always striven to help the American consumer by ensuring that their products are safe and their options plentiful. It is my deep conviction that this agency does its job best when it works alongside stakeholders, not against them. All sides have valid concerns. All deserve to be heard. As a commissioner and then as acting chairman and then again as a commissioner, I have always tried to work collaboratively with my colleagues and with stakeholders. I am proud of the work that we do here at the CPSC, and I will be more than a little interested to see where the agency goes in the future.

As a matter of fact, more than just staying interested, I plan to stay engaged. (After having been involved with the agency in some way or another for nigh on 30 years, you wouldn’t expect me to just disappear, would you?) I have very much enjoyed writing this blog since I started it in 2009, and I’ll be keeping it up. There will be posts about the CPSC, and perhaps about other subjects like administrative law and regulatory policy. I won’t just be posting because I’m interested—I’ll be posting because all of us who know and work with the CPSC have a responsibility to stay engaged with the agency. Regulators and the regulated (and other interested parties like yours truly) have to keep talking with each other, not going back into our shells, in order to avoid the kind of groupthink that leads to bad decisions or an us-versus-them mentality. So let’s keep the conversation going.