Lisa Osborne-Siefert became a consumer advocate shortly after her worst day as a parent, in 2011. She had walked into her 2-year-old son’s room to wake him from his afternoon nap and found his little body pinned under a tipped-over dresser.
Shane Siefert had told his mom “Love you,” as he settled in for his nap. But at some point, the toddler got out of his bed and climbed on the dresser, which toppled onto him.
“There are some days when it is debilitating,” Osborne-Siefert says of the grief she feels 14 years later.
Since Shane’s death, Osborne-Siefert, who lives in Huntley, has spoken to community groups, partnered with safety organizations and joined with other parents to convince Congress and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission that furniture tip-overs needed national attention.
Now, she’s worried about who will enforce the 2022 federal law she pushed for — the STURDY Act, which requires stability standards for dressers. And she wonders who will recognize the next safety threat.
That’s because President Donald Trump wants to dismantle the federal agency and move its functions under the Department of Health and Human Services, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., according to a draft budget obtained by several news organizations.
On May 8, Trump fired three of the five commissioners who lead the bipartisan, independent agency. That came after they voted to advance a safety standard for lithium-ion batteries linked to fatal fires involving e-bikes and scooters in defiance of a Trump executive order requiring White House review of all new proposed regulations.
Though the moves are certain to be fought in court, dismantling the agency upends more than a half century of independent oversight of product safety from an agency created by Congress to be largely insulated from politics.
“Taking down the CPSC is reckless,” Osborne-Siefert says. “I felt like, when I met with people from the CPSC, it wasn’t political. Everyone cares about safety. The CPSC works with scientific evidence. I don’t want them to now be working with political influence.”
Janet McGee of Eagan, Minnesota, a suburb of St. Paul, says the agency’s data-driven approach made her realize she wasn’t alone after her 22-month-old son Ted was killed by a dresser that toppled onto him on Valentine’s Day in 2016 as he napped. Ted died at a hospital four hours later.
Like Osborne-Siefert, McGee became a safety advocate, and she credits the CPSC’s data collection with revealing the extent of the problem.
Reports to the agency document 581 deaths in tip-over accidents involving furniture or TVs between 2000 and 2022. Even short dressers can tip over and kill a child.
“We went from thinking it was a freak accident to thinking it was a problem that needed to be addressed,” says McGee, who helps lead a group called Parents Against Tip-Overs. “Having a government agency that’s independent and bipartisan is so important.”
The National Consumers League, Consumer Federation of America, Consumer Reports and 156 other advocates are urging Russell Vought, director of the federal Office of Management and Budget, to preserve the CPSC as an independent, bipartisan agency.
In a letter, they pointed to substantial decreases in fire deaths, child poisonings, crib deaths and swimming pool injuries over the years, in large part due to the agency’s efforts.
The OMB did not respond to a request for comment.
‘Small but mighty’ agency
The CPSC was created under the Consumer Product Safety Act, passed in 1972 by Congress and signed into law by President Richard Nixon.
The agency’s operating budget is $151 million, according to its fiscal year 2025 plan. It has about 510 employees, including about 120 investigators and compliance officers working throughout the country.
It oversees safety for all sorts of products, from baby cribs to table saws, but not food and medicine, which are overseen by the federal Food and Drug Administration, and vehicles, which are regulated by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
The agency collects incident reports at SaferProducts.gov, and, when it identifies a pattern of deaths, injuries or dangerous malfunctions, it can seek recalls. It also pushes safety campaigns such as “Anchor It!” for furniture and a window blinds campaign to prevent strangulation deaths from corded blinds, which have killed hundreds of children.
When the agency spots a hazard, it contacts the company or manufacturer, which often results in a recall of the product. When they won’t comply with consumer product safety laws, the agency can take more serious actions, like fines or lawsuits.
Among its successes:
- An 80% drop in deaths from unsafe baby cribs, for which the CPSC set mandatory safety standards in 2011. The agency has continued to work on preventing injuries from unsafe sleeping environments — such as the use of soft bedding — which accounted for 126 deaths from 2019 to 2021.
- An 88% decline in injuries associated with baby walkers. In 1992, these injuries resulted in 25,000 emergency room visits. The CPSC issued mandatory safety standards in 2010. By 2020, the number of emergency room visits had dropped to about 3,100.
- Improvements in home fire safety, with a 43% drop in residential fires and a 47% decline in fire deaths from 1980 to 2018. The agency flags home products known to cause fires, such as defective dehumidifiers, millions of which were recalled.
Brett Horn is another parent who channeled his grief into advocacy, founding Charlie’s House in Kansas City, Missouri. It hosts in-person and online demonstrations to educate parents and caregivers.
Horn’s 2-year-old son Charlie died in 2007 when a 30-inch-high dresser tipped over onto him.
Horn describes himself as “a conservative-by-nature individual” and says he voted for Trump because he believes the federal government should be smaller. But Horn says axing the CPSC makes no sense.
“I do believe that this is not the appropriate target for that cost-saving … because of the effectiveness of this small but mighty agency,” he says.
Eliminating the agency and folding it into HHS would save the government $16 million, the news site Politico has reported. But Americans would lose their independent watchdog tasked with preventing deaths and injuries, Horn says.
“They always have worked well together,” Horn says of the Republicans and Democrats who’ve served as the agency’s commissioners. “It is very concerning. If it’s not broke, why fix it?”
SIDS of Illinois, which works to prevent infant sleep deaths, says that the public relies on the Consumer Product Safety Commission to oversee marketing of products for infant sleep.
“The CPSC also issues recalls for infant products that are found to be unsafe. We believe that consumers should be informed and educated about unsafe products, and we rely on the CPSC to reach parents with potentially life-saving information about infant products,” the group says.
The CPSC undertook extensive recalls in 2019 with Fisher-Price and other makers of inclined infant sleepers, and it’s tasked with enforcing the Safe Sleep for Babies Act, which Congress passed in 2021 to ban the manufacture and sale of inclined sleepers and crib bumpers.
Inclined sleepers have been implicated in the suffocation deaths of about 100 babies.
Nancy Cowles, who ran the recently shuttered Chicago-based nonprofit Kids In Danger, says it’s nonsensical to jettison the nation’s product safety agency. Besides the firings of the three commissioners, which renders it unable to hold votes on safety rules, Cowles fears key expertise will be lost if the agency’s duties are shifted to HHS.
“It’s really horrible,” Cowles says. “This is an agency that isn’t protecting just one part of the population.”
Another worry for Cowles: Since product safety laws passed by Congress — like the STURDY Act, Safe Sleep for Babies Act and Reese’s Law, which regulates button cell and coin batteries — name the CPSC as the enforcement agency, what happens if there is no CPSC?
“Are [the laws] even enforceable?” she says.
Dispute headed for court
Richard Trumka Jr., one of three Democratic commissioners fired by Trump, says they plan to challenge the “illegal firings” in court.
Trumka says disbanding the CPSC would destroy bipartisan projects in the works for years, including final rules that were expected to be set in September creating safer standards for portable generators, furnaces and boilers that kill about 100 people every year, as well as for aerosol dusters blamed in another 100 annual deaths.
“We were working on solutions to some serious issues that were hurting and killing people,” Trumka says.
He says it’s important to make product safety as free from political influence as possible, pointing to the CPSC’s order against Amazon, which found the e-commerce giant responsible for third-party sellers of dangerous products on its platform. Amazon is challenging the agency’s authority in court.
“A ton of the enforcement work we do is stopping dangerous foreign goods at the ports,” Trumka says.
Osborne-Siefert says she hopes the Consumer Product Safety Commission will be saved and that its work behind the scenes to protect American consumers will continue.
Before her son’s death, she says, “I may have heard CPSC mentioned in the news, but I had no idea what it did. I didn’t know how important it is to consumers and families. I think most consumers have no idea.”