Fired federal safety watchdogs claim dangerous toy, battery and baby rocker regulations in jeopardy

Washington, D.C. (InvestigateTV) — Kipley Haugen started preparing her speech weeks ago. It was to be the most important of the 8-year-old’s life: imploring federal safety regulators to protect other kids from a toy that, in her words, “hurted me.”

But a directive by the White House in May to fire the three Democrats on the 5-member U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission not only derailed Kipley’s plan, it also has left an untold number of proposed safety rules in limbo and a meeting to discuss annual priorities was postponed for three months.

Infant rockers and baby neck floats, table saws and portable generators, window coverings and water beads were among many products under review by the SC at the time of the istration’s actions, according to an InvestigateTV analysis of Federal notices.

Over multiple years, thousands of Americans have been killed or injured while using those products. Kipley is among them.

She swallowed a single, stray water bead when she was a year old. The beads, no larger than the size of cookie sprinkles, expand 100 times their size when exposed to liquid. Doctors found one bead in Kipley’s stomach during emergency surgery to save her life.

Following executive orders and policies designed to rein in government spending and decrease heavy oversight in some areas, President Donald Trump and his istration have targeted many independent federal agencies created by Congress, implementing severe cutbacks or eliminating agencies and positions, including at the SC.

The fired SC commissioners – Mary Boyle, Alexander Hoehn-Saric and Richard Trumka Jr. - and many Democrats in Congress have called the actions illegal.

“Congress determined that such independence is necessary to ensure that the SC remains unfettered by political dictates, self-interested industry pressure or blind consumer zeal,” according to a lawsuit filed May 21 by the embattled SC commissioners against Trump and other istration officials.

White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said last month that the SC falls under Trump’s purview. “It’s a federal agency in which branch? It’s the executive branch! Who’s the head of the executive branch? The President of the United States. He has the right to fire people in the United States.”

The SC launched in the early 1970s during Richard Nixon’s istration with a mission to protect Americans from defective or dangerous everyday products such as appliances, electronics, furniture, tools and toys.

It oversees 15,000 product categories, implements safety standards when needed, issues recalls and warnings for defective items and monitors products arriving at the U.S. ports to ensure they meet federal laws, among other duties.

“The SC isn’t waste,” said Kipley’s mother, Ashley, who has been advocating for safety regulations and laws on water beads since Kipley’s injury. “It’s the firewall.”

InvestigateTV detailed the family’s story in 2024.

In recent years, the SC has taken actions against some big-name companies, including assessing civil penalties for those that failed to report defective products, as required by law. Some consumer advocates worry about a future without such oversight.

“My fear is if the SC doesn’t exist, product safety becomes a political tool. Instead of us talking about it from a very personal standpoint ‘I deserve to be safe. You deserve to be safe.’ We instead are going to have this push and pull where it will be unclear who’s in charge, who’s responsibility is it to keep me safe,” said Courtney Griffin, director of consumer product safety at the Consumer Federation of America. “I view it as a complete abdication of our government’s fundamental job, which is to keep us all safe from harm, especially our children and infants.”

Fired commissioners accused of political resistance

Since taking office in January, Trump has issued more than 370 executive orders, with some meant to curtail government spending, oversight and regulation.

At the SC, the agency works with manufacturers, consumer advocates, medical professionals and others to craft safety standards for products that have a defect that could lead to harm – or already have injured or killed Americans.

Over the years, its bipartisan group of commissioners has ed safety standards that have made baby gear, furniture, toys and many other everyday products safer.

In May, the now-fired commissioners voted to push forward new mandatory standards for lithium-ion batteries, items that power scooters, bicycles and other products.

Since 2019, the batteries have been linked to more than 200 fires, explosions, gas releases, overheating and cases of burns and smoke inhalation, according to the SC. These incidents, the agency reported, led to 39 deaths and 181 injuries between 2019 and 2023.

That tally, however, doesn’t include three people who were fatally injured earlier this year in a house fire, likely sparked by a lithium-ion battery. A 6-year-old was among the casualties.

The Republicans – Acting Chairman Peter A. Feldman and Commissioner Douglas Dziak – voted against pushing the safety rule to its final stage because, they said, Trump’s executive orders required that any proposed new regulations go through a new consultation process involving many other federal agencies.

“My colleagues now have directly defied the president,” Feldman said during a May public vote on the battery rule. “The Democrat commissioners at SC are using the serious issue of lithium-ion battery safety to resist the policies of a duly elected president.”

After that, the Democrat commissioners pushed back against efforts from DOGE, or the Department of Government Efficiency, from embedding into the SC.

Within days, the Democrats and their staffs were fired, and Feldman postponed the agency’s annual public meeting to hear from the public about priorities the agency should pursue for the next fiscal year.

That was supposed to be Kipley Haugen’s chance to speak to the commissioners in person about the dangers of water beads.

The SC declined repeated requests for an on-camera interview and would not answer questions about staff size, status of numerous proposed safety rules, priorities for the year and key vacancies, particularly for border import enforcement.

Instead, a spokeswoman sent InvestigateTV the following response, “SC continues to fulfill its mission on behalf of American consumers. Just last week, with only two Commissioners, the Commission set a new record for the total number of recalls and safety warnings in a single week. To suggest that the work of the Commission depends on the individual commissioners removed by President Trump is an insult to the hard work of SC’s professional staff. Under the Constitution and the Consumer Product Safety Act, the President has the authority to remove Commissioners, which he has exercised lawfully.”

Some proposed safety rules are in jeopardy

The fired commissioners – all President Joe Biden appointees – fear that much of the work they’ve done the past three years will be undone.

The agency was in the final stages of approving mandatory safety rules for several products, among them:

• Infant rockers that had been linked to 11 deaths and 88 injuries.
• Aerosol dusters, products that blast air to clean electronics and other products, have been tied to more than 1,000 deaths and an estimated 21,700 inhalation injuries between 2012 and 2021.
• Portable generators that have been associated with at least 1,300 deaths between 2004 through 2021 and more than 23,000 nonfatal carbon monoxide poisonings.

“You’re not going to see the final rules that we talked about, that are going to save hundreds of lives from carbon monoxide poisoning, save hundreds of lives from toxic dusters. Save lives from all kinds of children’s products that we’re working on right now,” Trumka told InvestigateTV. “Those aren’t gonna happen.”

Final rules are typically the last step in the federal rulemaking process and before any regulation is established or enforceable. And it can take years – even decades for the process to complete.

In 2003, for example, of the public asked the SC to consider mandatory safety rules for table saws to prevent amputations. The SC estimates that 30,000 Americans suffer an amputation from a table saw. The rule was in its final stage and now, like other proposed rules, its future is unclear.

“It is turning an evidenced-based watchdog for American consumers, American families, and turning the keys over to powerful business interests,” said Griffin, of the Consumer Federation of America. “It will now become a political weapon…whereby we can have our physical safety in question because no longer will it be an independent evidenced- based body of true qualified professionals.”

The products that had been pushed through for mandatory rules such as rockers and aerosol dusters remain on the market without those safety regulations.

Water beads, for example, are readily available even though many national big box stores - and online retailers have pulled them from their toy sections and sell them only in floral departments, though recent reviews still indicate parents still use them as toys

The beads, created to hydrate crops and often used as part of floral decorations, became popular sensory toys.

Griffin said she is concerned about the agency’s future, and she said without the SC Americans would have to rely on retailers and manufacturers to police themselves.

“If there are companies who are acting as bad faith actors, who will protect us?” she said. “Certainly not the SC if it doesn’t exist.”

‘My dream is simple: That all kids can grow up’

The future of the SC’s existence as an independent agency under the executive branch likely rests in the hands of the Supreme Court – as does the fate of the fired commissioners.

In late May, the Supreme Court issued an order in a case involving two different independent agencies created by Congress in which the Democrats were terminated by the White House.

The ruling, which was not unanimous, effectively said that the President had the authority to fire those without cause “subject to narrow exceptions.”

Those narrow exceptions are to be litigated in a future Supreme Court hearing and were not explained in the order.

But the justices said that leaving the fired employed in the meantime “reflects our judgment that the Government faces greater risk of harm from an order allowing a removed officer to continue exercising the executive power than a wrongfully removed officer faces from being unable to perform her statutory duty.”

Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elana Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor disagreed.

“Today’s order, however, favors the President over our precedent; and it does so unrestrained by the rules of briefing and argument—and the age of time— needed to discipline our decision-making,” Kagan wrote in the dissenting opinion. “I would deny the President’s application. I would do so based on the will of Congress, this Court’s seminal decision approving independent agencies’ for-cause protections, and the ensuing 90 years of this Nation’s history.

How that ruling impacts the SC remains to be seen.

Boyle, Hoehn-Saric and Trumka remain locked out of the agency as their case against Trump and other government officials churns through a federal court in Maryland.

“The SC has a completely nonpartisan mission. Our job is to protect the public from unreasonable injury and death,” Hoehn-Saric said. “Going into this year, the SC was strong. . . we were rapidly advancing critical product safety rules. And one such rule was to establish safety standards for water beads. If the SC were working right, we’d have that rule in place today. But for the last several months, the agency has been really spinning its wheels trying to respond to executive orders.”

The terminations, lawsuits and overall confusion about federal regulations are far too much for an 8-year-old like Kipley to absorb. But she does understand what can happen without action on water beads.

It’s the message she wanted all the commissioners to hear. She stood on the sidewalk outside the SC’s office in Maryland and said her piece:

“When I was a baby, I was hurt and poisoned by water, which I had emergency surgery because the water beads got stuck of inside my tummy.

“Sometime people don’t understand me when I talk, and sometimes I forget things. The words get lost. I have to take medicine every night so I can sleep and my body doesn’t shake.

“My dream is simple: that all kids can grow up safe from water bead toys. No more injuries, no more surgeries, no more losses.

“I know we can fix this. I know you can help me. I believe in you. President Donald Trump, Chair Feldman, please help me protect kids from water beads. I’m counting on you.”

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