On November 6, 2007, President Bush announced the completion of a report by the Interagency Working Group on Import Safety, headed by Michael Leavitt, Secretary of Health and Human Services. Action Plan for Import Safety: A Roadmap outlines 14 recommendations to combat the year’s high numbers of consumer product recalls. The plan extends across federal agencies, including the Treasury, State, Justice, Agriculture, Commerce, and Homeland Security departments, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC), among others.
The Action Plan for Import Safety was announced to the public approximately one week after the Senate panel approval of the CPSC Reform Act of 2007. It provides steps to improving safety standards and enforcement, focusing on increased border intervention, technology, and preventing unsafe products from arriving in the U.S.
The Action Plan for Import Safety includes recommendations similar to those included in the Reform Act, such as imposing stronger penalties on negligent manufacturers, global compliance to U.S. safety standards, standardized product certification requirements, improved laboratory testing methods for products, and clear methods of communication between federal and state agencies.
However, the proposals clearly diverge in their approaches. The report endorsed by the President, for example, discusses monetary investments for changing safety policies less often than it does improving technological communication, both overseas and domestically. In fact, it suggests a streamlined database of import information and networks, for import risk assessment. Manufacturers would be asked to enter the product information prior to shipment, in order for better risk assessment on the part of the U.S. It also mentions utilizing various technologies such as RFID (radio frequency identification) to better track imports, and points to the strategic collection of personal consumer information at the time of purchase in order to disseminate recall information more widely. The maximum manufacturer penalties included in the Action Plan for Import Safety ring in at $10 million, as opposed to the $100 million cap provided by the CPSC Reform Act. The plan also recommends encouraging voluntary information-sharing for manufacturers, with rewards such as speedier processing at U.S. ports, for importers and manufacturers willing to divulge product information prior to shipment to the U.S.
Most noticeably, it excludes whistleblower protections covered under the CPSC Reform Act, and makes no mention of expanding the full-time staff of the CPSC—two aspects of the Reform Act met with criticism from the CPSC itself.
“The United States is one of the most open markets in the world,” President Bush commented during his November 6 statement to the press, “and our consumers are better off because they have a wide variety of products from across the world to choose from. And while we have strong food and product safety standards, we need to do more to ensure that American families have confidence in what they find on our store shelves.”