Read down MAGA’s enemies list and you’ll find oodles of presumably woke causes and customs, along with the universities that leached them into our national bloodstream and the government agencies that imposed them on an unsuspecting public. It’s a long list, customarily free from such woke constraints as having to provide credible documentation. But you won’t find consumer product safety on that list. Nobody, save miscreant manufacturers, really wants the public to unknowingly purchase dangerous cribs or
flammable toddler PJs. Even the Klan wants safe sheets. So, there’s been no groundswell to cripple the Consumer Product Safety Commission. But the absence of discontent even from America’s most discontented has posed no obstacle to the demons of DOGE, who in recent weeks have been busy slashing the CPSC’s massive staff (of about 500, which you might think is actually rather small considering their charge is to investigate and assess potentially dangerous defects in products that consumers call to their attention, and that the number of products in the American marketplace is, well,
large). At last Wednesday’s meeting of the Commission, which has five members, all confirmed by Congress and appointed to fixed terms, two of those members—Richard Trumka Jr. and Mary Boyle—spoke out against stripping the agency of investigators who were expert in specific types of products and specific types of hazards and specific forms of safety remediations. The following day, in the middle of their fixed terms, both Trumka and Boyle were unceremoniously sacked, and their colleague Alex Hoehn-Saric was fired the day after that. The three were the Democratic members of the Commission; two Republicans remain, apparently indifferent to the mass firings of staff. The previous week, the three Democrats had supplied the three votes (a majority) in favor of preliminarily adopting a proposed safety standard that would be opened up to public comments before coming to a final vote on its adoption. That standard would add safety precautions to the lithium-ion batteries in electric scooters and electric bikes, which CPSC investigators found had flared into fires that have caused at least 181 injuries and 39 deaths nationwide. Electric scooters and bikes not themselves being totally woke, some of the deceased were likely MAGAnauts and their children.
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