Yuku free message boards

Washington - Last Halloween, an Ashland University professor set out to see how common it was to find trick-or-treat trinkets and candy buckets painted with toxic lead paint. It turned out to be as easy as going to the local Family Dollar and Dollar General stores, which helped initiate recalls after the professor's discovery.

It was just as easy at Easter time, when Ashland chemistry professor Jeffrey Weidenhamer and his students went hunting for plastic eggs. Nearly 30 percent of the items they bought contained excessive levels of lead in the paint. Once again, the Consumer Product Safety Commission announced a voluntary recall, this time with Hobby Lobby Stores.

And once again, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio complained that government watchdogs had failed to protect consumers, and the products should never have made it to stores in the first place. Yet his consternation, shared by consumer groups and labor unions, went well beyond the single, small agency in charge of safeguarding consumer products.

The broader safety net - protecting children from dangerous toys, adults from tainted spinach and beef, factory workers from chemical dust that can sicken or explode, miners from underground passageways that collapse - has frayed, they say. The government's own records and statistics bear this out in many ways, showing shrinking agency budgets, personnel rosters that don't keep pace with inspection demands, and White House rejection of proposed safety rules.

Some safety advocates blame the Bush administration for canceling or freezing safety and environmental regulations and trying to cut government interference. The result, critics say, are incidents like the E. coli scare in 2006 from tainted spinach that sickened hundreds of people and killed three; the Utah mine collapse last year that killed not only six miners but also three would-be rescuers; and the importation of 90,000 tubes of Chinese toothpaste that contained poison.

"It's an administration that doesn't really believe in regulation," says Peg Seminario, the AFL-CIO's national safety and health director.

Yet the Bush administration points to measures, some in dispute, that show success, including steadily declining workplace deaths and injuries. The Labor Department, charged with protecting workers, even brags about being more efficient with less money - "nearly 15 percent less than 10 years ago," Labor Secretary Elaine Chao said in a speech covered by a trade publication in February.

"That's proof positive that the government can do more with less," she said.

This argument, however, hides a broader trend: The nation's safety agencies have been shedding staff not only over the last eight years but also, to varying degrees, over nearly three decades. Spending on agencies that regulate safety has long been politically sensitive, with Reagan Republicans slicing what they saw as unnecessary and intrusive parts of government. Clinton Democrats lacked the political muscle or will to reverse the longterm decline once Republicans gained a majority in Congress. The lowest point in workplace inspections came not during the current administration but in the mid-1990s, says the Department of Labor.

The result: The era of government as consumer protector, born of 1960s and '70s activism, has faded.
For example, the Food and Drug Administration's decreased funding over 35 years for inspection of the nation's food supply has resulted in a 78 percent reduction in the number of inspections. This has occurred "at a time when the food industry has been rapidly expanding and food importation has exponentially increased," says a critical report released in November by the FDA's own Science Board.

Agency staffs cut for years

Similar cuts have occurred at the Consumer Product Safety Commission, created by Congress in 1972 to protect children and adults from unreasonable risk of injury or death from consumer goods. It spent $44 million and had 978 full-time employees by 1980, budget documents show.

If adjusted for inflation since then, the agency would have had $111 million to spend in 2007. Yet by 2007, it had only $63 million, a cut of 43 percent in inflation-adjusted dollars. And it had only 393 workers, a 60 percent reduction from its 1980 workforce.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, created in 1970, also downsized. Although its budget rose very slightly when adjusted for inflation, today it has 30 percent fewer employees than in 1980. This occurred while the size of America's workforce ballooned.

"OSHA has repeatedly failed in its 37-year history to protect workers," Eric Frumin, health and safety coordinator of a labor coalition called Change to Win, testified before a Senate subcommittee last week. "In far too many cases, inspectors arrive only after a serious incident or years of neglect, where earlier intervention would have saved lives."

According to OMB Watch, a group with union ties that tries to shed light on federal spending priorities, OSHA had three staff members for every 100,000 American workers in 1980. Today, the ratio is 1.5 OSHA employees for every 100,000 workers.

The trend is similar across the spectrum, with agencies either cutting staff or failing to keep inspection on pace with, for example, the growth in production of packaged spinach, pharmaceuticals and imports of all kind, according to government audits.

"Congress in the 1970s set out very ambitious goals for all these agencies," says Sidney Shapiro, a Wake Forest University law professor who has written extensively about regulation. "Safe consumer products. A safe and healthful workplace. Clean air. Clean water. On and on.

"And we made some pretty good progress," Shapiro says. "It's a lot cleaner than it was 10 years ago, let alone 30 years ago. But the ability of agencies to keep pursuing that objective, I think, is eroding."

Injury rates mask problem

If the safety net is sagging, that doesn't automatically mean Americans are less safe. Although the FDA's Science Board concluded that the agency's "inability to keep up with scientific advances means that American lives are at risk," millions of Americans consume groceries, drugs and cosmetics every day without incident. OMB Watch's analysts say their research shows a shift in government priorities, but demonstrating a direct cause-and-effect relationship between cuts and safety is difficult, they say.

David James, an assistant secretary of labor, says no such relationship exists in part because of advances in workplace efficiency and safety technology and better targeting of injury-prone industries.

In fact, government figures show a steady decline in the rates of deaths and injuries of workers, despite safety staffing cuts.

Similarly, despite widespread criticism, the Consumer Product Safety Commission recalls more products today than it has in years - a measure, it says, of its ability to work with manufacturers and retailers to avoid accidents and injuries. Last year saw 473 product recalls, the highest number since 1980. Agency officials cite significant decreases in deaths from residential fires, product-related electrocutions, carbon monoxide poisoning and crib injuries.

But these figures mask big shortcomings, some analysts say. The biggest: the Department of Labor gets most of its worker-safety figures from employers, many of whom don't report their accidents.

A study by Michigan State University researchers last year, published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, found that the Department of Labor underestimates workplace-related injuries and illnesses by as much as 68 percent. That's consistent with other reports, some suggesting that employees in injury-prone industries are pressured by their bosses not to speak up.

As for product recalls, critics say it is hardly a success when lead-tainted toys wind up in stores and must be removed.

"Ultimately when there's a recall, there's been a failure," says Rachel Weintraub, director of product safety and senior counsel for the Consumer Federation of America. "And the problem is that often the product is in the hands of consumers, often children, and it's very difficult to get these products back."

Eighty-five percent of today's recalls are for goods made overseas, the government says. Battered by criticism over poorly inspected imports from countries like China, the product safety commission recently said it would create an Import Surveillance Division to work with U.S. customs and cargo inspectors, with the hope of stopping dangerous imports before they enter the country.

Democrats in Congress want the agency to do more, and they have begun boosting its budget. The House and Senate, however, still must reconcile differing versions of a bill that would also boost the agency's enforcement power and, if the Senate prevails, create a public database of consumer complaints.

Playing it safe

None of this means consumers need to be constantly scared. The Food and Drug Administration may have "an appallingly low inspection rate for food," as its own Science Board says. The Mine Safety and Health Administration, too, may have been deferential in allowing dangerous conditions to exist last year at Crandall Canyon Mine in Utah, as the Department of Labor's inspector general reported last week.

And the Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service may have less time to spend trying to inspect every livestock carcass while the volume of beef and poultry keeps outpacing the size of the staff, as OMB Watch notes.

But the meat you eat is safe, the agency says, insisting that every carcass is still inspected. So too are mines, the Department of Labor says. Despite the well-publicized exceptions, the odds of an incident, accident or poisoning at work or home remain slim.

But those exceptions - and the staff that isn't there to catch them - worry critics.

Asked if he feels safe when he buys consumer products, eats and goes to work, Brown, the senator, replies, "I'm more careful, because I know how this crowd in Washington has betrayed the American public."

Asked the same question, James, of the Department of Labor, says, "Safety is not a worry to me because I have full faith and confidence in this administration."