Trump Fires Three Consumer Watchdog Commissioners As He Dismantles Agency

The Trump administration is breaking up the Consumer Product Safety Commission, a small but powerful independent watchdog that for five decades has quietly kept dangerous toys, cribs and electronics out of American homes.

The administration on Thursday night fired three Biden-appointed commissioners on the five-member CPSC board — Alexander Hoehn-Saric, Mary T. Boyle and Richard Trumka Jr. — just hours after two staffers with the "Department of Government Efficiency" were scheduled to meet with acting Chair Peter Feldman at the agency’s Bethesda headquarters, according to two people familiar with the meeting granted anonymity to avoid retribution. Hoehn-Saric said that while he has received no direct communication from the White House, Feldman has barred him from performing his duties.

The three fired commissioners voted to block an attempt by Feldman to officially bring on the pair from DOGE, Trumka Jr. said in a statement.

“Rather than respect the democratic process, soon after, I received the email purporting to fire me,” Trumka, son of the late labor leader Richard Trumka, said, vowing to sue over his removal.

By midmorning their names were already gone from their office doors, according to a current staffer granted anonymity out of fear of retribution.

The firings come on the heels of the commissioners’ opposition to any DOGE-directed layoffs and the reclassification of more than 70 CPSC employees, including safety engineers, hazard analysts, and outreach staff responsible for educating manufacturers and consumers.

Boyle, Hoehn-Saric and Trumka Jr. argued that the agency was already operating below its appropriated staffing levels and that cuts would undercut critical safety work.

“These terminations will inevitably result in emergency room visits or deaths that could and should have been avoided,” warned Hoehn-Saric, who was appointed in 2021 and confirmed unanimously by the Senate.

The Trump administration is pushing forward with a plan to eliminate the CPSC as an independent agency and absorb its work into the Department of Health and Human Services, according to a proposed budget document obtained by POLITICO.

The draft budget creates a new office within HHS, headed by an “Assistant Secretary for Consumer Product Safety,” that would “absorb functions and staff from the [CPSC]” and carry on the commission’s core mission of protecting Americans from unreasonable risks of injury or death from consumer products. The new division would have a proposed annual budget of $135 million, around 10 percent less than its current funding level of $151 million.

The plan would require sign off from congressional appropriators and may face a series of other legal challenges as the commission was created by statute.

The firings and the broader restructuring have sparked a firestorm from the commissioners, who argue the administration is illegally gutting a life-saving agency.

“CPSC was created to be independent of the White House precisely so that decisions about public safety would not be subjected to political whims,” Hoehn-Saric said

Boyle, who has spent 15 years at the CPSC as a lawyer and senior official, called her termination an act of retaliation for refusing to “be complicit with the efforts of DOGE to destroy the agency.”

“DOGE shows no respect for expertise, no respect for public servants, no respect for the citizens our government serves,” she said in a statement. “Random layoffs with no rationale don’t reform government; they disable it.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt pushed back, telling POLITICO: “Is the federal agency within the executive branch? Who is the head of the executive branch? He has the right to fire people within the executive branch.”

According to both Boyle and Hoehn-Saric, the firing came just days after the Democratic commissioners voted to advance a proposed safety standard on lithium-ion batteries, which have been linked to more than 20 deadly fires involving e-bikes and e-scooters. The vote directly defied a Trump-era executive order requiring White House review of all regulatory proposals — a directive the commissioners say violates their statutory independence.

“We advanced the rule to gather public input, not implement it,” said Boyle. “That’s the process we’ve followed for decades. This administration wants to bury it behind closed doors.”

Created in the 1970s, the CPSC has long operated as a low-profile but powerful agency that issues recalls, enforces safety standards and litigates against companies selling unsafe products.

Such actions can be a death blow for companies, and the agency has faced legal challenges over the years from businesses like Amazon and conservative legal groups in an effort to reel it in. Last fall, the Supreme Court turned away a petition that sought to undermine the CPSC by arguing that its insulation from the president violated the separation-of-powers clause.