Senate votes to beef up consumer protection agency

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Senate voted overwhelmingly Thursday to beef up the federal agency that oversees the safety of consumer products after a spate of recalls involving imported products.

Senators voted 79-13 to more than double the staff of the Consumer Product Safety Commission and boost its budget by nearly $450 million over four years.

The legislation was introduced amid a wave of recalls of imported toys and other goods, most of them made in China, that were found to have been tainted with toxic chemicals or foreign substances.

The bill orders the agency to set new limits on the levels of lead paint in children's toys and add 500 people to its work force of about 400 by 2013.

It also offers new protections for whistle-blowers, allows state prosecutors to pursue violators and orders the commission to establish safety standards for all-terrain vehicles and portable gas cans.

Democratic leaders said the Consumer Product Safety Commission has been neglected by the Bush administration, resulting in large numbers of hazardous products reaching American buyers.

The bill still needs to be reconciled with a version passed by the House of Representatives, but its leading sponsor, Arkansas Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor, said the legislation is a sign of "what the Senate can do" despite the chamber's sharp partisan divide.

"We had a spirit of cooperation and collegiality, and it was great," he said.

The White House says it has "serious concerns" about the bill. It warns that giving state attorneys general the power to pursue product safety cases "is likely to lead to a confusing patchwork of safety standards." Watch Senate take up consumer safety »

And it says creating a publicly available database of consumer safety incidents "will result in a significant increase in wasteful litigation" and place "significant, unnecessary burdens" on the agency.

President Bush has not threatened to veto the measure, however.

Staffing at the commission has been cut by more than 50 percent since its inception in 1973 -- from 900 employees to just more than 400 last year.

One employee made famous by politicians pointing to the agency's inadequacies is Robert Hundemer, labeled the commission's only toy tester. Hundemer tested toys for small parts that could pose choking hazards. Watch Hundemer's take on the Senate bill »

On the Senate floor this week, Sen. Dick Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, displayed an oversized poster depicting Hundemer's cramped office, saying, "This is Bob's testing laboratory for toys imported into the United States. That's not a real confidence builder. It looks like my workbench in my basement in Springfield.

"I bet you that families across America thought that it was a little different process that led to an inspection of a toy that might end up in the hands of their child."

Hundemer, who retired from the commission in January after more than 30 years, said he and his colleagues tried to keep American consumers safe as best they could with dwindling resources.

Reports of tainted products have gone up sharply in the past year, starting with the March 2007 recall of more than 150 brands of cat and dog food. The Food and Drug Administration found some pets were becoming ill or dying after eating food tainted with the industrial chemical melamine.

Two Chinese businesses, a U.S. company and top executives of each were indicted by a federal grand jury in February in connection with tainted pet food, which resulted in deaths and serious illnesses in up to thousands of U.S. pets, federal prosecutors said.

In October, regulators and retailers recalled at least 69,000 Chinese-made toys over concerns of excessive amounts of lead paint, which can cause hazardous lead poisoning.

In November, shipments of the popular toy Aqua Dots were found to have been contaminated with a toxic chemical that turned into a powerful "date rape" drug if swallowed, causing some children who ate the craft toys to vomit and lose consciousness.

In February, a Maryland candy distributor pulled Pokemon-brand Valentine lollipops from store shelves after bits of metal were found in the sealed treats, authorities said. E-mail to a friend

CNN's Lesa Jansen contributed to this report.

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