After Donald Trump became president, the Consumer Product Safety Commission dropped a major recall demand aimed at jogging strollers blamed for hundreds of crashes and scores of injuries of both children and adults, reports the Washington Post.
The newspaper describes such crashes as “brutal.”
“With no warning, the front wheel on the three-wheeled BOB jogging strollers fell off, causing the carriages to careen and even flip over. Adults shattered bones. They tore ligaments. Children smashed their teeth. They gashed their faces. One child bled from his ear canal.”
CPSC investigators spent months looking into the complaints and decided in 2017 that the widely popular BOB “was unsafe and needed to be recalled,” the Post reports.
After hundreds of crashes, this Britax jogging stroller faced recall. Then Trump appointees stepped in. https://t.co/yRWGF5LdHg
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) April 3, 2019
But Britax Child Safety, which makes the BOB, refused to issue a voluntary recall of nearly half a million strollers, insisting they are “safe when used as instructed.”
At the heart of the dispute is the original quick-release design of the BOB’s front wheel, a design Britax has since modified to reduce the risk the wheel will detach while the stroller is in motion.
Under a settlement with the agency, the company agreed to “run a public-safety campaign and offer replacement parts or discounts on new strollers to some users.” It did not have to admit its original design was defective.
But nearly half a million original-design BOBs remain in the hands of consumers (and presumably in use), while a safety video Britas posted on YouTube has been viewed fewer than 200 times, according to the Post.
In February of last year, the CPSC sued to force a recall, but Britax kept fighting — an unusual move because most companies try to avoid public disputes with safety regulators.
The reason, the Post says, was that “the leadership of the safety agency was about to change,” letting Britax slip off the hook.
“The untold story of the Britax case shows how changes in the safety agency’s leadership under President Trump influenced the handling of a product that the commission believed had injured consumers.”
The Post says it reviewed numerous documents and interviewed eight current and former senior [CPSC] officials in its investigation, and discovered that “the agency’s Republican chairwoman kept Democratic commissioners in the dark about the stroller investigation and then helped end the case in court.”
The recall lawsuit against Britax “ended in November with a settlement, approved by a 3-to-2 commission vote reflecting the new Republican majority,” the Post says. “In a rare written dissent, the panel’s two Democrats called the settlement ‘aggressively misleading’ for seeking to downplay the risks to consumers.”
The acting CPSC chairwoman — and Trump’s nominee to assume the role permanently — is Ann Marie Buerkle, who has served on the commission since 2013.
Buerkle, the Post says, “was the only commissioner to oppose proposed portable-generator rules aimed at reducing carbon monoxide poisoning in 2016. She was again the lone vote that year against a then-record $15.45 million penalty for a company accused of making humidifiers prone to catching fire.” She declined the newspaper’s interview request.
Marietta Robinson, a Democrat and former commissioner who was still at the agency when the injury reports surfaced, told the Post that Britax was clearly counting on avoiding a costly recall after the Trump administration arrived and Republicans took charge of the CPSC.
“The only way this can be explained,” she said, “is they knew they could do whatever they wanted once the majority changed.”
Watch the short video from the Post above.