Sponsors (5)
The bill strengthens consumer product-safety enforcement by raising and indexing penalties, but significantly increases financial risk and compliance burdens for businesses while reducing procedural oversight.
Consumers: the Consumer Product Safety Commission can impose substantially higher per-violation penalties (base set to $50,000), increasing deterrence and likely stronger enforcement against unsafe products.
Taxpayers and consumers: penalties will be adjusted annually for inflation, helping maintain the penalties' real deterrent value over time.
Companies (especially small businesses): removing the statutory cap on aggregate penalties can expose firms to very large financial liabilities for related series of violations.
Small businesses that sell consumer products: higher per-violation base penalties and the ability to treat multiple violations separately raise compliance costs and the risk of large fines.
Small businesses and government contractors: exempting annual penalty adjustments from notice-and-comment rulemaking reduces public input and oversight over how penalties are set.
Based on analysis of 2 sections of legislative text.
Increases CPSC per-violation civil penalty to $50,000, adds several violations as separate offenses, removes an aggregate cap, and requires annual CPI-based penalty adjustments published by the Commission.
Official title: Amend the Consumer Product Safety Act to strike provisions relating to the maximum civil penalties for violations of product safety standards.
Introduced August 6, 2026 by Peter Welch · Last progress August 6, 2026
Raises the per-violation civil penalty for violations under the Consumer Product Safety Act to $50,000, adds several violation types to the list treated as separate offenses, removes a statutory maximum aggregate cap on related penalties, changes inflation-adjustment timing to annual CPI-U updates, and makes minor typographical fixes. Gives the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission authority to publish the annual inflation adjustments without notice-and-comment rulemaking and exempts adjustments when Congress or another statutory change already raised the penalty above CPI for the prior year.