Next week, Understanding Government will be rolling out a highly entertaining and trenchant look at the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s stormy history. There might even be pictures.

The cliche about the CPSC is that they’re "the little federal agency that couldn’t" — a tiny bureaucracy that’s been politically marginalized. But that may have changed with a new law, the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, that gives new resources and power to the agency.

But as the Wall Street Journal’s Melanie Trotman reports, Nancy Nord, the acting chairman of CPSC, doesn’t really like the law. She’s complaining about how confusing it will be to implement new regulations like the maximum level of lead paint in toys. And she says that Congress still hasn’t given the agency the money it needs to do things like create a database of consumer complaints.

The Democratic Congress may be stalling in passing any budget bills in the hopes they will be signed not by George W. Bush, but Barack Obama. So the money complaint may be temporarily legit. Nord’s attitude, however, isn’t. In a Washington anomaly, she’s complainng about added power and responsibility.  Maybe the next administration will have a chairman excited by the challenge of bringing CPSC back from the dead. -MB

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