Instead of just product recalls, how about a new approach to consumer safety that provides incentives and penalties to companies based on how well they protect the public safety? Getting people to return defective and dangerous products takes much more than simply issuing a recall notice, reports Lyndsey Layton of The Washington Post.   The Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Food and Drug Administration, two agencies that are involved with product recalls, face a significant problem: thousands of Americans buy everything

The Chicago Tribune's Patricia Callahan reports that the Consumer Product Safety Commission yesterday recalled 2 million "drop-side" cribs from the market -- a type of crib estimated to have killed between 32 and 46 children.

Patricia Callahan and Jared S. Hopkins of the Chicago Tribune have a good follow-up story about the Consumer Product Safety Commission persuading Family Dollar Stores Inc. to recall toy guns that shoot inch-long darts.

In 2007, a nine year-old Chicago boy died from inhaling a one-inch dart that was part of his toy gun.  Today the Consumer Product Safety Commission has finally reached an agreement with Family Dollar Stores Inc. to stop selling the "Auto Fire" toy.

Gut your homes. That’s the advice the federal government gave homeowners whose houses smell of rotten eggs and have corroding electrical wiring because they were built with defective drywall imported from China between 2003 and 2008. The Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) made the startling recommendation in a joint statement, saying the imported drywall might be a health hazard and that residents should "remove all possible problem drywall from their homes, and replace electrical components and wiring, gas service piping, fire suppression sprinkler systems, smoke alarms and carbon monoxide alarms."

The Washington Post's Ed O'Keefe looks at the Consumer Product Safety Commission one year after Congress granted CPSC more money and power to set product safety standards. O'Keefe reports that recalls of dangerous products are down slightly this year compared to last year. That's good to know -- ...

By Marci Greenstein If it's the holiday season, it must be time for scary stories about toys.  Usually they're brought to you by the Consumer Product Safety Commission, a federal agency that is supposed to protect our kids from dangerous toys. Just look at its current list of ...

Time to get nervous, parents! The Washington Post's Lyndsey Layton looks at a report released by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group on toy safety with the holiday shopping season coming up. PIRG sent fifteen toy products to an independent ...

The New York Times' Leslie Wayne investigates the proverbial white whale of federal product safety regulation -- All-Terrain Vehicles, which kill about 900 people a year. Wayne looks at how ATVs are being regulated after a bill was passed last year to strengthen the Consumer Product Safety Commission. They are now mandatory, not voluntary, standards for how ATVs have to be designed to be legally sold in the U.S. But a stronger CPSC seems to be essentially canceled out by the proliferation of Chinese-manufactured ATVs. These ATVs are cheaper, aimed at children and it is hard to ascertain liability when a dangerous product is made. I wrote a report for Understanding Government on the history of CPSC and I think that Wayne's reporting comes down a bit hard on the Chinese.

The Washington Post's Lyndsey Layton reports on the under-covered topic of what the Food and Drug Administration and Consumer Product Safety Commission have been up to in the Obama administration. George W. Bush and a Republican Congress eviscerated funding for both regulatory agencies and Bush appointed members to FDA ...