Richard Trumka, a commissioner of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), announced in April 2024 that major retailers, including Target and Walmart, would stop selling weighted baby swaddles. Trumka had sent letters to companies using his official CPSC letterhead, falsely insinuating that the Commission had determined the product to be unsafe and associated with Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Dreamland Baby, a popular manufacturer of weighted infant sleep products, is suing the CPSC and Trumka for circumventing the formal rulemaking process to baselessly malign their product.
The CPSC rejected Trumka's proposal to mandate standards for weighted infant sleep products in November 2023, according to the New Civil Liberties Alliance, the public interest law firm representing Dreamland Baby in the case. Though the CPSC did not promulgate product safety standards, the Commission informally updated its Safe Sleep guidance in January 2024 to say, "Don't use weighted blankets or weighted swaddles."
The CPSC is tasked with protecting the public against unreasonable risks of injury associated with consumer products. To this end, the CPSC is charged with implementing rules and conducting "research, studies, and investigations on the safety of consumer products and on improving the safety of such products." The CPSC may not delegate product safety determinations to other federal agencies. The CPSA requires public disclosures about the safety of products to be "accurate and not misleading," but the Commission's guidance is both inaccurate and misleading.
