As noted in our recent client alert, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) continues to aggressively pursue enforcement actions for violations of the Consumer Product Safety Act (CPSA) against foreign manufacturers. Recent developments suggest that the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) may follow suit by pursuing more CPSA criminal enforcement actions involving alleged willful failures to report product safety issues.
Last month, on May 15, 2025, the CPSC announced that it issued a single-week record of 28 separate product safety recalls and warnings. These recalls and warnings mainly targeted products manufactured in China including an “enforcement sweep of off-brand Chinese faucets found to leach lead and other contaminates [sic] into U.S. drinking water.” CPSC Acting Chair Peter Feldman stated that the “CPSC remains focused on the biggest threat to American consumers: hazardous goods from China.”
In its May 15 announcement, CPSC indicated it would take additional enforcement action in the weeks that followed. True to its word, over the next four weeks, CPSC announced over 50 product safety warnings and recalls, averaging more than 13 per week. Two recalls were for Chinese-manufactured faucets that were the subject of a previous product safety warning.
Notably, CPSC unilaterally issued all of the product safety warnings announced on May 15, meaning CPSC issued the warnings without approval from the manufacturer, distributor, or retailer of the products at issue. In the product safety warning press releases, CPSC urged consumers to immediately stop using the products at issue and noted that the manufacturer, distributor, or retailer had not agreed to recall the products. As we covered in a previous post, CPSC has the authority under Section 6(b) of the Consumer Product Safety Act to issue unilateral press releases warning consumers of a potential hazard and/or advising consumers to stop using a product, an enforcement mechanism it has increasingly used in recent years.
Statements made by Feldman and CPSC Commissioner Douglas Dziak in the announcement suggest that CPSC will continue to rely on its authority under Section 6(b). Dziak stated that the “record-breaking week shows what a focused CPSC can do” by “cracking down on foreign violators and delivering real safety results for American families.”
To date, all of the actions described above have been administrative. But over the last few years, DOJ has shown an increasing appetite for pursuing criminal CPSA investigations. And Acting Chair Feldman and Commissioner Dziak’s comments regarding “hazardous goods from China” and “foreign violators,” combined with statements from DOJ and other agencies and a recent DOJ enforcement action, suggest that non-U.S. manufacturers might face an elevated risk of criminal enforcement.
Brian Buckley, a summer associate in our San Diego office, contributed to the writing of this article.
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