Consumer product safety agency regains quorum after yearlong standoff over fired commissioners

The federal agency responsible for regulating the safety of everything from dressers and space heaters to e-bike batteries and children's toys has a working quorum again, just over a year after losing it in a political and legal fight that reached the Supreme Court.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission announced Tuesday that it had sworn in Commissioner Brien Lorenze, restoring the three-member quorum the five-seat commission needs to take formal votes, finalize safety rules and settle enforcement cases. Commissioner Karen Sessions had already joined the agency on August 19. With Lorenze seated alongside Sessions and Acting Chairman Peter Feldman, the commission can once again act as a body rather than through a single official.

"I am proud to welcome Karen Sessions and Brien Lorenze to CPSC," Feldman said in the announcement, adding that the agency is positioned to build on what he described as record enforcement results and to move forward "with even greater energy and purpose."

The numbers

The commission had gone without a quorum since Republican-appointed Commissioner Douglas Dziak resigned in August 2025, roughly thirteen months, following President Trump's removal of three Democratic-appointed commissioners three months earlier. That left Feldman as the only sitting commissioner for most of the past year, unable to hold the votes the agency's governing statute requires for major rulemakings, civil penalty settlements and other formal Commission action.

Even with Tuesday's addition, the five-member commission is operating with three seats filled and two vacancies. The CPSC's enabling statute also limits any three commissioners to the same political party, a provision meant to keep the agency's leadership bipartisan by design.

How the standoff began

The vacancy traces back to a dispute over a single rule. In early 2025, the commission's then-Democratic majority, Mary Boyle, Alexander Hoehn-Saric and Richard Trumka Jr., voted to advance a proposed safety standard for lithium-ion batteries used in e-bikes, e-scooters and similar micromobility products, batteries that have been linked to fires, explosions and deaths from thermal runaway. The move ran counter to a Trump administration order requiring independent agencies to route proposed rules through White House review before publication. Trump fired the three commissioners days later without citing neglect of duty or malfeasance, the only grounds the CPSC's founding statute allows, and the three sued to get their jobs back.

A federal judge initially agreed with them and ordered their reinstatement, and the commissioners briefly returned to work. The Supreme Court then stayed that order in July 2025, removing them from office again while the underlying appeal proceeded at the Fourth Circuit. That case, and a parallel dispute at the Federal Trade Commission, hinged on a nearly ninety-year-old precedent limiting a president's power to remove commissioners from independent agencies except for cause. On June 29, the Supreme Court resolved the underlying question in Trump v. Slaughter, ruling 6-3 that the for-cause removal protections shielding commissioners at agencies like the FTC, and by extension the CPSC, violate the separation of powers. The decision effectively let the earlier firings stand and cleared the way for the White House to fill the vacant seats on its own terms. A summary of the ruling notes it overturned the 1935 precedent that had protected commissioners at multi-member federal agencies for generations.

The Senate confirmed both nominees on August 7 by a 51-47 vote, according to a statement from Acting Chairman Peter Feldman, with Sessions sworn in on August 19 and Lorenze on September 8. Sessions has no prior CPSC experience but has held posts in both Trump administrations, most recently as a deputy assistant secretary at the Department of Transportation. Lorenze came up through the agency itself: he joined the CPSC as executive director, its top career operating post, in early 2025 after two decades in public- and private-sector data and technology work, including senior roles at the Treasury Department's financial-crimes unit and the Deloitte consulting firm, before the White House nominated him in June to move from staff into one of the vacant commissioner seats.

"The Supreme Court's decision to allow these firings undermines Congress' authority and puts the public at serious risk. For years, the agency's bipartisan leadership has taken strong actions that put consumers' safety first in a rapidly evolving marketplace."

That warning came from Oriene Shin, Consumer Reports' manager of safety advocacy, in a statement issued after the Supreme Court allowed the firings to stand. Consumer Reports and other advocacy groups have argued that a commission answerable to a single party, rather than the bipartisan structure Congress wrote into the CPSC's founding statute, is more likely to bend enforcement priorities toward political considerations than toward the products causing the most injuries.

Who is affected

The practical effect of the lapse fell on anyone waiting for the agency to finish work that requires more than an acting chairman's signature. Chief among the stalled items is the lithium-ion battery rule that triggered the original firings; the CPSC published it as a formal proposal in June, with a public comment period that closed August 24, but a final vote to adopt it as a binding standard needs a working quorum. Law firms tracking the agency's Senate confirmation hearing reported that Lorenze told senators the commission's monthly recall pace had risen 73 percent and online marketplace takedowns of dangerous listings had risen 208 percent since Feldman took over as acting chairman, though those figures reflect staff-level enforcement rather than the formal rulemakings still awaiting a Commission vote.

The gap coincided with a period in which recalls of consumer products, from ergonomic office chairs to unstable dressers to contaminated cleaning products, continued to be announced at a rapid pace, since staff-level recall negotiations with companies do not require a Commission vote. But formal rulemaking, the kind that sets mandatory design and testing standards manufacturers must meet before a product reaches store shelves, along with the largest civil penalty settlements against noncompliant companies, was effectively frozen for most of the past year. E-bike and e-scooter makers awaiting a final battery standard, shoppers buying products screened at the border, and companies facing potential fines have all been operating without a functioning Commission to close out that work.

What happens next

With a quorum restored, the commission can resume voting on the battery standard and other unfinished business, though the timeline for a final rule is not yet set. The bipartisan balance required by statute remains unresolved, since the commission still has two open seats and no Democratic appointee has been confirmed since the 2025 firings. Feldman's own term as acting chairman is due to expire in October, and control of the Senate after the 2026 midterms could shape who fills the remaining vacancies and whether all three sitting seats continue to be held by commissioners aligned with the same administration.

For now, the agency says it intends to keep pace with what Feldman has called record-setting enforcement activity, a claim consumer advocates are likely to test against how quickly the stalled battery standard and other formal rulemakings actually reach a final vote. The commission estimates that deaths, injuries and property damage from unsafe consumer products cost the country more than a trillion dollars a year, a figure both sides of the political fight over its leadership have cited as reason for the agency to function without interruption.