The besieged Consumer Product Safety Commission just got a little relief. Thanks to an amendment by Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR) that was included in the homeland security bill signed by President Bush last week, the commission's full powers have been restored. Unfortunately, the relief is only for six months—unless the President nominates and the Senate confirms another commissioner to the agency.

As many of you know by now, the agency has been operating with limited authority since January 15 because it lacks a quorum, having  only two serving  commissioners. The lack of quorum has meant the commission couldn’t order mandatory recalls, issue civil penalties or adopt new safety standards. But now, under the Pryor amendment, the commission has regained its full authority for another six months—even though it is still operating with the same two commissioners, Nancy Nord, who is acting chairman, and Thomas Moore.

The restored authority couldn’t come at a more critical time for the agency, which finds itself at the center of the growing debate over the safety of Chinese imports. The CPSC has issued 26 toy recalls this year, all from China. And two of the most recent recalls--Thomas & Friends trains and accessories and Fisher-Price’s licensed character toys such as Dora the Explorer and Sesame Street figurines--involved millions of very popular toys.

The highly publicized recalls have prompted four key Democratic senators to urge the CPSC to take stronger action on Chinese toys. Last week, the senators sent a letter to acting chairman Nord asking her to quickly determine whether the U.S. should detain and inspect all children’s products from China that contain paint. “How many more deadly toys do we have to recall before Washington responds?” said Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL)  “American families should not be playing Chinese Roulette at the toy store.” Durbin was joined by Bill Nelson (D-FL), Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN).

The senators pointed to a recent Food and Drug Administration ban of five types of seafood from China after discovering it was tainted with high levels of illegal substances. The seafood can be allowed in the U.S. only after the exporter verifies its safety. The senators asked Nord if the risk of lead contamination in children’s toys was sufficient for the agency to consider a similar “detain and test program” for such Chinese-made products.  “The fact that every week we have to frantically pull Chinese goods off store shelves shows that our safeguards are failing and we need to act fast to fix them,” Schumer said.

In the past year, the CPSC has stepped up its campaign against lead in children’s toys, even proposing to tighten its safety standard to virtually ban children’s jewelry containing lead.  However, hundreds of thousands of tainted items still are being sold, the New York Times reports today. The challenge in eliminating lead-based jewelry and toys is great, the paper said, pointing to commission documents in which importers “often assert that their contracts prohibit jewelry with elevated levels of lead. But by failing to test a large enough sample of the delivered goods — not just at the start of production, but regularly as new batches are produced — these companies still ended up selling hazardous products, the documents show.”

For a long time — even before the latest problems with Chinese imports — Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, has been calling for the strengthening of the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The restoration of its powers is a step in the right direction.