President Obama today announced that he intends to nominate Inez Moore Tenenbaum as chair of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and Robert S. Adler as a new commissioner of the agency. Both nominations need Senate approval. The President also announced his intention to increase the agency's budget by 71 percent (over fiscal year 2007 levels) to $107 million.

"It is a top priority of my administration to ensure that the products the American people depend on are safe," Obama said today, in a statement issued by the White House.

Tenenbaum, who served as South Carolina's State Superintendent of Education from 1998 to 2007, is special counsel to the McNair Law Firm in the area of public school finance. In 2004, Tenenbaum ran as the Democratic candidate for the Senate seat of retiring Democrat Fritz Hollings, losing to Republican Jim DeMint. Previously she practiced health, environmental, and public-interest law with the firm Sinkler & Boyd.

Adler has been a member of the board of Consumers Union for the past 20 years and is currently a professor of legal studies at the University of North Carolina and the Luther H. Hodges, Jr. Scholar in Law and Ethics at Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School. He has extensive knowledge of the CPSC and spent eleven years (from 1973-1984) as an attorney-advisor to two commissioners at the agency. He also served on the Obama-Biden transition team and co-authored the agency review report on the CPSC.

If approved as chair, Tenenbaum would replace Nancy Nord, whose three-year tenure as acting chair has been rocky. (Nord has said she will stay on as a commissioner.) The agency has been operating with only two commissioners—Nord and Thomas Moore—since July 15, 2006. The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act requires the commission to expand from three to five commissioners. Under agency rules, which require that two commissioners be from the minority party, the fifth must be a Republican. The fifth commissioner has not yet been named.

"The President's two nominations today to the Consumer Product Safety Commission make us optimistic that the sweeping product safety law enacted last year will be implemented fairly and effectively," said Ellen Bloom, the Director of Consumer Union's Washington D.C. office.

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