Demand Letter to the Consumer Product Safety Commission on Behalf of Nested Bean

On November 11, the Liberty Justice Center issued a demand letter to the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to hold the agency’s Commissioner, Richard Trumka Jr., accountable for abusing his position of power and bypassing mandatory CPSC protocol to advance his personal agenda. The Liberty Justice Center issued this demand letter on behalf of Nested Bean, an immigrant-owned business founded in 2011 by engineer and mother Manasi Gangan, which has been decimated by Trumka’s targeted attacks.

On April 15, 2024, Commissioner Trumka issued a series of letters to major retailers across the country, instructing them to immediately halt the sale of weighted infant sleep swaddles and blankets due to alleged safety concerns. He repeated the content of these letters in public statements released on the CPSC’s website and his official social media accounts.

Trumka’s statements linked to an article about safe infant sleep that named Nested Bean in its second sentence. Immediately after he issued these letters, multiple major retailers severed their connections with the two companies named in the article—but continued to sell other weighted infant sleep products that had not been singled out in the article.

In May and again in August, Nested Bean wrote to Commissioner Trumka demanding that he retract his inaccurate and misleading statements about the company and its products. Trumka refused, alleging that they were personal statements—even though they were issued on official CPSC letterhead, published on the agency’s website, and posted on his official social media accounts.

Commissioner Trumka is currently under investigation by the Chairman of the House Committee on Small Business for repeatedly exceeding his regulatory authority, acting unilaterally for the CPSC without authority, and subverting CPSC processes to advance his own goals. In one such example, Trumka announced in January 2023 that the CPSC intended to ban gas stoves—even though the agency was not considering such a ban and had specifically declined his proposed standards. Following national confusion and backlash, the Chairman of the CPSC was forced to issue a statement correcting the misleading claim.

In the demand letter, the Liberty Justice Center requests that the CPSC issue a statement within 30 days to clarify that Commissioner Trumka’s remarks regarding “risk of death” and “multiple infant deaths” are not attributed to Nested Bean’s products; that there have been no reported injuries or deaths attributed to Nested Bean’s products; that there has been no recall, stop sale order, or hazard pattern identified with Nested Bean’s products; and that the CPSC has not adopted any voluntary standards, mandatory standards, or definitions for weighted infant sleep products.

“This is not the first time that Commissioner Trumka has gone rogue and issued public statements under the guise of CPSC authority,” said Loren Seehase, Senior Counsel at the Liberty Justice Center. “We are prepared to take Commissioner Trumka to court to hold him accountable for violating his statutory authority, abusing his position of power, and destroying small businesses to advance his own agenda.”

A copy of the Liberty Justice Center’s demand letter is available here.