The GOP Is Fine With You Getting Your Fingers Chopped Off
Donald Trump’s yes-men at the Consumer Product Safety Commission are withdrawing a series of proposed safety rules, including an appendage-saving safety mandate for table saws. This will mean thousands more fingers lost per year.
As the GOP’s deregulatory bonanza continues apace, the next casualty could be thousands of American fingers. (Edwin Remsberg / VWPics / Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
One of the last remaining regulatory firewalls between corporate cost cutting and consumer safety is crumbling, risking the lives and limbs of everyday Americans to boost major industries’ bottom line.
Months after the president fired three Democratic members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission without cause, the commission withdrew a series of proposed safety rules, including an appendage-saving saw mandate fiercely opposed by some of the richest tool manufacturers in the country.
Last September, the administration withdrew several proposed consumer product rules, including a Biden-era mandate that would have required US tool manufacturers to add automatic anti-finger brakes to consumer and industrial table saws.
More than ten people per day in the United States suffer amputation injuries using table saws, meaning the rule had the potential to save upward of four thousand fingers and over $2 billion in health care and other costs a year.
Finger-detecting and auto-braking saws in the United States are currently made by a single company, SawStop, under patented technology. The firm’s competitors spent years fighting the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s proposed mandate, claiming it would impose unreasonable costs on them by giving SawStop a virtual monopoly over table saws.
However, SawStop pledged to Congress that it would waive patent protections in the event of an industry-wide finger-safety mandate.
Long before the finalized rule was announced in 2023, the Power Tool Institute — which represents brands including Bosch, DeWalt, and Milwaukee — had already spent millions of dollars on lobbying the government, including the Consumer Product Safety Commission specifically on table saw regulations, among other issues.
Table saw safety is just one of thousands of issues the Consumer Product Safety Commission undertakes, and if the president has his way, he’ll defang the entire operation. Under Donald Trump, the commission has argued for its own elimination — a “reorganiz[ation]” that would transfer the agency’s duties to the office of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration in its abrupt firing of three of the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s five members — clearing the way for a deregulatory free-for-all when it comes to consumers’ safety.