One of the worst things about the Trump administration is the warping of government agency missions, stripping them of their ability to help Americans and converting them into ways to harm people instead.
The latest—and extremely worrisome—move comes from the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which is supposed to track and recall dangerous products. Instead, agency officials are using their authority to demand that hospitals share extensive private medical data with a private contractor.
The CPSC has been sending letters to major hospital systems, demanding that they give a private company the personally identifiable medical records of everyone who visits their emergency rooms. There isn’t really even a pretense that the supposed watchdog agency is doing this to track whether certain consumer products are disproportionately resulting in injuries, which is what it was created to track. Instead, this requires reporting on pretty much everything—broken bones, overdoses, suicide attempts, adverse reactions to medications, and so on.
Hospitals have been participating in CPSC voluntary surveillance reporting for years, but that’s not what this is. The way that surveillance is supposed to work is that trained hospital workers provide data on injuries caused by specific categories of household products, typically stripped of any identifying data. The CPSC’s own manual instructs hospitals not to provide any identifying information at first, and stipulates that the agency only gets that data when following up on a product investigation, which the manual says happens in under one percent of the cases.
The manual also specifies that only certain types of emergency room visit data are to be shared, and excludes injuries from food, medical devices, illegal drugs, or anything that doesn’t involve a consumer product. The current demand from the CPSC is for pretty much everything,This is pushed as “modernization” of surveillance for product safety issues. The agency brags about how cool and great it will be just to have the government automatically scan everyone’s medical records, and then it will magically save lives.
By demanding medical records from ER visits that have nothing to do with injuries from consumer products, the Trump administration is making it pretty clear it is just using the CPSC as another tool in its quest to put Americans under constant surveillance.
It’s also clear that this forms part of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s unhinged quest to prove that vaccines are unsafe, as the new guidance mandates reporting of child injuries from “poisoning by” vaccines. Of course, vaccines are not regulated by the nation’s consumer product safety agency, but why should such a trivial thing like that matter?
We’ve also seen the administration feed every type of government data possible to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and you can likely presume that this is at work here as well.
Besides the moral stain of turning the whole of government data into a way to torment immigrants, the Trump administration has also proven itself an incredibly poor steward of private government data.Remember how a DOGE bro plopped Social Security data on a thumb drive, intending to take it to his new private sector job? Or that ICE shared Medicaid data it wasn’t supposed to have in the first place with Palantir, which runs one of the many apps the government uses to find people to terrorize and deport? Or that the IRS broke the law over 40,000 times by sharing addresses with ICE?
And it isn’t like the CPSC has a great data safety track record either. During President Donald Trump’s first term, the agency had a massive own goal of a data dumping disaster, where employees improperly released the personal data of about 30,000 people in a breach that went on longer and was worse in scope than the agency initially admitted. Now, the agency is going to be awash in the sensitive medical data of millions of Americans who suffered injuries that have nothing to do with product safety whatsoever.
Feeling safer yet?
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