The most recent development in the ongoing drama that is the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act came a few weeks back with the decision by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission that the Act's August deadline for implementing the use of tracking labels on products (CPSIA's "Section 103") would remain in place despite calls from a coalition of manufacturers to delay such a move.

The result, not surprisingly, was another round of consternation from toymakers and their allies—artisans, small business owners, libertarians—about how the CPSIA's rules, drawn up and voted upon in anger, could (or, more likely, "would") lead to the (presumably unintended) "death by many cuts" of many children's product businesses built on small production runs.

Typical of the reaction among manufacturers to the CPSC's inability to delay Section 103's enforcement was a statement by Rick Woldenberg, chairman of educational products maker Learning Resources and leader of the Alliance for Children's Product Safety. "Small businesses are throwing up their hands over this new burden," he wrote, explaining: "Tracking labels will create practical problems for small businesses. Processing labels is expensive and adds significantly to the complexity of small production runs. In addition, some products have more than one source or are assembled from components made at different times."

Bottom line impact aside, there was a bright spot to the development. Government—including the CPSC itself—is slowly coming around to the toy business' position as it relates to the potential dire consequences of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act on business models developed in the pre-CPSIA era. Nancy Nord, CPSC's acting chair, in advocating for a stay of enforcement of the labeling requirement, admitted as much. "It is not clear that the application of the tracking label provisions across the board to all companies will improve recall effectiveness to such an extent as to justify the potential significant disruption and adverse impact on manufacturers, especially smaller companies," she said in a written statement.

Even CPSC commissioner Thomas Moore, whose ruling kept Section 3's deadline in force, said the decision had more to do with a lack of authority to change it than a value judgment on its usefulness, conceding that "... a one-size-fits-all approach may not be possible given the broad range of products covered by this provision."

That's good news to a lot of people. Even better news is that members of Congress have begun to publicly side with business in acknowledging the irrationality of the CPSIA's regulations when used as a set of rules by which children's product industries must guide themselves.

What's still to be determined is whether the support of people like Nancy Nord is the last flicker of a fading sunset. CPSC's slate of commissioners is set to grow from three to five (another result of the CPSIA), with expectations of a 3-2 split along party lines—with Nord looking to remain one of them. That a Democratic majority would be as pro-business as Nord is unknowable and Inez Moore Tenenbaum, President Obama's pick to replace Nord, has yet to comment publicly on matters CPSIA-related. One can hope, though, that rational thought is among the newcomers' attributes.