No Quorum No More? White House Taps Potential Third CPSC Commissioner

On June 1, 2026, President Trump announced the nomination of Brien Lorenze to serve as a commissioner of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). Lorenze is currently CPSC’s Executive Director, having come to the agency and that role in March of 2025. If he is confirmed, Lorenze’s term at CPSC would run through October 2031.

Lorenze’s nomination joins that of Karen Sessions, who was nominated on February 11 but whose nomination has seen no action in the Senate. If she is confirmed, Sessions’ term would run through October 2032. (CPSC commissioners’ terms align with fixed, seven-year periods, so commissioners may take office well after their term has started.)

Currently, CPSC has just one commissioner, Acting Chairman Peter Feldman. Under the Consumer Product Safety Act (CPSA), CPSC needs three commissioners to have a quorum and conduct official business. The statute does allow for a quorum for a two-member Commission, but only for six months. However, last August, during such a two-commissioner quorum period, Feldman and fellow Republican then-Commissioner Douglas Dziak issued a trio of directives delegating nearly all of the agency’s authority to the Chairman. Feldman wrote at the time that this step would ensure “continuity of [CPSC’s] operations and avoid disruption to [the agency’s] safety mission,” and CPSC has remained in this one-person-Commission state for nearly a year. (In October 2025, President Trump nominated William Hewes III to serve as a commissioner, but the Senate did not act on Hewes’ nomination and returned it to the White House, which later withdrew the nomination.)

Notably, taking on the chairmanship of the agency requires a separate nomination, and both Lorenze’s and Sessions’ nominations are as commissioners only. Accordingly, if they are confirmed, the agency would be back to a statutory quorum (though not at its full five-commissioner strength) but would still lack a permanent chair, unless Feldman or another person is nominated and confirmed for that role. One additional wrinkle is that Feldman’s own current term is set to expire in October 2026, though, under the CPSA, he can remain in his position for up to another year if neither he nor a replacement is nominated and confirmed for the next term in that seat.

For CPSC-regulated companies, these nominations could mean that CPSC is headed toward returning to the multi-member body it had traditionally been since 1972. However, absent a confirmed nomination for permanent chair, uncertainty surrounding CPSC leadership would still remain.

For questions about CPSC policy or about compliance with the CPSA, including timely reporting and recalls under Section 15(b) of the CPSA, or with other product safety matters, please reach out to the authors of this post or any of their colleagues on Arnold & Porter’s Consumer Product Safety team.

© Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP 2026 All Rights Reserved. This Blog post is intended to be a general summary of the law and does not constitute legal advice. You should consult with counsel to determine applicable legal requirements in a specific fact situation.