Consumer Advocacy and Protection Act of 2026

This bill amends the Consumer Product Safety Act to increase maximum civil financial penalties for consumer product safety violations, eliminate overall caps on total penalties, and require automatic annual inflation adjustments. It also makes minor technical updates to statutory language.

* **Businesses, manufacturers, distributors, and sellers** subject to federal consumer product safety standards. * **The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC)**, which is required to calculate, publish, and enforce the updated civil penalties.

* **Higher Individual Penalties:** The maximum civil penalty for a single violation increases from $100,000 to $250,000. * **Elimination of Total Penalty Limits:** The bill removes the $15,000,000 total maximum limit on penalties for a related series of violations, allowing cumulative fines to exceed that amount. * **Broader Application:** Updates cross-references to apply these civil penalty rules to specific additional violation categories (paragraphs 11, 12, 15, or 16 of the Act). * **Mandatory Annual Adjustments:** The CPSC must publish the inflation-adjusted penalty cap in the *Federal Register*. The first adjustment must be published within **one year of enactment**, and subsequent adjustments must be published annually by **January 15**. * **Technical Updates:** Replaces outdated gender-specific phrasing ("man") with gender-neutral phrasing ("person"), fixes minor punctuation, and removes section 20(a)(3)(D) of the Act.

The bill does not authorize direct government spending or create new taxes, but it changes potential penalty revenue collected from violators: * **Penalty Increase:** Increases individual fine caps to $250,000 and removes the $15 million total aggregate fine limit. * **Adjustment Calculation:** Annual inflation adjustments must be calculated based on the year-over-year percentage change in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) from October to October, rounded to the nearest dollar ($1).

* **Exemption from Standard Rulemaking:** The CPSC is exempt from standard administrative procedure requirements (such as public notice-and-comment rules) when issuing routine annual inflation updates. * **Exemption from Inflation Adjustments:** The CPSC is not required to issue an annual inflation adjustment if Congress increases the penalty by law during the previous 12 months by an amount greater than the cost-of-living calculation.

This bill significantly increases financial penalties for companies that violate product safety laws by raising the per-violation limit to $250,000, removing the $15 million total cap on related violations, and requiring the CPSC to adjust penalty amounts for inflation every year.