For more than a century, the National Consumers League (NCL) has been a vigorous advocate for consumers, playing a pivotal role in protecting health and safety, by providing vital and reliable information on medical and food products so that individuals and families can make informed decisions about matters that affect their well-being.

Since being chartered in 1899, the organization has worked to create and strengthen protections for consumers. These critical protections were led initially by the work of its first general secretary, Florence Kelley, who helped spread the word about the importance of typhoid vaccines to mitigate a disease outbreak at the end of the 19th century and helped lead the League’s efforts to promote the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, which laid the foundation for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

Indeed, the work and mission of NCL shares much with the FDA, an agency that embraces a basic responsibility to provide the public with accurate, science-based information so that Americans can make well-informed decisions about their health. We’ve seen great success in this area, thanks in part to the work done by NCL. Nevertheless, we still face great challenges, and I am confident that NCL will play a very important role in addressing these as well.

Our nation has enacted important laws to help protect consumers, and we have marshaled extraordinary progress in science and technology in the development of new treatments and cures for diseases. Despite these and other advances that enable us to improve our health, we are today witnessing a troubling new development in, and threat to, public health. Notably, we are experiencing a worrisome decline in our nation’s life expectancy that is in part linked to an increasing prevalence and cumulative impact of a number of chronic diseases — heart, vascular, metabolic (such as obesity and diabetes), and lung and kidney disease, and to troubling rates of overdoses, suicides, and gun violence.

Just as regrettable is the growing problem of misinformation about public health, science, and medicine. A stream of misinformation and often unfounded opinions, most often spread via the Internet and social media, is eroding the public’s trust in science and government agencies, such as the FDA, making it increasingly difficult for the public to verify facts and advice from these trusted sources.

While not a new problem in our nation’s history, the digitization of our culture and the rapid growth of social media have exacerbated the pervasiveness and impact of the problem. This is an area where NCL’s powerful voice and unimpeachable credibility can have an enormous impact. Neither the FDA, nor the entire federal government can combat the spread of misinformation on its own. It is going to require a concerted non-governmental response. Few organizations are better positioned to succeed at this task than the National Consumers League.

It wouldn’t be the first time NCL rose to the occasion. During the COVID-19 public health emergency, NCL was an essential voice – helping Americans better understand the virus, its variants, and how to protect themselves from infection. The organization testified before the FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention panels on vaccine development and safety and advocated for limits on social media misinformation during that crisis.

Similarly, NCL has provided enormous public benefit through its work to help consumers understand food labeling, to hold companies accountable for the claims they make regarding food and health care products, and with programs such as Script Your Future that help raise awareness of the importance of medication adherence among patients, particularly those with chronic health challenges.

There is an old saying that a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can get out of bed. Given the speed and reach of social media today, that analogy can be applied to misinformation, which is disseminated far too quickly to be adequately countered with trustworthy facts. However, we don’t have the luxury to surrender. The lives and well-being of too many people depend on our ability to provide the public with reliable information grounded in science.

I am confident in our ability to overcome this latest challenge, thanks in large part to allies like the National Consumers League with its long track record of empowering generations of Americans to make well-informed decisions to secure their health and their futures. I look forward to NCL’s continued activism, engagement, and leadership.

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Robert M. Califf, M.D. is Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.

The drive to achieve accessible, affordable, high-quality healthcare for every man, woman, and child in the United States has been a long one, and it has been a central pillar of the National Consumers League’s (NCL’s) mission and history. Having served as Secretary of Health and Human Services during the creation and implementation of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), I have a great awareness and appreciation for the role NCL has played in bringing health security to more Americans and preventing those protections from being diminished or taken away by opponents of progress.

As I said, it’s been a long battle and one that is far from complete. You can go back to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration to witness NCL’s impact on health reform. Josephine Roche, a former president of NCL, was by President Roosevelt’s side writing the first-ever universal healthcare bill to be introduced in Congress. Components of that legislation became the groundwork for the creation of Medicare and Medicaid. 

In building a healthier nation, NCL also played a key role in the passage of the Sheppard– Towner Maternity and Infancy Protection Act, the first venture of the federal government into Social Security legislation and the first major law that came to exist after the full enfranchisement of women. Before its passage, most of the expansion in public health programs occurred at the state and local levels. The act provided support for women and their babies through pregnancy and childbirth and resulted in a decrease in infant mortality rates. It was repealed after lobbying by the American Medical Association, which argued it was “socialized medicine” in 1929, but when the Social Security Act was passed in 1935, it included many of the same provisions.

Since that time, NCL’s name has been there whenever opportunities occur to improve the health and well-being of consumers and working Americans or when efforts to roll back hard-won healthcare benefits need to be fiercely opposed. The Department of Health and Human Services has one of the most far-reaching portfolios of any cabinet department, and, as Secretary, I valued NCL’s ability to weigh in on so many of those issues, be they Medicare reform, prescription drug affordability, or food safety.

What I appreciate about NCL’s work in this space is that its mission involves not just policy advocacy, but also practical guidance for consumers trying to navigate the complexities of our healthcare system. The organization has been an invaluable resource in helping people better understand their healthcare coverage options; protect themselves against fraud; realize the importance of being up-to- date on vaccines; and, through the excellent Script Your Future program, practice better medication adherence.

The need for NCL in today’s healthcare sphere is more important than ever. Healthcare is, and always has been, a politically charged, volatile issue. As we saw during the battles to enact the ACA and prevent its repeal, and again during the COVID-19 pandemic and the effort to get people vaccinated, there is no shortage of misinformation designed to thwart public health initiatives. We need NCL, with its impeccable credibility, to combat the misinformation clutter and to cut through the noise with reliable, evidence-supported messaging that the American people can trust.

NCL’s voice is vital, as well, in the continuing battle to make healthcare more affordable and accessible. While the ACA has been an enormous success in reducing the number of uninsured persons in this country, patients and consumers are still dealing with industry machinations that make it more difficult to get the treatments they need and make out-of- pocket costs higher than they should be. NCL continues to be an effective advocate so that patients and their healthcare providers, rather than insurers, can determine the best course of treatment together.

Yes, the road to universal healthcare is a long one, but we wouldn’t be as far in this journey as we have come without the work of the National Consumers League.

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Kathleen Sebelius is the CEO of Sebelius Resources, LLC, a strategic advisory firm, and was Secretary of Health and Human Services under President Barack Obama, and was a 2023 recipient of the Trumpeter Award. 

Even as the widespread availability of air travel has become one of the hallmarks of modern civilization, frequent negative passenger experiences have become one of modernity’s most familiar headaches. From impromptu conversations I’ve had while waiting for a flight, to formal complaints submitted to the Department of Transportation, where I serve as Secretary, I have heard countless stories of frustrating experiences that range from irritation or inconvenience to serious harm and profound violations of passenger rights. These stories, coupled with a belief that air travel can and should be a consistently better experience, have propelled us during this Biden-Harris Administration to commit ourselves to the largest expansion of passenger protections and airline enforcement in the Department’s history.

The strides we have made thus far, and they are substantial, are a credit to the civil servants of our Department and the leadership of our Administration. They also reflect tireless advocacy and important insights from pro- consumer organizations like the National Consumers League (NCL).

NCL has been protecting the interests of consumers for 125 years, and in recent years, the organization has been a tremendously important voice in the effort to ensure airlines treat their customers fairly. Recently, these contributions have included the service of NCL’s John Breyault as the consumer representative on the Department’s Aviation Consumer Protection Advisory Committee.

In recent years, we have proudly delivered a number of important victories for consumers:

● Since President Biden took office, we have increased oversight of the airline industry and have been holding airlines accountable when they fail consumers. This has resulted in securing nearly $4 billion in refunds and reimbursements owed to airline passengers.

● The Biden-Harris Administration issued a final rule, which was then fortified by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Reauthorization Act, to make it easy for consumers to obtain cash refunds when owed. If an airline cancels or significantly changes a flight, passengers are now entitled to an automatic refund within seven business days for credit card purchases if the passenger is not offered or does not accept alternative transportation or travel credit. We have made good on the principle that consumers should not have to navigate a patchwork of cumbersome processes to request and receive a refund. No more searching through airline websites to figure out how to make the request or being misled to accept a travel credit when you are entitled to a full refund.

● Another final rule we issued protects consumers against costly surprise airline junk fees. It requires airlines and ticket agents to tell consumers up front about the fees they charge for transporting bags and canceling or changing a reservation. I did not expect the concept of providing customers with the information they need to make an informed decision to be controversial, but the airline industry has decided to challenge this rule in court rather than make the necessary disclosures to their customers. We will continue to defend in court a rule that we view as commonsensical and that is expected to save consumers more than $500 million every year.

● We have also proposed a new rule that would ban airlines from charging junk fees to seat families together on a flight. Today, many airlines still don’t guarantee family seating, which means parents face concerns that they may have to pay extra just to be seated with their young child. Flying with children is already complicated enough without that added uncertainty, so we are acting to address this.

We are proud of our efforts to date, and the bipartisan FAA Reauthorization Act signed by President Biden earlier this year builds further on our work to improve the travel experience for airline passengers. But much work remains to be done. Good policy, and strong advocacy for consumers, will matter more than ever in the years ahead.

I want to congratulate NCL on its 125th anniversary. I look forward to continuing to work alongside NCL towards our shared goal of making aspects of everyday life, like air travel, more affordable, more manageable, and less stressful for American consumers.

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Pete Buttigieg is the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Transportation.

I wholeheartedly subscribe to the philosophy espoused by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. when he said that “human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable” and that it is dependent upon “the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.”

We do, in fact, live in a safer world today because of the tireless exertions and unyielding passion of Sally Greenberg and her team at the National Consumers League (NCL) to make it so. Even if achieving a lifesaving product safety improvement requires years of determined effort to overcome the fierce opposition of powerful interests, we have seen that NCL does not stop working until progress is achieved.

I first met Sally back in the late 1990s when I was the executive director of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), and Sally had just come to Washington, DC, to work for Consumers Union, which is now Consumer Reports. People thought with our shared interest in consumer protection, we would get along well. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship and a productive one.

For the past 15 years, we have been engaged in an effort to make table saws less dangerous. This is an issue of considerable and devastating magnitude. Each year, there are approximately 30,000 table saw accidents that require medical treatment, including about 4,000 amputations.

Dr. Steve Gass, an attorney, physicist, and amateur woodworker, came up with an idea to fix this. He developed a sensor and a braking mechanism that would stop a saw blade immediately upon contact with skin, rendering what would have been a severe laceration into the equivalent of a paper cut. At first, Steve and his partners tried to get the table saw industry to license his new technology and incorporate safety into the saws they sell to the public. But the industry wasn’t interested in spending money to protect their own customers. So, Steve and his partners founded a table saw company called SawStop. These saws have prevented tens of thousands of injuries in the 20 years they have been on the market.

Dr. Gass and his partners believed that safety technology should become the standard for the industry, but larger table saw manufacturers fought back and were successful in keeping federal action from occurring. Sally Greenberg, an amateur woodworker herself, heard about this on National Public Radio and got involved. It has been a difference maker.

NCL has been a key player in a decades-long campaign that involved, in part, bringing victims of table saw accidents face-to-face with members of Congress and CPSC commissioners. It’s one thing to hear about a problem. It’s quite another to meet a firefighter who could no longer hold a fire hose and couldn’t do the job he loved, a musician who could no longer play guitar and became suicidal, or a high school student who lost fingers in shop class.

It has been a long battle against an entrenched and powerful industry, but we’re now in the final stages of federal rulemaking that will not just mitigate the risk of table saw accidents, but virtually eliminate that risk. This would not have happened if not for Sally Greenberg and NCL.

But that is what NCL has done for 125 years. It’s thanks to this organization’s work, for example, that rearview backup cameras are now standard in cars. When the technology was developed, it was only available as an option for luxury vehicles. It took NCL and other advocates years of determined advocacy, pointing out that the lack of these cameras was leading to hundreds of deaths—mostly of small children—and thousands of injuries each year. Today, thanks to this work, cars are safer, and more children are alive.

Referring again to Dr. King’s words, we can never take progress for granted or assume it will occur, not without the determination of those who will never give up, no matter how fierce the opposition or how difficult the fight. That is Sally Greenberg and her team, and that is the history of the National Consumers League.

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Pamela Gilbert is a Partner in the law firm of Cuneo Gilbert & LaDuca LLP and previously served as Executive Director of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Consumer Program Director at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, and Executive Director at Public Citizen’s Congress Watch.