Product Safety Nominee On Hold

President Bush's nominee to head the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Michael Baroody, has run into a roadblock on Capitol Hill. USA Today reports that Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., has placed a hold on Baroody's nomination, arguing that the vice president of the National Association of Manufacturers is ill-suited to run one of the government's leading consumer-protection agencies.

But the manufacturers' association released a letter of support for Baroody from Roland Droitsch and James Henry, two high-level civil servants who worked with him at the Labor Department in the Reagan administration. They wrote:

"The (high) volume of output of health and safety rules during his tenure set a record … unmatched before or since. The fair-minded and intellectually honest man we know is unrecognizable to us in the reported depictions of him by some critics."