Nearly 23,000 Elmo teethers just got recalled because their eyes can pop off and choke a baby. Four families already reported it happening. This is the same consumer safety agency the Trump administration tried to fire its own commissioners from, slash by 14%, and hand over to RFK Jr.’s health department, all while it’s supposed to be catching hazards like this before they reach your baby’s crib.
Skip Hop Inc. recalled its Baby Sesame Street Elmo Silicone Teethers on September 3, after the Consumer Product Safety Commission found the toy’s black eyes can detach when frozen, creating a choking hazard serious enough that the CPSC’s own recall notice lists “risk of serious injury or death.”
What Actually Got Recalled
The recall covers about 22,660 units sold in the U.S., plus another 3,177 in Canada, sold at Carter’s retail stores and online at carters.com and skiphop.com from January 2025 through March 2026 for about $12 each. The teether is shaped like Elmo’s face, red, orange, and white, with the black eyes being the failure point, and comes packaged with a textured key and a fabric crayon box.
Skip Hop has received four consumer reports of the eyes detaching. No injuries have been reported yet, which is the only reason this story is a recall notice and not a tragedy. Parents are being told to stop using the teether immediately and can get a refund via gift card usable at Carter’s, Skip Hop, OshKosh B’gosh, or Little Planet stores.
The product was manufactured in China and imported by The William Carter Company of Atlanta, distributed by Skip Hop Inc. of New York.
This Is the Agency Trump Tried to Gut While It Was Doing Exactly This Kind of Work
Here’s what makes this recall land differently than an ordinary product safety notice. In May 2025, the Trump administration, acting through Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, fired three of the CPSC’s five commissioners, all Biden appointees, Alexander Hoehn-Saric, Mary T. Boyle, and Richard Trumka Jr., hours after they’d blocked DOGE staffers from entering CPSC headquarters to carry out layoffs.
The firings came directly on the heels of those same three commissioners opposing DOGE-directed staff cuts and the reclassification of more than 70 CPSC employees, including safety engineers and hazard analysts, the exact category of staff responsible for identifying hazards like a teether’s eyes coming loose before it reaches store shelves. Hoehn-Saric warned at the time: “These terminations will inevitably result in emergency room visits or deaths that could and should have been avoided.”
Trumka didn’t mince words either, framing his firing as retaliation, coming “immediately” after he’d worked to “protect the American people from harm” and to stop “the illegal firing of scores of public servants who do lifesaving work.”
The Supreme Court Let It Happen
A federal judge initially ruled the firings unlawful and ordered the commissioners reinstated, finding they’d “suffered irreparable harm.” That reinstatement didn’t last. In July 2025, the Supreme Court overturned that ruling in a 6-3 decision, clearing the way for Trump to permanently remove all three commissioners, gutting the agency’s bipartisan structure down to a skeleton crew.
By August 2025, a fourth commissioner, Douglas Dziak, resigned outright, leaving acting Chairman Peter Feldman, a Trump appointee, as the sole remaining commissioner running the entire agency alone.
Then Came the Plan to Eliminate the Agency Altogether
While the fired commissioners were briefly reinstated, the two remaining commissioners went ahead and released a 2026 budget request proposing to cut CPSC’s funding by 10.5% and its staffing by 14%, and, more dramatically, to fold the entire agency into Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services, replacing the five-commissioner structure with a single political appointee, an Assistant Secretary for Consumer Product Safety.
The Consumer Federation of America condemned the proposal outright, accusing the CPSC’s own leadership of trying to “eliminate itself” and “gut its own safety mandate.” Daniel Greene of the National Consumers League put it plainly: “The CPSC’s budget request puts partisanship before product safety.”
Five U.S. senators, led by John Hickenlooper, warned at the time that gutting the commission “compromises the ability of the federal government to apply data-driven product safety rules to protect Americans nationwide, away from political influence,” noting the CPSC had helped recall 153 million consumer products the year prior alone.
The Agency Is Barely Running
To be clear about what this recall shows: the CPSC caught this hazard and got Skip Hop to act before anyone was seriously hurt. Some legal analysts have noted the commission’s enforcement pace hasn’t collapsed entirely; it issued hundreds of recalls even through 2025’s disruption. But that’s happening with a gutted commissioner structure, a single Trump-appointed acting chair running an agency built for five, proposed staff cuts of 14%, and a live proposal to eliminate the commission’s independent structure, all while the agency continues fielding hazard reports on products already sitting in nurseries across the country.
This recall is what the system catching a problem looks like right now, while the administration overseeing it has spent the past year actively trying to shrink and dismantle the very structure responsible for catching it.
Nearly 23,000 Elmo teethers are being pulled from shelves because their eyes can come off in a baby’s mouth, a hazard serious enough that the government’s own recall notice cites the risk of death. The commission that caught it is running with a fraction of its intended leadership, after the Trump administration fired its Democratic commissioners for resisting staff cuts, got the Supreme Court’s blessing to keep them fired, and proposed folding the entire agency into RFK Jr.’s department while slashing its budget. Parents can get a refund for the teether. There’s no refund on offer for what happens if the agency meant to catch the next hazard doesn’t have the staff left to do it.