Congress passed comprehensive legislation last week to combat inferior and dangerous consumer products, and included provisions to crack down on exporting substandard U.S. goods to other countries.

The sweeping Consumer Product Safety Modernization Act, which targets major consumer concerns about toxic materials in toys and other products, awaits President Bush's signature. With that, the law would represent a major shift in the role of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, improving enforcement and increasing the agency's budget.

The law follows the recall of about 45 children's products last year and would virtually ban lead in toys. It would increase the budget of the CPSC from $80 million to $118 million in 2010 and $136 million five years later.

A part of the bill, too, would attack the export of dangerous materials, a problem examined in a Bee story last September. That story examined a federal database identifying exports of non-approved products and reported that the CPSC had for decades approved the exports, the largest number coming from California.

The Bee story "was extremely useful for making the case that the CPSC really is exporting banned and recalled products to less suspecting countries," said Perry Gottesfield, executive director of San Francisco-based Occupational Knowledge International.

The nonprofit group was one of several consumer advocates credited with pressuring Congress to add the export provisions.

Children's products were among the exports identified in The Bee review.

"An ethical country that believes children should be protected should not at the same time ship unsafe products to other countries," said Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., a member of the Senate Commerce committee and of the CPSC conference committee that helped negotiate the final bill.

In a statement, the CPSC applauded Congress for passing the bill and said the agency would "be communicating with parents, consumer advocates and industry on how the law will be implemented and how consumer products will be made safer."

Agency spokesman Scott Wolfson previously told The Bee that in approving the exports, CPSC was simply following export notification law "as Congress spelled it out for us." But CPSC Commissioner Thomas Moore had strongly objected to the policy.

"Our agency, through our governing statutes, cannot claim much moral superiority over the Chinese, or any other foreign country, when it comes to our own export policy," Moore said in a list of legislative proposals submitted to Congress in July.

The Bee found in its examination of the CPSC database that between October 1993 and September 2006 that the agency received 1,031 requests from companies to export products the agency had found unsafe for American consumers. The CPSC approved 991 of those requests, or 96 percent.

The CPSC database did not identify how many of the approved exports were products made outside the United States that simply were returned to their manufacturers and how many made here or elsewhere were actually exported for sale in other countries. The data also represent just a portion of all products violating CPSC standards exported from the United States to other countries.

Under current law, companies must seek CPSC approval when they export products that violate mandatory standards or bans. But only about 13 percent of CPSC standards are mandatory.

California companies accounted for about one-third, or 338, of the total exports during the period reviewed by The Bee.

The new law would ban the export of products considered to be the most dangerous, and it also would give CPSC additional discretion to decide if other products should not be exported.

"If something is dangerous, it's dangerous," House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, said in a written response to The Bee. "Why would we take something off the shelves here only to ship it off to another country and put other children at risk? That makes no sense."

Call The Bee's Russell Carollo, (916) 321-1178.