D.C. swims in the deep end

Mandate, yes.
Money, no.

In a typical move, Congress failed to provide funding for a new safety program designed to prevent drownings in pools and hot tubs.
Improved drain standards, supported by this newspaper, were one of the successful initiatives of former U.S. Sen. George F. Allen.
The standards are intended to try to prevent the approximately one death per year in pools or hot tubs due to drain design.
In these cases, the drain suction is so strong that children can be pulled to the bottom and held there until they drown.
In some cases, suction has been so strong that it caused dismemberment.

The new standards were adopted, and pool owners were given a year to comply.
The rules apply to public pools and hot tubs, which now must have safer drain systems or shut-off valves to release the suction.
That deadline is up today (Dec. 19).

Saving lives is a worthy cause. But Congress not only failed to provide money to help public pools and spas to retrofit to meet the new standards.
It even failed to provide money to enforce the rules.
The head of the Consumer Product Safety Commission says it would take about $7 million to enforce the law, and that money was never appropriated.
Instead — in typical Washington fashion — much of the enforcement duty will be passed on to the states.
The CPSC will reserve its focus for the most potentially dangerous situations, pools where very young children may swim.
The National Swimming Pool Foundation, meanwhile, says it costs anywhere from $1,000 to $15,000 to comply with the new rules.

About 80 percent of the 300,000 public pools and spas in the United States do not comply, and may have to close.
Considering that Washington now is having to go deep into debt to meet its various promises for economic bailouts, some might say that not appropriating enforcement money is a good thing.
However, the failure to provide funding either for compliance or enforcement had nothing to do with the economic crisis, which wasn’t on the horizon at the time.
It had everything with Congress’s penchant for making grand gestures without backing them up.

For Congress, sad to say, that’s business as usual.