President Obama isn’t the Recaller-in-Chief, but that’s not stopping two senators from calling on him to expand the Takata airbag recalls into maximum overdrive.

Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn., above at right) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.), in a letter dated Tuesday to the White House, want Takata to recall every airbag inflator in the U.S. that uses the controversial ammonium nitrate propellant, a substance that in Takata’s own testing has been highly susceptible to failure and difficult to control. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, as part of a $70 million civil penalty against Takata in November, has directed the Japanese supplier to stop producing driver’s frontal airbag inflators with ammonium nitrate by the end of 2017 and to cease using those inflators in passenger- and side airbags by the end of 2018. Blumenthal and Markey criticized this deal, calling it “an outrageous dereliction of NHTSA?s basic duty to protect consumers.” “We do not need to wait for yet another preventable death to happen in order to recall the remaining population of vehicles containing ammonium nitrate-propelled airbags,” they wrote.
Blumenthal and Markey had written to Takata in August asking the company to recall all ammonium nitrate inflators. This time, with Obama on the letterhead, they took shots at NHTSA, criticizing the agency for “waiting until someone has died” to recall more cars and a general stance th...