The Trump Administration Is All In for Glyphosate, MAHA Be Damned
Eager as Republicans are to keep the so-called MAHA Moms on their side, paying lip service to pesticide alternatives won’t make up for just how helpful the GOP has been to pesticide producers. Republicans are the party of Big Pharma and Big Ag. The question is whether they can continue to be the party of MAHA too.
In the lead-up to yesterday’s decision, the Trump administration lent several critical assists to Bayer. Under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act, or FIFRA, the EPA is required to regularly assess pesticides’ safety and require manufacturers to place warnings on products that may pose certain dangers. Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency has recently moved to ban states from placing their own warnings on products that the EPA deems safe at the federal level; the agency took aim specifically at California’s warning labels on glyphosate. Because the EPA’s most recent review of glyphosate still says that it’s safe—and because states can no longer issue warnings that contradict the EPA—Bayer has leaned on that Trump 2.0 revision to argue to SCOTUS that it is under no obligation to put any warning labels on its products. Accordingly, Bayer has maintained that it can’t be made to pay the cancer patients who are suing it for having failed to put warnings on RoundUp.
A key basis for Bayer’s case and SCOTUS’s decision—repeated several times in Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s majority opinion—is that the EPA has continually maintained that glyphosate is safe. The court ruled that since successful failure-to-warn suits would require states to add non-EPA-approved warnings to labels, that would run afoul of FIFRA’s requirements for labeling uniformity. The EPA, however, is currently in the process of reassessing the safety of glyphosate and other active ingredients in pesticides. That review is due to wrap up by October 1. At that point the EPA could, at least in theory, find that glyphosate is not safe, invalidating a large part of Kavanaugh’s justification for the majority’s opinion.
