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KEY POINTS:
Big German manufacturer has lawyers and lobbyists in and outside Washington, D.C., seeking protections for Roundup weedkiller.
Company’s actions are a transparent demonstration of power and influence in defense of a top-selling farm chemical.
Opposition movement retaliates in courts, social media, street protests.
Let’s talk about America’s two-tiered operating system and its effect on water and health.
At the top are corporate executives who dispatch teams of lawyers and lobbyists to influence government decisions in their favor. Underneath are citizens who rely on social media, noisy protests, and the courts to mount public-interest campaigns.
In other words, it’s a familiar story – the “haves” versus the “have nots.”
At the moment there is no better illustration of the classic standoff than the battle between Bayer A.G., the German chemical and pharmaceutical manufacturer, and thousands of Americans concerned that exposure to Roundup – Bayer’s top-selling weedkiller – causes severe illness.
Since 2018, when a San Francisco jury awarded $289 million to a groundskeeper who blamed his terminal cancer on exposure to glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, the “have nots” have been holding their own. Revulsion to glyphosate and other pesticides galvanized an influential Make America Healthy Again movement that helped elect President Trump in 2024 and established a MAHA program at Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services.
Bayer also has spent a total of $14 billion in judgments to 115,000 Americans who developed cancer and argued they were not warned, because the federal label for applying glyphosate doesn’t caution users about the chemical’s carcinogenic potential. Kennedy Jr., by the way, was a lead attorney for the groundskeeper in that 2018 case.
A Case for the History Books
Business school textbooks will include a chapter on the campaign Bayer has mounted over the last two years in response, an expensive and strategic program executed in Washington and state capitals to infiltrate and influence every level of government. The mission: protecting the $2.8 billion annual market for Roundup. The company, with $51 billion in sales last year, is now making its case in the Oval Office, Congress, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Solicitor General’s office, the U.S. Supreme Court, the Legislatures of 11 states, and in the proceedings of hundreds of farm counties.
Rarely has an industrial corporation that isn’t connected to the Pentagon been present in so many arenas of influence. And never has an agricultural chemical attracted such robust attention from lawmakers and agency executives intent on 1) protecting its manufacturer and 2) preventing actions that would reduce water pollution and danger to human health.
For those who are unfamiliar, Roundup is the most heavily used farm chemical ever in the United States. It’s sprayed on almost all of America’s corn and soybean acreage to kill invasive weeds and grass. Introduced in 1974 by Monsanto, which was later bought by Bayer in 2018 for $63 billion, residues of glyphosate contaminate water where it’s most heavily applied. The U.S. Geological Survey found traces of the chemical in 94 percent of the streams it tested in the Great Lakes and Midwest states, and across the country. Separate research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found 87 percent of 650 children tested, and 80 percent of 1,600 adults tested had detectable levels of glyphosate in their urine.
As noted above, that’s a problem because glyphosate is a suspected carcinogen.
Bayer insists glyphosate is harmless when used according to its federal label directions. But juries in personal injury trials across the country decided otherwise. Last year Bill Anderson, Bayer’s chief executive, said the company is “reaching the end of our road” and may cease U.S. production of glyphosate if the big losses in liability trials continue. Farm trade associations heeded Anderson’s threat and issued their own warning that if Bayer stopped making glyphosate, it would seriously harm U.S. corn and soybean production and threaten the nation’s food supply.
There’s considerable debate about that last point. Some 40 percent of the corn crop, for instance, isn’t grown to feed people or animals. It’s refined into ethanol, a transportation fuel. And before Trump levied a tariff on soybeans, roughly 40 percent of the crop was exported.
President Is Directly Involved
Last month the president jumped to the head of Bayer’s campaign to end its legal responsibility for health damages. Trump signed an executive order invoking the Defense Production Act to declare the domestic production of glyphosate a matter of national defense and a critical component of agricultural security. The order shields Bayer from liability from producing the chemical.
The administration also is supporting Bayer in a lawsuit that the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear next month. D. John Sauer, the U.S. solicitor general, filed a brief last year that restated Bayer’s argument that the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act — the federal pesticide licensing and safety statute – preempts the “failure-to-warn” tactic in lawsuits won by plaintiffs. The company and the government argue that because glyphosate is safe, the federal label didn’t need to include the threat that using it could cause cancer.
The EPA, for its part, is due later this year to finish reevaluating its nearly decade-old determination that glyphosate is safe for humans and the environment. And as part of legislative work to enact a farm policy bill this year, Republicans in Congress are writing provisions that would protect chemical manufacturers from liability lawsuits.
Bayer has been just as busy outside Washington. North Dakota and Georgia last year approved legislation to immunize glyphosate from liability. The company is lobbying nine other farm states to do the same thing.
Counterattack
Bayer is certainly spending enough money in the right places to gain ground in the trench warfare to secure Roundup sales in the United States. But its opponents are pretty capable at firing back.
In Iowa, where more Roundup is used than in any other state, residents have held up a legislative vote to immunize Bayer from liability with a counter campaign to kill what they call the “cancer gag act.” And in Maine, Rep. Chellie Pingree, an organic farmer and a Democrat, is preparing an amendment to the federal Farm Bill that removes language that immunizes Bayer from liability.
In response to Trump’s executive order last month, Rep. Pingree joined Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, in introducing the “No Immunity for Glyphosate Act” (H.R. 7601) to strip liability shields.
The counterattack was supported by MAHA leaders, who said they felt betrayed by the president and Kennedy Jr., who formerly called glyphosate “poison,” and wrote this in a Facebook post in 2020: “If my life were a Superman comic, Monsanto would be my Lex Luther. I’ve seen this company as the enemy of every admirable American value.”
Kennedy’s tune changed after Trump signed the executive order. “Unfortunately, our agricultural system depends heavily on these chemicals,” he wrote in a social media statement.
Author Vani Hari, a MAHA leader who blogs as the Food Babe, told reporters “MAHA voters were promised health reform, not chemical entrenchment.” She called the executive order “a direct assault on MAHA” and “a gift to pesticide and chemical industry lobbies at the expense of human health.” Hari also accused Trump of abandoning a campaign promise to reduce risks from exposure to pesticides.
She and other MAHA leaders noted that during a rally in Georgia, Trump appeared to promise change in government oversight of pesticides. “I told a great guy, RFK Jr.,” said Trump, “Bobby, I said. Bobby, you work on women’s health. You work on health. You work on what we eat. You work on pesticides. You work on everything.”
“The President is making a mockery of the very voters who put his administration into office,” added Kelly Ryerson, known as Glyphosate Girl, another activist MAHA leader. “Expanding the production of glyphosate, a pesticide derided by the MAHA movement, is a commitment to perpetuating the toxic, chemical food system that has created a sick and infertile American population. It is ironic that this move is made on behalf of national security, when the chemical destruction of both human and soil health is what actually threatens our national security and future as a productive nation.”
Ryerson’s argument is right on target. Bayer’s project to protect market share is a remarkably transparent lesson in how power is wielded in America. A corporation facing billions in liability is pulling the levers of government so forcefully that a chemical found in children’s urine and Midwestern streams is now framed as a matter of national defense. A president who rode a health-reform movement into office is now shielding the very industry his supporters trusted him to confront. And a MAHA movement that thought it had held its own against the “haves” is watching political muscle and corporate money run over public health and government accountability.
Unless the “have nots” succeed, the precedent being set won’t stop at glyphosate. It will define how every future fight in this administration over water, food, and health is decided.
Featured Image: Photo © J.Carl Ganter/ Circle of Blue