Appropriations Rider Latest Win in Pesticide Industry’s Campaign to Avoid Cancer Liability
The House Interior and Environment Appropriations Subcommittee passed a budget package on Tuesday that would cut the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget by 23% for the 2026 fiscal year. House Republicans tacked on several riders, including one to limit the EPA’s ability to update pesticide labels and give user guidance.
The rider would prevent the EPA from adopting any new pesticide warning labels that contradict the findings of two specific EPA pesticide health assessments, one of which is only required every 15 years for pesticides. This language may seem redundant or innocuous, but in practice, it could make it harder for the EPA to update pesticide warning labels to the latest science. EPA’s pesticide review process has been criticized for favoring industry over public health and permitting pesticides in the U.S. that are banned elsewhere.
Republican support for the rider connects to a larger lobbying campaign by pesticide corporations aimed at avoiding health-related lawsuits. Since 2018, agrichemical goliath Bayer has paid more than $10 billion to settle thousands of lawsuits alleging that the active ingredient in its popular Roundup weed killer, glyphosate, causes cancer. These cases allege that Bayer failed to warn consumers about the risks of using its glyphosate-based weed killers, a legaroundl liability Bayer is trying to eradicate through the courts and new legislation.
“They are pushing a broader strategy that expressly goes after liability and failure to warn claims, and this rider is clearly a piece of that strategy,” says Tarah Heinzen, legal director at Food & Water Watch. “The less that’s required in terms of labeling, the harder it is to demonstrate a failure to warn in court.”
Nearly seven years ago, a school groundskeeper with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Dewayne Johnson, broke open a dam of lawsuits against the best-selling herbicide of all time. In 2018, a California jury found that Bayer, the newly minted owner of Monsanto, failed to warn consumers like Johnson that glyphosate-based weedkillers could cause cancer. Bayer was charged $289 million in damages, which a judge eventually reduced to $20.5 million. Tens of thousands of glyphosate users with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and other blood cancers have since sued Bayer.
Bayer contends that glyphosate is safe when used as directed and notes that the EPA has repeatedly determined that it is unlikely to cause cancer. However, in 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” While glyphosate is less toxic than many other available herbicides, it is also applied more broadly than other agrichemicals, meaning that any adverse human health effects may impact more people. Studies also find that glyphosate’s health risks may increase when mixed with other co-formulants in Roundup. U.S. farmers use more than 250 million pounds of glyphosate annually, a 15-fold increase since the introduction of Roundup Ready seeds. Glyphosate was the second most popular home and garden weedkiller in 2012, and 90% of Roundup cancer litigants are residential users.
IARC’s “probably carcinogenic” classification has swayed many juries. Bayer criticizes the IARC for relying heavily on animal studies, while the IARC criticizes Bayer for relying on industry-funded research. A prize-winning investigation revealed that Bayer hired lawyers, lobbyists, and online commenters to discredit and intimidate the IARC and defend glyphosate.
Bayer routinely emphasizes that the EPA disagrees with the IARC. Numerous reports and investigations, including by the EPA’s inspector general (OIG), find flaws in the EPA’s pesticide approval process and a compromising coziness with the pesticide industry. In one instance, the EPA OIG found that the EPA relied too heavily on industry-sponsored studies in a pesticide cancer risk assessment. Even when the EPA does find that pesticides have potential human health and environmental risks, it can still approve them if it finds that the economic benefits of using the pesticide outweigh the risks.
Permissive pesticide regulation has persisted under both Republican and Democratic administrations. For instance, Biden’s EPA reapproved the controversial herbicide paraquat, despite evidence linking it to Parkinson’s. Nearly 60 countries have banned paraquat, including China, whose state-owned chemical company makes paraquat through its subsidiary Syngenta.
Roundup litigation costs have hurt Bayer’s stock and bottom line. Bayer’s CEO says glyphosate sales, which were $2.8 billion last year, barely eclipse litigation costs in some years. Bayer stopped selling glyphosate-based Roundup for residential use and recently threatened to stop selling glyphosate in the U.S. altogether unless it can limit its liability to health-related lawsuits.
Most glyphosate cancer cases hinge on a claim based in state tort law that Bayer failed to adequately warn consumers about the risks of using its products, which is where pesticide labeling rules come into play. Unlike other product labels, pesticide labels are legal documents. Consumers must use the products as directed, and pesticide manufacturers must provide specified warnings, directions, and product information.
Plaintiffs allege that Bayer had enough evidence to know and disclose that glyphosate could cause cancer on their pesticide labels. Bayer argues that it should not be held liable for failing to warn consumers because it included all warning labels as required by the EPA.
At the heart of this argument is whether the EPA is the ultimate authority on pesticide safety and if the federal pesticide approval process should preempt state-level “failure to warn” claims. Bayer thinks so, and it petitioned in April to make this argument to the Supreme Court.
In the meantime, Bayer formed a coalition with farm trade associations to advance a series of state and federal laws that would effectively make its legal argument the law of the land. These laws would affirm that the federal EPA pesticide registration process satisfies any state-level requirements to disclose health risks, and therefore, pesticide makers cannot be held liable for failing to disclose risks beyond what the EPA requires. Pesticide liability shield laws failed in Florida, Idaho, and Iowa, but passed in Georgia and North Dakota.
Republican Congressman Dusty Johnson is expected to reintroduce a federal version of these laws, the Agriculture Labeling Uniformity Act, which would shield pesticide corporations from state-level “failure to warn” claims and prevent states from setting their own higher standards for pesticide safety labels. The recent House rider fits in because it blocks the EPA from issuing new pesticide labels that contradict two specific federal health assessments, one of which is required for pesticides only every 15 years.
“When we are essentially freezing these labels in place for 15 years, it means that we are stuck to whatever that science was at the time,” says Geoff Horsfield, policy director at the Environmental Working Group.
Bayer says that these laws are about uniform standards that respect EPA’s review process. “These bills are important because they reinforce the authority of the EPA’s rigorous, science-backed labeling decisions, so that when the EPA determines what a crop protection label should say, that decision is consistent and reliable for everyone,” a Bayer spokesperson told Civil Eats.
Critics contend that these laws prevent consumers from seeking justice for health harms and limit pesticide safety consideration to an industry friendly EPA review process. Across the country, a coalition of farmers, environmental justice advocates, and Make American Healthy Again groups oppose both state and federal pesticide liability shields. Senator Cory Booker introduced legislation that would give anyone harmed by pesticides a right of action to sue pesticide manufacturers in federal court.
What We’re Reading
The Biden administration stood up 12 new USDA regional business centers to support small farms and food businesses. The Trump administration plans to shut them down. (Civil Eats)
Rural grocers will be hit hard by cuts to SNAP. (Politico)
Zephyr Teachout argues that cities should challenge commercial bribery and Big Box favoritism to bring down grocery prices. (New York Times)