Pesticide Industry Infiltrates MAHA to Derail Reforms
Croplife America, the lobby group for Bayer and Syngenta, has all but wiped out any prospect for pesticide health and safety reforms.,
During the 2024 presidential campaign, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorsed Donald Trump’s bid to return to the White House as the best chance to deliver his long-promised health revolution.
In the final weeks of the race, the former environmental attorney urged voters to back Trump in order to advance a reform agenda aimed at eliminating harmful substances from America’s agriculture and food supply, particularly the herbicides and insecticides sprayed on most fruits and vegetables.
“Don’t you want healthy children, and don’t you want the chemicals out of our food, and don’t you want the regulatory agencies to be free from corporate corruption?” Kennedy thundered at an October 2024 rally in Glendale, Arizona. Moments later, Trump promised to empower his ally to investigate the “toxins in our environment and pesticides in our food.”
“We’re going to ban the worst agricultural chemicals” and “remove conflicts of interest” from top farm and food safety agencies, Kennedy pledged days later.
Those promises have since fallen by the wayside.
The administration has reapproved the cancer-causing weedkiller dicamba, deleted references to pesticides from its “Make America Healthy Again” action plan, and delayed enforcement of limits on so-called “forever chemicals” in drinking water. There has been no meaningful action on controversial pesticides Kennedy previously warned about, including neonicotinoid insecticides and glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup—which he once called “one of the likely culprits in America’s chronic disease epidemic.”
Meanwhile, representatives of pesticide and chemical companies have flooded into key regulatory roles. Former lobbyists Douglas Troutman, Nancy Beck, Lynn Ann Dekleva, Scott Hutchins, Kelsey Barnes and Kyle Kunkler now occupy senior positions overseeing agriculture and environmental policy.
What happened?
