“I told a great guy, RFK Jr., 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,” then-candidate Donald Trump told the crowd during a campaign rally in Georgia. (.52)
Throughout the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who endorsed Trump after dropping out of the race himself, repeatedly stressed the importance of limiting Americans’ exposure to toxic chemicals in the food supply, including dangerous pesticides that can end up on produce.
At another campaign rally in Arizona (2:56), Trump promised to safeguard America’s children from pesticides in food. He said, “Millions and millions of Americans who want clean air, clean water and a healthy nation have concerns about toxins in our environment and pesticides in our food. That’s why today I am repeating my pledge to establish a panel of top experts working with Bobby to investigate what is causing the decades-long increase in chronic health problems and childhood diseases.”
Standing outside of the Department of Agriculture headquarters (1:25) just before the election, Kennedy vowed to “ban the worst agricultural chemicals already banned in other countries.”
Trump reiterated this idea in a social media post announcing his nomination of Kennedy to be Health and Human Services secretary. Together they would “ensure that everybody will be protected from harmful chemicals, pollutants, pesticides,” Trump claimed.
Powerful promises – already broken?
Their words – and promises – struck a powerful chord with millions of health-conscious Americans who voted for Trump in the election, largely because of these pledges to restrict the use of toxic chemicals and pesticides in food.
The initial report from the Make America Healthy Again, or MAGA, Commission does mention pesticides several times, but the administration has so far failed to recommend ways to limit our exposure to pesticides.
The Trump administration is poised on August 12 to release its first MAHA action plan, with recommendations for safeguarding public health. But industry pressure is spurring policies at odds with those goals.
In a report released in May, Republican lawmakers, agriculture lobbyists and pesticide industry representatives pushed Kennedy and the MAHA Commission to back away from their aggressive, anti-pesticide rhetoric. Their message: Don’t scare consumers. Don’t take tools away from farmers.
In April, 79 Republican members of the House and Senate sent a letter to Kennedy, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin and Agriculture Department Secretary Brooke Rollins, all members of the MAHA Commission. Their letter urged the panel against targeting pesticides and their health harms in the upcoming report.
Agribusiness lobbyists pile on
The major pushback from the pro-pesticide lobby was as coordinated as it was expected, starting with the release of the May report highlighting concerns over the chemicals.
“It is deeply troubling for the White House to endorse a report that sows seeds of doubt and fear about our food system and farming practices,” said Zippy Duvall, president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, in a statement.
“This report will stir unjustified fear and confusion among American consumers, who live in the country with the safest and most abundant food supply,” said Alexandra Dunn, president and CEO of CropLife America.
Not to be outdone, MAHA activists, including Moms Across America founder Zen Honeycutt and Del Bigtree, founder of the anti-vaccine group Informed Consent Action Network, sent their own letter to Kennedy and the commission on May 21. The activists urged them “to stand firm in the face of these demands” by the agrochemical industry.
So far, it appears their calls are largely being ignored.
RFK Jr. revises his stance
Once one of the most forceful critics of pesticides, who often referred to certain crop chemicals as “poison,” Kennedy has recently begun to backpedal on his commitment to crack down on pesticides.
During a May 20 Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, just days before the report’s release, Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.) pressed him on whether the administration would move to restrict glyphosate, a weedkiller Kennedy has long argued causes cancer.
Kennedy’s response marked a dramatic shift from his earlier arguments.
“I have said repeatedly throughout this process that we [the Trump administration] cannot take any step that will put a single farmer in this country out of business,” he told the senator. “There’s a million farmers who rely on glyphosate. One hundred percent of corn in this country relies on glyphosate. We are not going to do anything to jeopardize that business model.”
Those don’t sound like the words of someone who in recent years helped raise awareness of glyphosate’s harms. According to his 2023 and 2024 financial disclosure forms, Kennedy received approximately $2.4 million in referral fees from the lead law firm handling lawsuits on behalf of individuals who became ill after glyphosate exposure.
Intense administration infighting
According to Politico, agribusiness lobbyists have held multiple meetings with White House officials to protest language in the May MAHA report linking pesticides to cancer and other health risks.
A Trump administration official, speaking anonymously, confirmed to Politico that the action plan expected in August would steer clear of any new pesticide regulations.
Reporting by FoodFix’s Helena Bottemiller Evich added more detail: “I’m told there was a ton of infighting within the administration over this report, and edits were being made down to the wire. USDA and EPA, in particular, didn’t see eye to eye with HHS on how far the report should go on a whole host of issues, raising concerns about not just public perception of the food supply, but also whether the report would open up American industry and even potentially federal agencies to liability. (The American government suggesting something is harmful in an official document carries weight in court.)”
Longtime pesticide critic Honeycutt of Moms Across America expressed disappointment, calling a section of the report referring to the chemicals “the only one . . . where language seems softened to avoid controversy.”
Agencies pursue deregulation
Of course, pesticides are regulated by the EPA – not HHS – and under Zeldin, the agency is full speed ahead on a deregulatory agenda that threatens public health and the environment.
The Trump EPA has this year accelerated the approval of new pesticides. This includes at least four active ingredients that are “forever chemicals” known as PFAS – well-studied toxic compounds known to persist in the environment and accumulate in the body.
And it doesn’t stop with pesticides. The agency is aggressively dismantling environmental protections across the board. The hit list of safeguards falling by the wayside include limits on toxic air pollution, PFAS-contaminated drinking water, hazardous industrial discharges, and bedrock legal decisions that allow the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from tailpipes and smokestacks under the Clean Air Act.
Zeldin has called it the “biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history.”
He’s alarmingly accurate. Longstanding public health protections are being gutted in real time. It’s a wholesale retreat from science-based policy, and hardly what any clear-eyed MAHA devotee would recognize as an agenda to make Americans healthy.
As for the pesticide crackdown promised on the campaign trail, so far, it’s just empty rhetoric. Despite mounting public concern, there’s no sign this EPA under a second Trump administration plans to hit pause, let alone reverse course.
Under Zeldin’s watch, the EPA has greenlit multiple new pesticides and moved to extend the use of others. Among them is dicamba, a volatile herbicide whose use was partially banned by a federal court just last year.
In a further nod to the industry, Trump and Zeldin appointed a former agribusiness lobbyist, and vocal critic of MAHA, as EPA’s top pesticide regulator.
With the next MAHA recommendations imminent, all eyes are now on Kennedy.
Will he reaffirm his past warnings about the risks toxic crop chemicals pose to children and other vulnerable populations, like pregnant women and farm workers? Will he oppose efforts to preempt state and local pesticide laws, which are mostly designed to protect school children?
Or will this second report, like the first, deliver tough talk but fall short – offering few recommendations that provide real protections from dangerous pesticides?
EWG will be sure to let you know.
