G.O.P. Plan on Pesticides Faces Revolt From MAHA Moms

For years, the pesticide manufacturer Bayer has battled thousands of lawsuits claiming that its weed killer Roundup causes cancer in people who use it frequently.

Now, the Republican-controlled Congress could deliver the company a crucial victory. A provision tucked into a government spending bill could shield Bayer and other pesticides makers from billions of dollars in payouts to plaintiffs.

The proposal follows intense lobbying by Bayer and other industry interests over the past year. But it has sparked outrage from a new force in Washington: followers of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement.

The controversy highlights tensions within President Trump’s political base over the pesticides in the nation’s food supply. Tensions flared this month after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. released a report on childhood health that disappointed many MAHA activists who felt it didn’t go far enough to rein in pesticides. The divisions within the president’s base could resurface ahead of the midterm elections next fall.

If Republican lawmakers vote for the spending bill in its current form, “they are going to face the wrath of MAHA in the midterm elections,” said Vani Hari, a MAHA influencer who is known as the Food Babe to her 2.3 million Instagram followers.

Among MAHA influencers, glyphosate, the key ingredient in certain formulations of Roundup, is so singularly spurned that the activist Kelly Ryerson goes by “the Glyphosate Girl” on social media. In recent weeks, Ms. Ryerson has urged her nearly 84,000 Instagram followers to call lawmakers about the proposal.

“Giving immunity to chemical manufacturers? That’s insanity,” Ms. Ryerson said in an interview. “And I think that a lot of these Republican congresspeople don’t really even understand what the language means because they’re being sold a bag of goods from Bayer.”

The industry-friendly provision was included in the House version of legislation that would fund the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department for the next fiscal year. It is unclear whether the proposal would be part of a potential short-term deal to keep the government funded past a Sept. 30 deadline, although Senate Republican leaders have indicated they want to pass a “clean” stopgap bill without any divisive issues.

It also remains unclear whether Bayer helped draft the provision. But the company helped write a similar proposal that was almost included in the 2024 farm bill, and it has lobbied for measures in several state legislatures that could thwart future lawsuits over Roundup, according to lobbying records.

Brian Leake, a spokesman for Bayer, said the company “stands behind the safety of our glyphosate-based products which have been tested extensively, approved by regulators and used around the globe for 50 years.”

Mr. Leake did not comment on Bayer’s involvement in the provision. But he defended the company’s lobbying in general as “a normal part of Bayer’s political engagement.”

“At the end of the day, lawmakers are the ones that bring forth bill language — not anyone else — and any draft legislation goes through a process before it gets to either the House or Senate committees for consideration,” he said.

On its face, the pesticides provision in the spending bill seems largely inconsequential. It simply would prohibit the E.P.A. from approving warning labels on pesticides that differ from the agency’s own scientific findings.

But in practice, this language would effectively shut down the lawsuits against Bayer, legal experts said. That’s because the E.P.A. does not classify glyphosate as a carcinogen, even though the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer found that the herbicide was “probably carcinogenic” in 2015.

The lawsuits argue that Bayer should have notified consumers of potential cancer risks by affixing warning labels to Roundup bottles. But if the provision became law, courts could dismiss these cases on the grounds that adding such warning labels would be impossible.

“Those claims would be thrown out,” said Daniel Hinkle, senior counsel for policy and state affairs at the American Association for Justice, an advocacy and lobbying group for trial lawyers.

Glyphosate, introduced in the 1970s, is an herbicide used on crops, as well as residential lawns and gardens, that works by inhibiting a crucial enzyme in plants to prevent their growth. U.S. Department of Agriculture data shows that glyphosate is one of the most widely-used herbicides in the country, with its most common form applied to 46 percent of soybean crops and 41 percent of corn crops nationwide. The crops are genetically modified to withstand Roundup, so that they thrive while surrounding weeds die.

Bayer lobbyists last year helped draft language in the farm bill, the sweeping agriculture and nutrition measure, that could halt lawsuits over the health risks of glyphosate, the Washington Post reported. This year, the company has reported spending more than $6.9 million on federal lobbying on a range of issues, including “the uniformity of pesticide labeling,” records show.

Bayer also supported versions of bills that would limit liability for pesticide manufacturers in a dozen state legislatures. In Iowa, where a bill ultimately failed to advance, Bayer spent more than $200,000 on lobbying on various issues in 2024 and 2025, according to an analysis of records by Food and Water Watch, an advocacy group.

“They came in and tried to throw their weight around and pass this bill. And the people didn’t want it,” said Jennifer Breon, an Iowa organizer for Food and Water Watch. “Now they’re trying to do the same at the federal level.”

Separately, a pesticide industry group founded by Bayer, the Modern Ag Alliance, sponsored billboards, radio and social media ads promoting glyphosate. The group also led a coalition of more than 300 farming groups nationwide that wrote to congressional leaders in May, saying that a patchwork of state-specific labels would create headaches for farmers, limiting access to pesticides and raising food prices.

Throughout the legal and legislative battles, Bayer has maintained that its weed killer is safe. In 2020, the company agreed to pay roughly $10 billion to resolve tens of thousands of cases without admitting any wrongdoing.

Mr. Leake, the Bayer spokesman, noted that despite the World Health Organization’s finding in 2015, regulators around the world have not identified a link between glyphosate and cancer. (While regulators in the European Union have not found a link, Belgium, France and the Netherlands have banned household use of the herbicide because of mounting health concerns.)

Still, Philip J. Landrigan, a pediatrician and director of the program for global public health at Boston College, said that recent studies have continued to link glyphosate to increased cancer risk. For instance, a study published in June in the journal Environmental Health found that rats exposed to large doses of glyphosate in drinking water were more likely to develop leukemia.

“The evidence has really become very clear that glyphosate is a cause of cancer,” Dr. Landrigan said. Children were particularly vulnerable, he said, because they take in more pesticides per pound of body weight than adults, and because their developing organ systems are more sensitive to harmful chemicals.

Zen Honeycutt, the founder and executive director of Moms Across America, a group closely linked to the MAHA movement, has set up a political advocacy arm to lobby lawmakers. She said she was dismayed to see Republicans supporting a measure that appeared to conflict with Mr. Trump’s health agenda.

“That is completely counter to what Trump and his party have promised,” she said. “The Republican Party is being corrupted by false information from the pesticide companies. There’s no other way to describe it.”

A White House spokesman, Kush Desai, said in an email that Mr. Trump intended to “deliver historic progress on the MAHA agenda, from overhauling nutrition guidelines to cracking down on misleading pharmaceutical advertisements. The Trump administration is committed to continuing to work with our stakeholders to deliver more MAHA wins for the American people.”

Ms. Honeycutt said she had confronted her own representative, Chuck Edwards, Republican of North Carolina, about the provision when they happened to be on the same flight to Washington on the morning of a committee vote on the matter.

Mr. Edwards voted to advance the provision anyway. His office did not respond to a request for comment.

“We mothers are not beholden to political parties,” Ms. Honeycutt said. “We are going to support those or vote for those who put the health and safety of our children and our families first."

“Right now, it appears that the Democrats are being more supportive of holding pesticide companies accountable for the safety of their products.”

Representative Mike Simpson, Republican of Idaho and chairman of the appropriations subcommittee that oversees environmental agencies, said during a July hearing that “MAHA moms” had heard “misinformation” about the proposal. He said the provision was merely intended to clarify that states cannot require pesticide labels that differ from the E.P.A.’s requirements.

“The language ensures that we do not have a patchwork of state labeling requirements,” Mr. Simpson said. “It ensures that one state is not establishing the label for the rest of the states.”

Representative Chellie Pingree of Maine, the top Democrat on that appropriations subcommittee, said in an interview that Bayer and Republicans were the ones spreading misinformation. She noted that before the July hearing, Bayer representatives called nearly all members of the subcommittee and urged them not to drop the provision from the bill.

“When you’re from a farm state, suddenly it’s a five-alarm fire when you get that call,” she said.

Lawmakers and their aides said there was a great deal of uncertainty over the government funding bill overall. With the two parties divided over key details, a short-term bill could be needed to keep government funds flowing while they try to reach a long-term compromise.

Ms. Pingree said that if the bill to fund environmental agencies received a vote on the House floor, she would introduce an amendment to remove the pesticides provision. But she said it was unclear whether the bill would get a stand-alone vote and whether the amendment would garner enough support.

Del Bigtree, an ally of Mr. Kennedy and a top aide to his 2024 presidential campaign, said on his podcast last month that the outcome of the battle could have long-term implications for the MAHA movement’s trust of Trump officials.

“This is where the rubber meets the road,” he said. “This is a big, big test for this administration.”

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