The Trump administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” mission can’t reckon with the agriculture lobbyists and billionaires pulling strings at Capitol Hill.
According to a preliminary report obtained by The New York Times, the herbicides that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has spent years denouncing will go largely untouched by MAHA’s supposed health crusade.
A draft of a White House report titled “Make Our Children Healthy Again Strategy” included language proposing that environmental regulators would work with “food and agricultural stakeholders” to ensure that citizens are versed in current pesticide-review procedures. In other words, in lieu of restricting the chemicals, Kennedy has decided that the best route is to just work with the people he’s long lobbied against.
On one hand, the former environmental lawyer had to contend with other Cabinet members—like Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins—whose priorities lie with the agriculture industry and the herbicides that keep profits high, regardless of their troubling record of health.
Earlier this year, Kennedy acknowledged the hurdle he was going up against in terms of trying to rid crops of herbicides like glyphosate and atrazine.
A farmer uses a corn combine to harvest his crop in 2022 in Johnson, Nebraska.
"I have said repeatedly … that we cannot take any step that will put a single farmer in this country out of business," Kennedy said at a May hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee. “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."
His stance is a far cry from his 2020 Facebook post in which he called Monsanto, now owned by Bayer, a leading manufacturer of the glyphosate, an “evil” company.
“If my life were a Superman comic, Monsanto would be my Lex Luther,” he wrote at the time.
More recently, Kennedy has argued that these herbicides are linked to the increase in chronic conditions, such as diabetes, heart disease, and asthma.
Kennedy and MAHA’s war on herbicides and pesticides is a gray area overall, and while evidence suggests that glyphosate and atrazine cause harm to those working with and living near the chemicals when sprayed, the science is still inconclusive.
“The science is not a slam dunk for either of these pesticides, but there is enough preliminary evidence to suggest that we should probably be putting more resources into studying them,” Melissa Furlong, an epidemiologist at the University of Arizona, told The New York Times.
For glyphosate, animal studies showed DNA damage and increased inflammation. As for atrazine, additional animal studies indicated that the chemical can work as an endocrine disruptor, reducing testosterone levels while raising estrogen levels in male frogs.
The MAHA report is expected to go public in the coming weeks. And while pesticide regulation is not explicitly present, it does reportedly say that the Trump administration will back research on technologies that could help farmers reduce pesticide use. Additionally, it reportedly says that the purpose of the research is to lessen Americans’ overall exposure to chemicals.
Pretty weak stuff for Kennedy. No matter how much he shakes his fist over food dyes and processed food, he is having to reckon with the lobbying giants on Capitol Hill like everyone else.
