GOP Rift Grows Over Cancerous Herbicide

Secretary Kennedy, who spent years crusading against the chemical's use, has acknowledged the dangers of eliminating it abruptly.

A fight over one of America’s most widely used farm chemicals is exposing a growing divide inside the Republican Party — one that pits food security and national defense against public health concerns.

At the center of the debate is glyphosate, a known carcinogen and the active ingredient in Roundup, the most commonly used herbicide in the United States.

On February 18, President Donald Trump signed an executive order aimed at ramping up domestic production of glyphosate and its key precursor, elemental phosphorus. The administration cast the move as a matter of national security, arguing there is “no direct one-for-one chemical alternative” to glyphosate-based herbicides and warning that without it, American agriculture — and the food supply — could become “untenable.”

The order also pointed out that phosphorus is vital not only for farming but for certain defense technologies. The U.S. currently imports about 6 million kilograms of elemental phosphorus each year. According to the administration, Bayer — which owns Roundup maker Monsanto — is the only domestic producer of a glyphosate-based herbicide and does not meet total U.S. demand, leaving the country dependent on foreign sources.

The move quickly drew pushback — including from within Trump’s own party.

Just two days later, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) joined Democrats to introduce the No Immunity for Glyphosate Act (H.R. 7601) alongside Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-ME). The bill would block federal funding for the executive order and make clear that people who believe they were harmed by glyphosate — or by elemental phosphorus — can sue manufacturers.

The clash comes after years of courtroom battles over Roundup’s safety. In 2023, a Missouri jury ordered Bayer to pay more than $1.5 billion after finding the herbicide carcinogenic. The company has already set aside roughly $16 billion to settle more than 100,000 claims alleging that glyphosate exposure caused cancer. Altogether, Bayer faces about 181,000 Roundup-related claims.

Bayer has removed glyphosate from Roundup products sold in the U.S. residential lawn and garden market. The chemical, however, remains in agricultural formulations — the versions used on farms across the country.

Those products are part of a broader system built around genetically modified crops — including corn, soybeans and cotton — engineered to survive glyphosate’s weed-killing power. That pairing has become a cornerstone of modern industrial farming.

At the same time, Bayer is taking its fight to the nation’s highest court. In January, the US Supreme Court agreed to hear the company’s argument that federal law should override lawsuits that claim it failed to warn users about cancer risks. Bayer argues that because the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has not required a cancer warning label for glyphosate, those failure-to-warn lawsuits should not be allowed to proceed. The justices said they will consider only that narrow legal question.

Critics of glyphosate cite studies and jury verdicts linking the chemical to cancer, birth defects, neurological disorders and hormone disruption. Supporters say eliminating it abruptly would devastate farm production and drive up food prices.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sided publicly with the president’s executive order, even as he acknowledged the dangers of glyphosate. Writing on X, he noted that while the U.S. accounts for just 4 percent of the global population, it uses roughly 25 percent of the world’s pesticides.

“Unfortunately, our agricultural system depends heavily on these chemicals,” Kennedy wrote, warning that if they disappeared overnight, crop yields would fall, food prices would spike and many farms would fail.

At the same time, Kennedy described conversations with farmers who say chemical inputs are eating into already thin margins, resistant pests are spreading, soil health is deteriorating and foreign markets are increasingly rejecting American produce. Many farmers, he said, want alternatives — but they also want a realistic transition that won’t bankrupt them.

Kennedy said he is working with Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin to coordinate what he called a practical shift toward a farming system less dependent on harmful chemicals.

The secretary’s position marks a notable shift. Before entering government, Kennedy helped lead the first successful jury case against Monsanto in 2018, when a California jury awarded $289 million to Dewayne Johnson, a school groundskeeper who developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma after repeated exposure to Roundup.