Fed Pre-empt State Law
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SO MUCH FOR STATES RIGHTS?
SEE PESTICIDES BAYER GLYPHOSATE PROP 65 CA LIABILITY LABEL
NOTE THAT STATE LAW CAN BE USED TO QUASH LOCAL REGS
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Oil Corporations Invoke Numerous CCRs to Defend Against Their Climate Coverup and/or Resulting Damages
To date oil corporations have used one or more of the following CCRs as defenses in numerous lawsuits based on their climate cover up:
First Amendment, Fourth Amendment (overbroad subpoena), Fifth Amendment (takings clause), Fourteenth Amendment, Commerce Clause, Equal Protection Clause, and Contracts (“Impairments”) Clause. [4]
Oil Company Wins Lawsuit to Allow Fracking Based on CCRs Despite Ordinance Prohibiting It
SWEPI, LP v. Mora County, 81 F.Supp.3D 1075 (D.N.M. 2015)
SWEPI, Limited Partnership [5], entered into an oil-and-gas lease with the State of New Mexico in 2010. In 2013 the Mora County (New Mexico) Board of Commissioners adopted an Ordinance titled “Mora County Community Water Rights and Local Self-Government Ordinance” (Ordinance). In relevant part the Ordinance sought to protect the land, water, and rights of Mora County and its residents by prohibiting corporations from extracting water for use in the extraction of fossil fuels, depositing waste water, and maintaining infrastructure related to fossil fuel extraction. In other words, the Ordinance tried to ban hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”)
If corporations violated the Ordinance, it denied them the rights of persons afforded under the New Mexico and U.S. Constitutions. Further, the Ordinance refused to recognize the validity of a permit issued by any federal or state agency if it interfered with these rights. Preemption by state or federal law was recognized only if those laws expressly preempted County ordinances and charters, and provided greater protection for the health, safety, and welfare of Mora County’s people than County ordinances.
Violation of the Ordinance was a crime. SWEPI filed a complaint in 2014 seeking an injunction against the Ordinance. In 2015 the federal District Court ruled, in relevant part, that the Ordinance violated the Supremacy Clause and First Amendment rights of SWEPI, and invalidated the entire Ordinance.
The Court reasoned that, because the Supreme Court had established (actually, invented) the doctrine that corporations are persons under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment they are entitled to its protections, including under the First and Fifth Amendments.
The Ordinance violated the Supremacy Clause because federal law supersedes a local ordinance and such an ordinance cannot nullify a constitutional right. The Ordinance violated the First Amendment because it was overbroad in that it absolutely prohibited all of SWEPI’s First Amendment rights. In a Pennsylvania case, the Court invalidated a similar ordinance but also found the arguments supporting it to be “frivolous” and ordered two attorneys for the environmental group representing the township to pay an energy limited liability company $52,000 in legal fees! [6]
Conclusion: This SWEPI case demonstrates three principles.
First, corporations have used their invented constitutional rights to continue the same activities that have caused global warming. Unless the Supreme Court has a change of heart (unlikely) or the People pass a constitutional
amendment eliminating CCRs, corporations will also attempt to evade liability for their decades-old climate cover up as evidenced by the cases cited in endnote 4.
Second, this case illustrates that CCRs allow unelected judges and justices to effectively override the authority of elected officials to carry out their duty to use the police power to protect the health, safety, and welfare of their residents. [7]
Third, local communities that lose control over their land can suffer very real harm. CCRs unjustly allow corporations to override the ability of local governments to care for the people of their communities.
Mora County’s Ordinance challenged the CCR doctrine, a legal fiction that threatened to contaminate the local community with highly toxic fracking wastewater. Some would say that the court made the correct decision because its ruling followed precedent. In response, all CCR cases rest upon a so-called foundation unsupported by history, legal authority, or logic. [8]
Further, as SWEPI illustrates, the CCR doctrine, by elevating the profit-making interests of corporations over the health and safety of natural persons, protects property at the expense of the actual human beings who created the corporations . This is inherently unjust and “in the face of injustice, all people have the right and moral duty to peacefully protest unjust laws.” [9] The solution to CCRs is Move to Amend’s We The People Amendment, HJR 48: https://www.movetoamend.org/amendment
Because of these Supreme Court invented Corporate Constitutional Rights, corporations enjoy more rights than people or their local governments to exercise police powers to protect the health, safety, and welfare of the people in their communities.
In expanding First Amendment free speech protection to corporate commercial speech, the federal courts have relied heavily on the notion that the public has a First Amendment right to hear what corporations have to say.
It turns out that what the public gets to hear is only what the corporations want us to hear which is whatever increases their profits or makes them look good. In this case, Monsanto did not want the public to hear that Roundup might cause cancer and used its so-called First Amendment constitutional right ‘not to speak’ to hide that information from the public to maintain its profits.
We must take these public health choices out of the hands of corporate executives and put corporations in their proper place: subservient to public welfare. The only way to do that is make clear that corporations do not have Constitutional rights and that these rights are meant for human beings, not artificial entities. The We the People Amendment to the Constitution, written by the Move to Amend coalition and introduced by Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (WA) will do just that. House Joint Resolution 48 currently has 74 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives, and with rulings like National Association of Wheat Growers, et al. v. Becerra the long list of reasons for this critical amendment continues to grow. Join the movement to pass the We the People Amendment: https://www.movetoamend.org/motion.
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Outrage mounts as Republicans in Congress move to protect ...}:
Sep 27, 2025 — ... glyphosate-based Roundup herbicide and other weed killers can affect its research and product development and other “important...
The Guardian
- Press conference on bill to create near-immunity shield for all ...
Jan 21, 2026 — by state trying to pull the wool over lawmakaker. eyes today Tennessee is in the crosshairs. that's why we're here at least five s...
IT s been seven years since Germany’s Bayerbought US agrochemical giant Monsanto, inheriting not only the company’s vast portfolio of seeds and pesticide products, but also more than 100,000 lawsuits alleging Monsanto’s popular Roundup herbicide causes cancer. Bayer, which has so far paid out billions of dollars in settlements and jury verdicts to cancer victims, has been working – so far in vain – to put an end to the litigation and to block any future such cases.
Now Bayer appears closer than ever to success, as many Republican congressional leaders push for measures that would effectively block lawsuits against pesticide makers around the country.
A groupfounded by Bayer called the Modern Ag Alliance is the face of the legislative push, advocating for liability shields they say are necessary to allow companies to continue to sell chemicals that farmers use to kill weeds and bugs in their fields.
“Without legislative action, a potential catastrophe is on the horizon that could result in many farmers going out of business and food prices rising even further,”the alliance, which represents more than 100 agricultural organizations, including farmers who grow wheat, corn, soybeans and other key food crops, warns on its website.
[
Weedkiller ingredient widely used in US can damage organs and gut bacteria, research shows
Read more](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jul/06/weedkiller-diquat-organ-damage-study)
The alliance has been lobbying for thepassage of state laws blocking such lawsuits. They’ve succeeded thus far in two states – Georgia and North Dakota – and continue to lobby for such laws in all 50 states.
But the immediate battleground is in the halls of Congress, where a provision tucked into a congressional appropriations bill is outraging consumer advocates, including those affiliated with the influential Make American Healthy Again (Maha) movement. Similar protective language for pesticide makers is expected to be included in the new farm bill as well.
“The audacity of elected officials voting for legislation to fully strip our legal rights away when injured by chemicals is stunning,” said Kelly Ryerson, a leading Maha advocate who has been lobbying lawmakers and her 84,000 social media followers to oppose pesticide company protections. “Especially in this age of Maha when an unprecedented number of Americans are rallying against toxins in food and the environment.”
‘Important investments’
Bayer has made it clear that changing laws in its favor is a priority. The company states on its website that without “legislative certainty”, lawsuits over its glyphosate-based Roundup herbicide and other weed killers can affect its research and product development and other “important investments”.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) should be the ultimate arbiter of product safety and what warnings should be required on product labels, Bayer says. The company also says if the EPA approves a product label, consumers should not be able to sue companies for failing to warn of perceived risks.
In a statement to the Guardian, Bayer said federal legislation is “needed to ensure that states and courts do not take a position or action regarding product labels at odds with congressional intent, federal law and established scientific research and federal authority”.
Bayer has already removed glyphosate, classified as “probably” carcinogenic to humans by World Health Organization cancer experts, from consumer herbicide products. And the company has threatened to stop selling it to farmers if the litigation is not brought to an end.
The company disputes, however, that the appropriations bill will provide that certainty, saying in its statement that the language doesn’t prevent lawsuits and asserting it does is a “distortion of reality”.
The relevant section of the House version of the appropriations bill – section 453 – does not mention litigation or pesticide company liability. Section 453 simply says that no funds can be used to “issue or adopt any guidance or any policy, take any regulatory action, or approve any labeling or change to such labeling” inconsistent with the conclusion of an EPA human health assessment.
But critics say the language effectively would impede states and local governments from warning about risks of pesticides even in the face of new scientific findings about health harms if such warnings are not consistent with outdated EPA assessments. The EPA itself would not be able to update warnings without finalizing a new assessment, the critics say.
Due to the limits on warnings, consumers would find it nearly impossible to sue pesticide makers for failing to warn them of health risks if the EPA assessments do not support such warnings.
The language is “by design sneaky and complicated and hard to explain”, said Daniel Hinkle, senior state affairs counsel for the American Association for Justice, who has been lobbying against the action.
“Nobody thinks that a giant chemical company should be able to lie about the risks of using their product and get away with it. It’s just making sure that people understand that is what is at stake,” Hinkle said.
‘Very worried’
Representative Chellie Pingree, a Democrat from Maine who tried but failed to overturn the language in a, said she is “very worried” about the “outrageous” efforts to protect pesticide companies from litigation.
“We’re talking about chemicals here that are already prone to health risks,” Pingree said. “And the chemical industry is trying to keep that information from consumers … and then to have immunity from being responsible if you get cancer from being in the presence of these chemicals.”
The language is not currently included in the short-term government spending package being debated ahead of a looming government shutdown that would occur at the end of the month in the absence of continued spending authorization.
But it is expected to see support in both House and Senate appropriations bill versions once the short-term budget is resolved. The new farm bill is also expected to include language limiting or preventing pesticide injury lawsuits, with strong signals from Glenn Thompson, chair of the House committee on agriculture, favoring such protections.
Previously, Thompson has weighed in on the side of Bayer amid its ongoing efforts to get the supreme court to weigh in on federal “preemption” over pesticide regulation.
The involvement and influence of the Maha movement, made up of voters from both parties, is adding a bipartisan element to what otherwise might be a highly partisan fight.
Max Lugavere, a health journalist, author and podcaster who posted a photo of a Maha-related visit to the White House to his 1.1 million Instagram followers, said pushing lawmakers is important, but “awareness among everyday people is the first domino”.
Citing “growing evidence linking pesticides to health risks”, Lugavere said: “Stripping away legal recourse in these cases wouldn’t just be wrong, it would be [a] tragedy.”
For California lawyer Brent Wisner, who helped lead the early Roundup litigation against Bayer, the efforts by lawmakers to protect the company against future litigation is un-American and potentially unconstitutional.
“I don’t care what party you are in, if you get poisoned by a pesticide manufacturer you want to be able to sue. You need to be able to sue,” he said. “Bayer is paying millions of dollars to get these laws passed because it’s cheaper than it is to pay people they’ve given cancer to.”
*This story is co-published with the New Lede, a journalism project of the Environmental Working Group
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Pesticide use and cancer risk rise together across America’s heartland
America’s farmers and farmworkers, their families and neighbors, are being diagnosed with cancer at rates higher than the national average. A growing body of research indicates that pesticides are partly to blame.
by Ben Felder, Investigate Midwest
February 18, 2026
Why you can trust Investigate Midwest
Lisa Lawler wasn’t surprised when diagnosed with breast cancer in 2025. Her mother had breast cancer and died in 2016. It seemed like cancer had become a common diagnosis for many of her neighbors and friends.
“With how many people seem to get cancer in our community, you just assume you will get it,” said Lawler, who lives in rural Hardin County, Iowa. “But no one really talks about what’s causing it.”
After 10 rounds of radiation and a surgery to remove the tumor, Lawler’s cancer was in remission. Last year, she took a test to determine if her cancer was likely genetic, meaning a high chance of recurrence, which could lead her to have her entire breast removed.
She was surprised by the results.
“The genetic test they ran for me was one that covered 81 genes that are typically related to breast cancer,” Lawler said. “After the test, they told me my cancer is likely not genetic, but likely environmental, based on these 81 genes.
“Your next thought is, then what’s in the environment that caused my cancer?”
Increasingly, pesticides are being blamed for rising cancer rates across America’s agricultural communities.
Hardin County, home to around 800 farms, has a pesticide use rate more than four times the national average and a cancer rate among the highest in the state.
Most of the 500 counties with the highest pesticide use per square mile are located in the Midwest. Sixty percent of those counties also had cancer rates higher than the national average of 460 cases per 100,000 people, according to an analysis of data from both the U.S. Geological Survey and the National Cancer Institute.
Last year, Investigate Midwest, in partnership with the University of Missouri, investigated the link between agrichemicals and cancer in Missouri, finding that many were rural communities that already lacked access to healthcare.
This story was produced as part of the Pulitzer Center’s StoryReach U.S. Fellowship.
Investigate Midwest expanded on that coverage by analyzing data across the country, along with interviewing more than 100 farmers, environmentalists, lawmakers and scientists as part of a partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s StoryReach U.S. Fellowship. The result was the picture of a nation at a crossroads in dealing with this public health crisis that has not just been ignored by state and federal health officials, but aided.
This story was also supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
“Cancer is everywhere and it’s an experience that is unfortunately all too common,” said Kerri Johannsen, senior director of policy and programs at the Iowa Environmental Council, a Des Moines-based nonprofit that has been studying the state’s growing cancer rate.
Agrichemicals have helped America become a crop-producing power, increasing yields of commodity crops — such as corn and soybeans — used for food, fuel and animal feed.
Sprayed from airplanes, drones, tractors and handheld devices, these chemicals can drift through the air or run off into nearby rivers and streams.
And for decades, some farmers and pesticide users have developed neurological and respiratory issues. Thousands of lawsuits have alleged that pesticides and the companies that make them were to blame.
Kerri Johannsen, senior director of policy and programs at the Iowa Environmental Council
Pesticide manufacturers often rejected those claims while sometimes concealing research by their own employees that raised similar concerns. These companies — such as Bayer, Syngenta, Corteva and BASF — have also spent millions to lobby federal and state lawmakers for laws that would limit their legal liability and continue to allow them to sell agrichemicals.
“This is one of the most transparently reviewed products ever,” said Jessica Christiansen, the head of crop science communications for Bayer, speaking about her company’s production of Roundup, a glyphosate-based pesticide. “This product is so well studied … been on the market for over 50 years with thousands and thousands of studies. There is no linkage to cancer, there just isn’t.”
Under the Trump administration, the Environmental Protection Agency and U.S. Department of Agriculture have also hired dozens of former pesticide executives and lobbyists, some of whom have already pushed for deregulation of their industry. The Department of Health and Human Services has also altered its own reports to downplay the harm of pesticides.
Two states — North Dakota and Georgia — recently passed laws limiting their residents’ ability to sue pesticide companies, and at least a dozen other states will consider similar laws in the coming months.
“We’ve gotten to a point in the U.S. … where we’ve stopped treating pesticides as if they are dangerous tools,” said Rob Faux, who manages a small Iowa farm and has advocated against pesticide liability shield laws. “Instead, these companies tell these stories that these pesticides are completely safe and we are encouraged to use them anytime. We’ve been convinced that we must use them or we are not going to have enough food to eat.”
In Iowa, a state with heavy pesticide use — 53 million pounds last year — and the nation’s second-highest cancer rate, doctors and health officials have been sounding an alarm for years.
The state has become ground zero in the fight to limit the impact of pesticides on health and the environment. Farmers have gathered at the state Capitol to advocate for increased laws and funding to address the rising cancer rate. That advocacy likely helped defeat a bill last year that would have protected pesticide makers from some lawsuits.
I call myself a Republican, but this is not about politics; this is about money, about the almighty dollar.”
Bill Billings, a resident of Red Oak, Iowa, who was diagnosed with cancer in 2024
“I believe the groups wanting this (bill) to go through didn’t expect any substantial resistance, but there was enough resistance,” said Faux, who also works for the Pesticide Action and Agroecology Network, a nonprofit advocating for less agrichemical use.
The Iowa bill was strongly opposed by environmental and health organizations, which have traditionally been left-leaning. But there was also strong opposition from many conservative residents and farmers.
“I call myself a Republican, but this is not about politics; this is about money, about the almighty dollar,” said Bill Billings, a resident of Red Oak, Iowa, who was diagnosed with cancer in 2024.
Initially, doctors told Billings, then 61, he would likely be dead in a matter of months after discovering lymphoma in his lungs. A health enthusiast and hospital administrator, Billings had been a regular user of Roundup, the popular Bayer pesticide used on farms and residential properties.
“The cancer specialist said, very directly, (my) cancer is a result of being exposed to chemicals,” Billings said. “In my records, it literally says that I have cancer as a result of exposure to Roundup and agrochemicals.”
Billings was prescribed a five-drug regimen, along with chemotherapy. In September, he was declared cancer-free.
Last year, he hired a lawyer to file a lawsuit against Bayer.
“The irony is … Bayer Pharmaceuticals makes one of the drugs that treated my cancer,” Billings said. “It’s disturbing to find out you are in this financial circle — not only as a consumer, but as a patient.”
Bill Billings, his home, and surrounding neighborhood in Red Oak, Iowa, photographed Jan. 21, 2026. photos by Geoff Johnson, for Investigate Midwest
Research increasingly links pesticides to growing cancer risk
Cancer is a complex disease and can be caused by numerous environmental and genetic factors. Some links have been clear — such as smoking and lung cancer — while other forms can be impossible to trace back to an original cause.
But scientific research linking pesticides with certain types of cancers has been growing.
“Our findings show that the impact of pesticide use on cancer incidence may rival that of smoking,” scientists wrote in a 2024 study, which was published in Frontiers in Cancer Control and Society.
The study linked pesticides to prostate, lung, pancreas and colon cancers. Pesticides have also been associated with lymphoma and Parkinson’s disease, the study claimed.
Many doctors in agricultural communities say the link with pesticides is hard to deny.
“Iowa has a super high rate (of cancer) and when you look at all of our modifiable risk factors … tobacco, obesity, too many calories, highly processed foods, lack of physical activity, alcohol consumption, getting vaccinated for HPV, sun exposure, and so on, Iowa doesn’t really stand out dramatically at any of those,” said Dr. Richard Deming, medical director at MercyOne Cancer Center in Des Moines. “But one thing that distinguishes Iowa from other states is our environmental exposure to agricultural chemicals.”
Richard Deming, medical director at MercyOne Cancer Center in Des Moines
Deming and other health experts also point to Iowa’s high radon levels, a naturally occurring radioactive gas produced by uranium and radium.
The state also has high levels of fertilizer-derived nitrate in its water, which has been associated with increased cancer risk.
“But we use tons of ag chemicals that make it quite likely that the volume of these chemicals is contributing to what we’re seeing in Iowa in terms of the increased incidence of cancer,” Deming said.
A direct correlation can be difficult to determine, as cancer development times can range from months to decades. Overlaying cancer rates onto a map, however, highlights the nation’s top crop and vegetable growing regions, where pesticide use is highest.
The Midwestern states of Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska and Missouri — leading corn-growing states — had the highest rates, while rates were also high in California and Florida, high fruit-growing states.
Lawler, who developed breast cancer in Hardin County, grew up on her family’s 400-acre farm, where her father grew corn and used 2,4-D, a pesticide made by Dow Chemicals. She and her siblings moved out of state after high school, but Lawler returned in 2010.
Pesticides have become indispensable in farming, Lawler acknowledged, but she wishes more people would ask questions about the risks.
“We change products all the time when we learn about the health impacts,” Lawler said.
These family photos show Lisa Lawler with her mother and siblings over the years. Lawler was recently diagnosed with breast cancer; her mother later died after a cancer diagnosis. The family believes years of farm pesticide and herbicide exposure may have contributed. All photo provided by Lisa Lawler.
As lawsuits mount, Bayer pushes state laws to limit liability
In early 2022, Rodrigo Santos had just been promoted to the head of Bayer’s crop sciences division, a prestigious position within the German-based chemical company. But a global pandemic, climate change and a pending war in Ukraine were disrupting the global production and sale of crops — a direct hit to the company’s pesticide sales.
“The global food system is in crisis,” Santos wrote in a column for the World Economic Forum, going on to say that the world needed to grow more food without a significant increase in the amount of land devoted to crops.
But beyond the pandemic and war, another crisis presented an existential threat to one of the company’s top-selling products. Roundup, the glyphosate-based weed killer produced by Monsanto, which Bayer bought in 2018, had been blamed for causing cancer in thousands of lawsuits.
In 2019, a California jury ordered Bayer to pay $2 billion in one lawsuit (the amount was later reduced). Since then, more than 65,000 lawsuits have been filed against the company, according to Bayer, and the company has agreed to pay more than $12 billion in settlements.
Since purchasing Missouri-based Monsanto, Bayer’s stock price has dropped more than 90% over five years.
This investigation looks at the relationship between pesticide use and rising cancer rates across the heartland. It’s the first in a series and part of a larger reporting effort that takes time, data, and sustained work.
In recent years, Bayer executives, including Santos, openly discussed discontinuing glyphosate production. We are “evaluating all the alternatives that we have for the business,” Santos told investors last year when asked about a possible sale of its Roundup division.
But while Bayer publicly said it was reconsidering its glyphosate business, a review of lobbying disclosure statements, campaign finance records, state legislative records and other documents reveals the world’s largest pesticide company remains committed to expanding its sales.
Under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, the EPA regulates the warning labels on pesticide products. While state-level lawsuits have claimed that federal labeling is insufficient, pesticide companies, including Bayer, have argued that federal regulations should trump state laws.
Bayer, along with other corporate agriculture groups, has pushed for bills in more than a dozen states that would codify the view that federal labeling regulations are sufficient warning, effectively voiding state-level lawsuits.
Jessica Christiansen, head of crop science communications for Bayer
Christiansen, the head of crop science communications for Bayer, disputed that these laws will stop lawsuits and said courts have yet to begin interpreting those that have passed.
“Folks can still sue a company, and they should if there’s a problem,” Christiansen said. “But the litigation industry has a lot to lose with these (bills) that are out there.”
Founded by Bayer, the Modern Ag Alliance has lobbied for these bills and promoted opinion articles downplaying the health impacts of pesticides.
“If farmers lose access to crop protection products because of misguided ideological agendas, U.S. agriculture would be upended, potentially forcing many family farms to shut down and driving up food costs for every American,” said Elizabeth Burns-Thompson, executive director of the Modern Ag Alliance.
The Modern Ag Alliance has spent more than a quarter of a million dollars on state lobbying since 2024.
In Idaho, the organization spent one in four lobbyist dollars last year. In Iowa, Bayer has spent $209,750 on lobbying since 2023, double what the company spent in the previous decade.
Most of the bills came up short in 2025, but Georgia and North Dakota passed liability shields that will complicate local lawsuits.
Georgia’s Senate Bill 144, which took effect Jan. 1, received some bipartisan support but was mostly approved by the Republican majority and opposed by Democrats.
Similar bills have been filed in at least 10 states for this year’s legislative sessions.
In 2024, the Iowa bill was passed by the state Senate with a 30-to-19 vote. Ahead of a vote in the House last year, farmer and environmental groups lobbied against the bill.
The session ended without the House taking up a vote. The bill could return in 2026, but Faux, the Iowa farmer, said he also worries about it being “snuck into” another bill or budget agreement.
“I don’t think we can just assume this fight is over,” Faux said.
In other states, backlash seemed to stop liability shield bills before they got started.
Rep. Dell Kerbs, R-Oklahoma
In Oklahoma, Rep. Dell Kerbs, a Shawnee Republican, authored a pesticide liability shield bill he said was meant to end “frivolous” lawsuits against pesticide makers.
“What’s happened in our country is we have … judges that have decided they need to be in the labeling business,” Kerbs said when introducing his bill at a Feb. 11, 2025, hearing of the House agriculture committee.
State Rep. Ty Burns, another Republican, asked Kerbs why he chose to author the bill.
“I was first approached by Bayer,” Kerbs responded.
“But this is a labeling bill; it is not an immunity bill. It is just clarifying on EPA labeling regulations,” Kerbs added. “There is nothing that prevents a lawsuit from any single person. This is not giving a free pass to kill people. This simply is saying that a frivolous lawsuit to potentially pad the pocket of somebody who was not reading the label is not a justification to add that to a label through a state district court.”
But when Burns asked Kerbs about opposition to the bill, especially from many farmers, Kerbs denied receiving any complaints.
“That is hard to believe,” Burns told Kerbs, “because I have been bombarded.”
The bill was never presented to the House for a vote.
After early promises, MAHA walks back pesticide oversight
While liability shield laws have been largely advanced by Republican lawmakers, the push to further regulate pesticides has transcended partisan lines.
Both left-leaning environmental groups and conservative health movements, which have targeted agrichemicals and some vaccines, have called for reducing or eliminating the use of pesticides.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has been a longtime critic of pesticides. In a May 2025 report, his Make America Healthy Again commission linked pesticide overuse to children’s health issues, which drew praise from both political camps.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. makes remarks at an event announcing the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) Commission on May 22, 2025, in the East Room of the White House. photo by Joyce N. Boghosian, The White House
George Kimbrell, co-executive director of the Center for Food Safety, which has advocated for stronger pesticide regulations, called the initial report a “baby step” forward and said he was encouraged after decades of inaction by the federal government.
“Going back my entire career, 20-plus years now of doing this work, it doesn’t matter if it’s a Democratic administration or a Republican administration, they have been beholden to and done the wishes of the pesticide industry,” Kimbrell told Investigate Midwest last year. “So, this is a unique moment where … there’s a chance that there could be some positive change in terms of responsible oversight for these toxins.”
Corporate agriculture groups heavily criticized the report, including the American Farm Bureau Federation and CropLife America, a national organization representing many large agrichemical companies, including Bayer, Corteva Agriscience and Syngenta.
Many of those groups and companies had been large financial backers of Trump. But Kennedy downplayed any concerns that the president would avoid taking a hard position against pesticide companies because of that support.
“I’ve met every president since my uncle was president, and I’ve never seen a president (like Trump), Democrat or Republican, that is willing to stand up to industry when it’s the right thing to do,” Kennedy said at a May 22, 2025, MAHA commission meeting as the president sat smiling to his right.
Three months later, Kennedy’s MAHA commission published its final report, which contained no calls to further regulate pesticides. In fact, it called for the federal government to work with large agrichemical companies to ensure public “awareness and confidence” in the EPA’s current pesticide regulations.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment from Kennedy.
MAHA-Report-The-White-House
Many of the groups that expressed optimism over the initial report were outraged over the change.
“This report is … a clear sign that Big Ag, Bayer, and the pesticide industry are firmly embedded in the White House,” said David Murphy, the founder of United We Eat and a former finance director for Kennedy’s presidential campaign.
The Trump administration has employed several pesticide executives, researchers and lobbyists at the EPA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Kyle Kunker, who was a registered lobbyist for the American Soybean Association, an organization that has advocated for the legal liability shield laws at the state level, was hired last year to oversee pesticide policy at the EPA.
Three weeks later, the EPA recommended expanded use of dicamba-based herbicides, which federal courts had previously restricted. The EPA proposal was closely aligned with the position of the American Soybean Association.
In 2025, the EPA also hired Nancy Beck and Lynn Ann Dekleva, both of whom worked with the American Chemistry Council.
Last month, a coalition of MAHA supporters called for the removal of Lee Zeldin, administrator of the EPA.
Lee Zeldin, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, testifies during his Senate Environment and Public Works confirmation hearing on Jan. 16, 2025. photo by Tom Williams, CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Recent EPA decisions around pesticides “will inevitably lead to higher rates of chronic disease, greater medical costs, and tremendous strain on our healthcare system,” the group stated in a petition circulating online.
Several prominent MAHA influencers have joined the petition, posting anti-pesticide messages on social media under handles such as The Glyphosate Girl and the Food Babe. “The EPA is acting like the Everyone Poisoned Agency,” wrote Kelly Ryerson, on her Glyphosate Girl Instagram feed.
As the EPA advances pesticide use, the Trump administration has also asked the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that federal labeling laws invalidate state-level lawsuits.
“After careful scientific review and an assessment of hundreds of thousands of public comments, EPA has repeatedly determined that glyphosate is not likely to be carcinogenic in humans, and the agency has repeatedly approved Roundup labels that did not contain cancer warnings,” Trump’s solicitor general wrote in an amicus brief with the Supreme Court.
However, one of the studies the EPA has often cited in claiming pesticides are safe was recently retracted due to concerns about its authorship and potential conflicts of interest.
The report, published in 2000 by the scientific journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology, claimed Roundup “does not pose a health risk to humans.” The report has been the foundation for numerous other studies, court cases and policy decisions.
The journal retracted the study last year, noting that court cases had revealed that Monsanto employees had contributed to the study. “This lack of transparency raises serious ethical concerns regarding the independence and accountability of the authors of this article and the academic integrity of the carcinogenicity studies presented,” the retraction stated.
“This is just one example of how the current process of certifying these chemicals is broken in the U.S.,” said Colleen Fowle, water program director at the Iowa Environmental Council. “At the very least, we’re hoping that this (retraction) eliminates this specific research article from being cited in the future and concentrates more on independent peer-reviewed research as our basis to determine the safety of glyphosate.”
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Big Oil’s coordinated lobbying efforts to secure legal immunity from climate accountability lawsuits are ramping up. State-level bills aiming to block communities from taking the fossil fuel industry to court have been introduced in Oklahoma and Utah while lobbyists continue to push Congress for a liability shield that could force the rising bill for climate change onto taxpayers and set a harmful legal precedent that protects corporations instead of communities.
Communities across the country are coming together for a national Week of Action to Make Polluters Pay. During the week of January 26, communities will gather in the streets, coordinate letter writing campaigns, and raise attention to Big Oil’s push for legal immunity. See what events are happening near you. If you live in Minnesota or Washington State, you can also sign your state’s petition demanding No Immunity for Big Oil.
Upcoming bills in New York and Hawaiʻi would empower the states to sue Big Oil for fueling the insurance crisis. As climate-related extreme weather triggers higher insurance premiums across the country, states are looking to make the fossil fuel industry — not everyday Americans — pay for the climate damage they knowingly fueled for decades.
“Shouldn’t the entities that caused climate change contribute? Why do residents have to foot the whole bill for the situation we’re now in when they did not profit off it the way the polluters did?”
Hawaiʻi state Sen. Jarrett Keohokalole
Climate change has reduced U.S. incomes by 12% since 2000, a new study finds. Climate chaos — fueled by decades of Big Oil deception — has caused nationwide delays and disruptions to production and trade, leading to significant income loss.
CCI January 15, 2026
Big Oil and its allies have spent the past year quietly building a campaign urging Congress to give fossil fuel companies total legal immunity from the growing wave of climate deception lawsuits filed by communities demanding accountability for their climate lies. As of this week, they’re saying the quiet part out loud.
The American Petroleum Institute (API), the nation’s largest oil and gas trade association, said this week that one of its top 2026 priorities is to stop “state climate lawsuits.”
In his speech at its annual State of American Energy event, API President and CEO Mike Sommers claimed that the U.S. has reached “public consensus” on the need for increased oil production that is currently being “blocked by red tape, delay and endless lawsuits.”
The declaration comes after numerous news outlets have reported that the fossil fuel industry has been lobbying Congress for immunity from climate accountability lawsuits filed by 11 attorneys general and dozens of municipal and tribal governments across the U.S. While Big Oil defendants have been fighting to block and delay the cases at every turn, lawsuits from communities across the country continue to move through the courts and closer to discovery and trial.
“Big Oil is openly asking Congress for a ‘get-out-of-jail-free’ card because fossil fuel companies are desperate to avoid facing the evidence of their climate lies in court,” CCI President Richard Wiles said in response to API’s priorities. “Congress must make clear that any proposal to strip Americans of their right to hold corporations accountable for the damage they cause when they lie to the public about the harms of their products will be dead on arrival.”
Big Oil’s push to put itself above the law is already in the works. Last year, 16 Republican attorneys general proposed creating a “liability shield” for fossil fuel companies modeled on a 2005 law protecting gun manufacturers from lawsuits, and state-level immunity bills for the fossil fuel industry have already been introduced this year in Utah and Oklahoma.
These efforts are not without pushback. A Congressional appropriations bill introduced last year originally included language that would prohibit the District of Columbia from using any funds to enforce its consumer protection laws “against oil and gas companies for environmental claims,” clearly targeting D.C.’s ongoing climate accountability lawsuit against ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, and other oil majors. However, the latest version of the bill no longer includes the restrictive language that aimed to bar D.C. communities from accessing the courts.
“I think anyone in America who breathes the air around them and also believes in corporate accountability ought to be very concerned about these types of end-runs against accountability,” Jay Inslee, the former governor of Washington state, told *The Guardian.
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