webodec3ARCHIVEPreview
Open in TheBrain

Farm Bill

5/18 redumdent belated?

merri ok

huge, food stamps, pesticides

---

2026

-=-=

mma

MAHA advocates are rallying against GOP “traitors” who passed the farm bill

Moms Across America founder Zen Honeycutt: “If the Republicans lose the midterm elections … this will be one of the reasons why”

Written by Alyssa Tirrell

Published 09/17/26

This week, the Senate Agriculture Committee passed the farm bill, a policy package that has repeatedly faced opposition from the “Make America Healthy Again” movement.

While the farm bill was being considered, MAHA advocates urged their followers to contact senators to vote “no,” arguing that the bill's language would fail to hold pesticide manufacturers accountable. Following the bill’s passage, advocates expressed frustration with Republican senators, highlighting tensions between a key faction of President Donald Trump's base and the broader GOP prior to the midterms.

This week: MAHA vs. the farm bill

As the Senate Agriculture Committee reconsidered the farm bill, MAHA advocates asked their followers to call senators and urge them not to pass a package that would delay pesticide reviews and cut funding for regenerative agriculture, a pesticide-free farming method.

Several major MAHA accounts, including Moms Across America, Kelly Ryerson (known online as Glyphosate Girl) and Courtney Swan, joined in a September 14 post on Instagram urging their followers to contact five Republican senators — Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville, Iowa’s Joni Ernst, Kansas’ Roger Marshall, North Dakota’s John Hoeven, and West Virginia’s Jim Justice — and tell them to vote “no” on the farm bill.

MAHA activist Alexandra Munoz shared the post and commented, “This bill must be stopped! Don’t let them deregulate pesticides more!” The post was further shared in an Instagram story by MAHA podcaster Alex Clark, and the MAHA Mom Coalition included the call to action in a series of posts critical of the bill.

Zen Honeycutt, founder of Moms Across America, posted a video Tuesday morning encouraging her audience to call their senators to vote “no” on the bill. In an additional video posted the following day, Honeycutt elaborated, “We just want to let them know we will be watching their vote.”

She added, “If the Republicans lose the midterm elections and they are voting — doing things like this, like voting party lines instead of listening to their constituents — this will be one of the reasons why."

On Wednesday, the farm bill passed the Senate Agriculture Committee in a vote along party lines. The stalemate was broken by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who has been privately dealing with health issues since at least June and reportedly returned to the Senate in part to break the deadlock.

MAHA advocates responded by expressing frustration, particularly with Republican senators.

Vani Hari (known online as the Food Babe), Munoz, Ryerson, and Swan shared a post condemning the passage of the farm bill. Hari wrote, “What happened with the Farm Bill today is absolutely insulting to the American people. Congress had an opportunity to demand MORE accountability for the chemicals being sprayed on our food.” The caption included a “Traitor list” naming a dozen Republican senators.

Ryerson also separately posted an image of McConnell returning to the Senate with the caption, “Ailing Sen McConnell dragged in from medical leave to VOTE TO DEFUND REGEN AG and POSTPONE GLYPHOSATE REVIEW.”

In a new video, Honeycutt said, “We're very disappointed. I’m going to read the Republicans who voted for the farm bill, which is not what their constituents want.” She also claimed that McConnell “did not have the wherewithal, he was not in mental or physical fitness to be able to do that vote, that should absolutely not be allowed.”

She then read a list of Republican senators who voted to pass the bill, adding, “Folks, the Republicans need to hear from you.”

Recap: MAHA vs. glyphosate

This spring, the herbicide ingredient glyphosate became a particular rallying point for MAHA advocates as the Supreme Court prepared to hear a case that would shield Bayer, the manufacturer of the glyphosate-based Roundup, from liability. As CNBC reported, “The Environmental Protection Agency does not classify glyphosate as a carcinogen and does not require labels to disclose cancer risk, but the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer in 2015 said the chemical is ‘probably carcinogenic to humans.’”

The issue was further charged in March after the Trump administration, which had signed an executive order promoting glyphosate production in February, wrote an amicus brief to the Supreme Court in support of Bayer.

In response, MAHA advocates organized “The People vs. Poison” rally in D.C. on April 27. The protest prompted the House of Representatives to remove language from the farm bill that MAHA figures said would also have shielded pesticide manufacturers from liability. The bill passed the House without the pesticide protections just a few days later, and MAHA celebrated the win.

The victory was short-lived, however. In late June, the Supreme Court decided in favor of Bayer, finding that “that the company can't be sued in state courts because federal regulations have found a cancer link unlikely and do not require a warning label.”

Then, in early August, Senate Republicans voted down a Democrat-led amendment to the farm bill that would have allowed injured parties to file suit against pesticide companies. The legislation then stalled in committee, according to The Hill, thanks primarily to Democratic members who oppose a “provision in the bill that would require states to help cover the cost of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funding.”

//

MAHA moms are taking on data centers

06/10/26

MAHA and wellness advocates sound the alarm after the primary defeat of Rep. Thomas Massie

05/21/26

MAHA is outraged over Supreme Court ruling that shields Monsanto owner Bayer from cancer liability

06/26/26

-=-=

---

2018 VADEN

AI Overview

The "2018 Farm Bill loophole" is a regulatory oversight in the ⁠Agriculture Improvement Act of 2018 that legalized hemp but inadvertently spawned a multi-billion dollar, nationwide market for intoxicating, hemp-derived cannabinoids like Delta-8 THC and THCA. [1]

How the Loophole Worked

Closure of the Loophole

Due to safety concerns and lobbying efforts, the federal government officially acted to close the loophole. As part of a government funding package signed into law by President Trump, Congress redefined hemp to close these avenues. The updated federal framework: [1, 2]

Enforcement Timeline and Current Status

Federal enforcement of this new, restrictive definition of hemp takes effect on November 12, 2026. While the federal ban was signed into law, the industry has a transition period to sell off existing inventory, which has prompted many state governments to also pass emergency legislation restricting or outright banning these products. [1,2, 3, 4]

---

GGL 6 26

AI Overview

The original 2018 Farm Bill (⁠Descriptive Anchor Text Congress.gov) established agricultural policy for years but did not create broad liability shields for pesticide manufacturers. However, during the prolonged Farm Bill renewal process, lawmakers debated highly controversial language designed to immunize manufacturers of chemicals like glyphosate from lawsuits and to preempt local pesticide regulations (⁠Descriptive Anchor Text Earth Island Institute). [1, 2, 3,4,5]

Here are the details of how the pesticide and herbicide provisions shaped the recent debate

The Battle Over Chemical Pesticides and Herbicides in the Farm Bill

During the legislative markup and floor votes in the House, contentious sections were introduced that deeply impacted the agrochemical debate:

Recent Legislative Action

These provisions faced massive pushback from public health advocates and bipartisan lawmakers. In a major floor vote, the House of Representatives successfully passed an amendment to strip these controversial liability protections and preemption measures from the Farm Bill. [1, 2]

Following the removal of this language, the broader Farm Bill advanced through the House, but continues to face a complex path as it moves to the Senate.

---

EIJ

Besieged by legal troubles, the pesticide industry had been working vigorously behind the scenes to pass a version of the 2026 Farm Bill that would have given the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sole regulatory oversight over pesticide labeling. But faced with mounting opposition, especially from members of the Trump-leaning Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, the Republican-controlled House today voted to strip the pro-pesticide policies from the Farm Bill, which sets the nation’s agriculture policy for five years.

The industry-backed text would have preempted state and local governments from setting their own, potentially more restrictive, labeling guidelines. Environmentalists, farmworker groups, and public health watchdog groups opposing the measure say the now-defeated provision was part of a concerted effort by pesticide manufacturers to shield themselves from legal liability.

“There’s a coordinated three-pronged strategy underway to shield chemical companies from accountability after dangerous pesticides have contaminated the environment and caused cancer, Parkinson’s, and birth defects,” says JW Glass, EPA policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity. The plan, he says, involves pushing for federal legislation that would concentrate all regulatory power over pesticide labeling in the hands of the EPA. It also lobbied the EPA to simultaneously reverse or loosen its pesticide-labeling regulations and pass state-level “failure-to-warn” legislation that would offer the industry legal immunity as long as their products comply with the EPA’s labeling requirements. Language in these bills also prohibits the EPA from approving a pesticide product label or taking action that is not in alignment with existing human health assessments or carcinogenic classification for the product.

The pesticide industry’s aggressive efforts to restrict labeling requirements appear to be prompted by several significant wins for consumer lawsuits against pesticide manufacturers in recent years. Court rulings on such suits in three states have required Bayer to pay more than $500 million in damages for failing to warn the public about the health risks of its Roundup herbicides. The Germany-based company, which inherited an avalanche of Roundup-related legal claims when it bought Monsanto in 2018, has already settled around 100,000 lawsuits and paid out over $11 billion in damages. But, according to the Lawsuit Information Center, as of April 27, another 61,000 cases against it are still pending in state and federal courts.

Similarly, ChemChina-Syngenta is facing more than 8,000 lawsuits in the United States over the links between its paraquat weed killer and increased rates of Parkinson’s disease. (Paraquat is banned in China and 70 other countries, but not in the US.) The company has begun to settle some of the lawsuits, but thousands more remain. In early March, Syngenta announced it would stop paraquat production by the end of June, but other manufacturers of the chemical will continue supplying it.

Naturally, this multi-billion-dollar industry is not going to sit still while the lawsuits and setbacks mount. Bayer has already publicly declared that it is “pursuing several measures to manage and mitigate the risks of Roundup litigation in the US.” The company is spearheading an alliance of some 110 agricultural organizations across the US, named Modern Ag Alliance, that is advocating for “farmers’ access to the crop protection tools” such as chemical pesticides and fertilizers, including Roundup and several others, that are known to be toxic to humans and the environment.

It is the Bayer-led Modern Ag Alliance that pushed for the Farm Bill measure. Its effort on that front traces to June 2023, when the alliance and other industry groups backed the so-called Agricultural Labeling Uniformity Act, which provides sweeping protections for pesticide companies. Proposed by Republican Representative Dusty Johnson from South Dakota, the measure ostensibly seeks to address the fragmented regulatory landscape for pesticide use in the country by reaffirming that under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), only the EPA can decide how pesticides should be labeled. It prohibits states and courts from requiring manufacturers to include health warnings not recognized by the EPA.

The bill made it only as far as the Congressional Subcommittee on Conservation, Research, and Biotechnology, but it resurfaced in 2025 as a rider to a Department of Interior appropriations bill. In January this year, following sustained resistance from food and farming watchdog groups, the rider was stripped from the bill.

But it returned again as part of the new Farm Bill introduced in February by House Agriculture Committee Chairman Glenn Thompson. The Republican representative from Pennsylvania’s 15th district received his biggest campaign contributions, incidentally, from the “Crop Production & Basic Processing” and “Agricultural Services/Products” industries. According to OpenSecrets.org, in 2023 to 2024, these contributions amounted to $367,990 and $270,180, respectively. According to a report by news site U.S. Right to Know and data from OpenSecrets.org, Bayer also spent $9.2 million in 2025 to hire lobbyists to push its agenda in Congress and other federal departments.

Though the provision has been stripped from the Farm Bill, the pesticide industry has other cards in play. Key among those is an effort to have the US Supreme Court overturn the 2023 ruling in the Monsanto v. Durnell case, wherein a Missouri court found that Monsanto (now Bayer Crop Science) had failed to warn the plaintiff, John Durnell, that glyphosate could cause cancer. Durnell, a gardener, had sued the company saying he developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma after more than 20 years using Roundup — the company’s popular weed killer whose active ingredient, glyphosate, has been linked to cancer by various studies. The EPA, however, says that the pesticide poses no risks to human health when used according to label instructions and doesn’t require a cancer warning (say, the way cigarettes do) on the product label.

The case, which the Supreme Court heard earlier this week, hinges on whether the EPA indeed is the sole authority with the power to implement pesticide label warnings. If the Supreme Court rules that it is, as Bayer contends, then pesticide manufacturers will get the immunity that they want — it will be harder for consumers to file similar lawsuits against not only Bayer, but other pesticide manufacturers, too.

The Trump administration has backed Bayer on this issue, and in February Trump issued an executive order to bump up glyphosate production, calling it necessary for “national security.” But this has put the administration at odds with its MAHA supporters, who staged a People vs. Poison rally along with other environmental groups outside the Supreme Court as it heard the case on Monday.

The court is expected to issue a ruling by late June or early July. Irrespective of how that ruling goes, the industry is pursuing yet another tactic — supporting a slew of state-level “pesticide immunity bills” that are largely similar to the federal Agricultural Labeling Uniformity Act in that they are aimed at limiting the industry’s liability in injury and product liability lawsuits by establishing the EPA as the sole labeling regulator. (According to a report in The American Prospect, the Modern Ag Alliance has been pushing state legislators to introduce these bills since 2024.)

So far, in 2026, at least 10 states have introduced such bills, and they already passed in North Dakota and Georgia last year. Here, for example, is language in Georgia’s Senate Bill 144, which Governor Kemp signed into law: “A manufacturer cannot be held liable for failing to warn consumers of health risks above those required by the United States Environmental Protection Agency with respect to pesticides.”

However, resistance to the industry’s efforts is mounting on both sides of the political aisle.

On April 22, representatives Chellie Pingree (D-Maine) and Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) introduced an amendment to strip the immunity provision from the Farm Bill. “Big Chemical has spent years trying to buy exactly this kind of protection from Congress: immunity from lawsuits, weaker safeguards, and a federal override of state and local pesticide protections. This Farm Bill would hand it to them on a silver platter,” Pingree said in a press statement. “If a company’s product makes people sick, that company should be held accountable. If states and local communities want to put stronger protections in place, they should have every right to do so,” the statement said, while pointing out that just one state, Maine, has more than 30 state and local regulations related to pesticide use and warning requirements that would have been undermined or preempted under the pesticide provision in the Farm Bill.

Separately, last July, New Jersey Democratic Senator Cory Booker introduced legislation that would allow private citizens to sue pesticide manufacturers in federal court for harm caused by their products. The Pesticide Injury Accountability Act would amend the FIFRA to allow for “private right of action” for injuries caused by pesticides.

Booker has introduced much more extensive FIFRA amendments in past years that didn’t pass, and according to legal experts, there is little chance that this bill, which is currently sitting with the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, will become law.

*Note: The Farm Bill is problematic on many other fronts. Learn more about those issues here.

---

6 26 no talk

---

mojo 12 24

The Senate’s New Farm Bill Would Prioritize Climate. Too Bad It’s Doomed.

[Frida Garza]

---

---

an common dr 5 24

echoing early May criticism of U.S. House Republicans' blueprint for the next Farm Bill, anti-hunger and green groups on Friday fiercely condemned the GOP's discussion draft text of the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2024.

Released by U.S. House Committee on Agriculture Chair Glenn "GT" Thompson (R-Pa.), the draft is competing with a Democratic proposal—Senate Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Committee Chair Debbie Stabenow's (D-Mich.) Rural Prosperity and Food Security Act.

While Thomspon claimed that his bill "is the product of extensive feedback from stakeholders and all members of the House, and is responsive to the needs of farm country through the incorporation of hundreds of bipartisan policies," Rep. David Scott (D-Ga.), the panel's ranking member, said that the draft "confirms my worst fears."

"House Republicans plan to pay for the farm bill by taking food out of the mouths of America's hungry children, restricting farmers from receiving the climate-smart conservation funding they so desperately need, and barring the USDA from providing financial assistance to farmers in times of crisis," he warned, referring to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The economic impact of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) cuts alone "would be staggering," Scott emphasized. "A $27 billion reduction in food purchasing power would not only increase hunger, but it would also reduce demand for jobs in the agriculture, transportation, manufacturing, and grocery sectors."

Leaders at advocacy groups on Friday similarly slammed the Republican bill. Ty Jones Cox, vice president for food assistance at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, reiterated her previous condemnation of GOP attempts to cut the benefits of hungry families, saying that "this is unacceptable; Congress should reject it."

"Every SNAP participant would receive less to buy groceries in future years than they would under current law, putting a healthy diet out of reach for millions of people. This would be the largest cut to SNAP since 1996 if enacted and these cuts would grow even deeper over time," Jones Cox explained, debunking Thompson's description of the changes.

"And the cut to future SNAP benefits isn't the only harmful policy in this bill. For example, it would allow states to outsource SNAP administration to private contractors. But prior privatization efforts delayed benefits for people in need, worsened errors, and increased costs," she continued. "Congress should reject Chair Thompson's harmful proposal and instead work to pass a farm bill that truly protects and strengthens SNAP." Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, executive director and CEO of MomsRising, argued that "at this time when skyrocketing food prices have increased hunger and food insecurity, forcing tens of millions of U.S. families to make impossible choices between food and other essentials, it would be mean-spirited and shameful for Congress to cut the SNAP benefits moms and families rely on; and it also would be damaging to our economy."

Describing the benefits, formerly called food stamps, as "the nation's first line of defense against hunger," Rowe-Finkbeiner highlighted that "more than 42 million people count on SNAP benefits each month and nearly four in five of them are children, seniors, people with disabilities, or veterans."

"In contrast, the bipartisan Senate Farm Bill—the Rural Prosperity and Food Security Act—aids farmers and treats hunger in America as the emergency it is," she noted. "It is a bold bill that would protect SNAP benefits and increase access to this essential program for groups that have long been excluded, reducing barriers to participation for older adults, military families, some college students, and others. It is an easy choice. Without question, the Senate Farm Bill is the version that should become law." The GOP's efforts to restrict food assistance aren't limited to the United States, as Gina Cummings, Oxfam vice president for advocacy, alliances, and policy, pointed out Friday, declaring that "at a time when over 281 million people are suffering from acute hunger, any proposal to undercut crucial international food assistance programs is damaging."

As Cummings detailed:

The resilience-building programs housed in Food for Peace are vital to preparing frontline communities for future shocks that could impact their food security—whether it be from climate change, conflict, or economic downturns.

Oxfam has raised concerns about the American Farmers Feed the World Act, which is where many of the cuts to Food for Peace originate from—since its introduction last summer. The bill has proposed gutting funding for resilience-building activities that ensure communities can build up their local markets, withstand the next drought, flood, or conflict, and not go hungry. The House Farm Bill as it is currently written includes some of the most concerning provisions of the bill and would render these vital interventions inoperable, resulting in as many as 3 million fewer people being reached by these programs based on their current scale.

The House must reject the provisions of the American Farmers Feed the World Act included in the House Farm Bill draft as the bill goes for markup. The inclusion of such provisions is a threat to global food security and a shift towards a less-efficient model of international aid by the United States.

The AFL-CIO said on social media that it "strongly opposes" the Republican proposal, adding: "Families rely on Food for Peace—and also SNAP, SNAP's Thrifty Food Plan, and other federal nutrition and food security programs. We cannot support making harmful policy changes or funding cuts to any of them."

In addition to calling out the GOP for trying to leave more people hungry, advocates denounced Republican efforts to gut climate-friendly requirements from the Inflation Reduction Act and enact the Ending Agricultural Trade Suppression (EATS) Act.

"The Farm Bill is a seminal opportunity to reform our food and agriculture sector away from factory farms and corporate greed," said Food & Water Watch managing director of policy and litigation Mitch Jones. "Instead, House Republicans want to double down."

"Some of leadership's more dangerous proposals would take us backwards on animal welfare, and climate-smart agriculture—both the EATS Act and support for factory farm biogas must be dead on arrival," he asserted. "It's time Congress put the culture wars aside and got back to work on a Farm Bill that puts consumers, farmers, and the environment above politicking and Big Ag handouts." Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said that "weakening safeguards that protect people from pesticides, slashing protections for endangered species, and recklessly expanding industrial logging should have no place in the Farm Bill."

"It's unfortunate that chairman Thompson has put forward such a destructive farm bill to appease the most fringe members of Congress," Hartl added. "This bill can't pass the House and it's a waste of everyone's time."

In a joint statement released Friday after a meeting with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Democrats on Thompson's panel, Scott and Statenow stressed that members of their party are "committed to passing a strong, bipartisan Farm Bill that strengthens the farm and family safety nets and invests in our rural communities."

"America's farmers, families, workers, and rural communities deserve the certainty of a five-year Farm Bill, and everyone knows it must be bipartisan to pass," the pair said, blasting divisive GOP proposals. "Democrats remain ready and willing to work with Republicans on a truly bipartisan Farm Bill to keep farmers farming, families fed, and rural communities strong."

==

https://islandpress.org/blog/time-climate-resilient-farm-bill

Daniel Imhoff is the co-author ofThe Farm Bill: A Citizen's Guidewith Christina Badaracco. This op-ed was originally published November 13, 2018 in*[Environmental Health News

At the end of September, the House and Senate missed their deadline to agree on a Farm Bill, leaving in limbo the $100 billion worth of programs we spend annually on food assistance and agriculture.

That delay opens the possibility for the country to change course and help avert a global meltdown with policies that could transform the "Corn Belt" into a climate cooling "Carbon Belt."

Current subsidies are supposed to even out the financial ups and downs of crop production and help farmers stay afloat in a competitive global economy.

Instead they've actually created a wasteful and polluting engine of overproduction. There's a cruel irony here. The biggest obstacle farmers face isoverproduction, which drives down prices, saturates markets, and shifts the burden of recouping the cost of raising crops to taxpayers.

Most of the ever increasing harvests of corn and soybeans produced by our struggling farmers aren't even eaten directly by humans. They are fed to cattle and used for industrial food ingredients and biofuels.

A substantial amount of the overproduction is also exported. The real winners are the grain traders and meat factories and ethanol distillers and agrochemical corporations whose lobbyists write the Farm Bills and benefit from low commodity prices.

There is a waste crisis as well: 40 percent of the food produced never reaches an eater's plate. Much of it winds up in landfills.

The costs of this status quo are enormous. Agriculture is responsible for as much as 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Industrial farming operations — using copious amounts of energy for transportation and chemical production and raising tens of billions of methane-generating animals in confinement — are a big contributor to the imminent temperature spikes recently projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They gave us just a dozen years to get atmospheric carbon levels under control or face dire consequences.

Continue reading the full op-ed in Environmental Health News.

==

Farm Bill’s corporate farm subsidies remain intact after extensive lobbying

By Karl Evers-HillstromDecember 14, 2018

More than 500 groups and companies hired lobbyists in 2017 and 2018 to influence the Farm Bill, which allows large scale farm operations to get subsidies.

==

something on yemen tucked in?

 good news in this bill, thanks in part to UCS supporters like you who helped us advocate for a strong, science-based farm bill.

Notably, the final farm bill maintains the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) without new punitive work requirements.

And, in good news for farmers and low-income consumers alike, the bill expands funding for the Food Insecurity Nutrition Incentives program, which helps low-income shoppers purchase more fresh fruits and vegetables from local farmers. It also increases research and support for organic farmers, new farmers, and farmers of color, and includes a new Local Agriculture Market Program, which will strengthen regional economies and better connect farmers with consumers.

And on farmland conservation, the bill maintains overall funding for programs that help farmers safeguard their soil and protect air and water quality

==

https://www.alternet.org/trumps-12-billion-bailout-farmers-hurt-his-trade-wars-has-been-massive-bust-nyt

==

:{New Farm Bill Contains Sneak Attack on the Environment With Toxic Pesticides:(style="font-family:Merriweather"):}:

By Derrick Z. Jackson

If fish could wail, they would scream over the lethal powers granted to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in part of the draft farm bill recently rolled out by the House Agriculture Committee. The bill, passed out of committee by Chairman Mike Conaway (R-TX) on a party-line vote last month, desperately fails farmers and low-income families. It also contains a number of sneak attacks on the environment. One such provision would allow the EPA to approve new pesticides with no assessment of their potential impact on fish and wildlife covered under the Endangered Species Act.

That means that EPA would no longer need to wait for independent research on the toxicity of pesticides in rivers, wetlands and prairies from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the Interior Department, or in estuaries and coastal waters from the National Marine Fisheries Service in the Commerce Department. The bill chillingly specifies that the EPA administrator "shall not be required to consult or communicate with the Secretary of the Interior or the Secretary of Commerce."

To date, most of the national publicity about the House farm bill has understandably focused on its potentially devastating effect on America's poor, with expanded work requirements that the Congressional Budget Office estimates would eliminate 1.2 million people from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program rolls. The CBO also estimates that 400,000 households would lose benefits under higher income thresholds, eliminating free school lunch for 265,000 children. The bill also slashes child support and home heating and cooling assistance.

When it comes to wildlife, the bill envisions an EPA that pays no heed to environmental science, potentially wreaking a different kind of devastation.

Chlorpyrifos Clearance Only the Beginning

This continues the attack on federal environmental science that began in earnest a year ago when EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt derailed a ban on chlorpyrifos that was long in the works during the Obama administration. In 2000, the EPA ended that neurotoxin's use in residential lawn and garden and indoor pest control for its toxicity to children. However, it remained America's most-used conventional insecticide in commercial agriculture, used so heavily that the Obama-era EPA could not conclude that human exposure in residues and water runoffs met federal safety standards. One study last year found that 7-year-old children in Salinas Valley, California who lived near farms using organophosphates such as chlorpyrifos, diazinon and malathion suffered deficits in intelligence and verbal comprehension.

But Pruitt cleared chlorpyrifos after meeting with the CEO of Dow Chemical, the top maker of the pesticide. The Los Angeles Times exposed the meeting after an EPA spokesman lied that it never happened.

Emboldened by that success, Dow, which donated $1 million to President Trump's inaugural committee and spent nearly $14 million on lobbying in 2016, pursued a far more outrageous free pass for its toxic products. It feared the results of a massive National Marine Fisheries Management study launched by the Obama administration that was not yet final, but that would likely render a very negative biological opinion on the effect of chlorpyrifos, diazinon and malathion on fish and wildlife. As reported by the Associated Press, Dow's Washington law firm wrote Pruitt, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, urging them to dismiss any results that would come of that research, complaining that the methodology wrongly produced "unrealistically high and sometimes physically impossible estimates."

A Fleeting Victory for Science

For a hopeful second, it appeared that Dow had lost the argument when the fisheries service officially concluded that chlorpyrifos and malathion were each likely to directly "jeopardize" 38 species of sea life, including several species of salmon, sturgeon and killer whales, and diazinon would jeopardize 25 species. The pesticides would also "adversely" harm about the same number of critical habitats. The opinion emphasized: "Species and their prey residing in shallow aquatic habitats proximal to pesticide use sites are expected to be the most at risk."

But Conaway (who has received nearly $5 million in campaign contributions from the agribusiness sector since 2005, according to the Center for Responsive Politics) and his fellow republicans want to come to the rescue of Dow and the entire toxic agricultural chemical industry. Complaining that it took too long for EPA, the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Fish and Wildlife Service to complete reviews to register new compounds, all 26 Republicans, over the opposition of all 20 Democrats, voted to allow the EPA to utterly ignore any assessments by the NMFS or Fish and Wildlife.

If reauthorized as written, the farm bill would also allow the "lawful use" of pesticides to kill endangered species without fear of federal penalties and would prevent EPA and the states from requiring pesticide permits under the Water Pollution Control Act for discharges into navigable rivers. Plus, even though a vast majority of farmers embrace sustainable practices to avoid erosion and pollution, a fact recently highlighted by UCS Senior Analyst for Food Karen Perry Stillerman, the farm bill would eliminate the Conservation Stewardship Program.

For humans, the danger of chlorpyrifos alone was enough for the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Environmental Working Group to write a joint letter to Pruitt last summer saying his EPA was rejecting years of the agency's own science that said the pesticide's "risk to infant and children's health and development is unambiguous."

Specter of Silent Spring

For both humans and wildlife, the Republican reauthorization of the farm bill would usher in the weakest federal protections against pesticide abuse since Rachel Carson charted the destruction of species by overuse of DDT and other pesticides in her seminal 1962 book Silent Spring. She wrote of pesticide poisonings, and mental illness to people, documented by American, British, New Zealand and Australian researchers. One study by the University of Melbourne noted how three chemical scientists, eight greenhouse workers and five farm workers suffered from impaired memory, schizophrenia and depression. "All had normal medical histories before the chemicals they were using boomeranged and struck them down," she wrote. She said their illness was "a heavy price to pay for the temporary destruction of a few insects, but a price that will continue to be exacted as long as we insist upon using chemicals that strike directly at the nervous system."

==