OCSPP chem safe pollut prot

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Tracing Bayer’s ties to power in Trump’s Washington

From lobby firms to top officials, a look at how Bayer built access and secured favors

Stacy Malkan | February 24, 2026

The White House invokes the Defense Production Act to guarantee supplies of elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides. Regulators reapprove dicamba, a Bayer herbicide twice blocked by federal courts, and clear the way for new pesticides containing toxic, persistent PFAS “forever” chemicals.

And the U.S. Justice Department urges the U.S. Supreme Court to erase billions of dollars of Bayer’s liability for its glyphosate-based Roundup weed killer – placing the weight of the executive branch on the side of a foreign company against thousands of Americans who say Bayer’s products caused their cancers.

Over the past year, the administration under President Donald J. Trump has delivered a string of victories to Bayer, the German agrichemical and pharmaceutical giant that merged with Monsanto in 2018 to become the world’s leading manufacturer of genetically modified seeds and pesticides.

Pesticide industry influence in Washington is not new. The Biden administration also delivered wins to Bayer, including defending pesticide deregulatory measures. But Bayer’s big wins with the Trump administration come as the company seeks sweeping legal protections from cancer lawsuits – at a time when a growing body of scientific research links glyphosate to cancer and other chronic diseases, and cancer rates are rising among young people across the U.S. Corn Belt.

These favors to Bayer clash with Trump’s promise to “Make America Healthy Again,” which many supporters understood as a pledge to confront industries linked to chronic disease. They show how a foreign corporation can procure influence at the highest levels of the U.S. government and shape policies that impact health.

Our review of Bayer’s access in Washington found 16 key administration officials with ties to Bayer’s lobbying or legal network. Bayer and its lobbyists have access to people in power at the White House, U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Agency and even those in high level positions closest to Trump.

Bayer also has a formidable lobbying force in Washington, with 45 people registered to lobby for Bayer under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, and at least 13 outside lobby firms – seven of which are now among the highest-paid firms in D.C. More than 30 senior officials at lobby firms retained by Bayer have direct ties to Trump, having worked in one or both of his administrations or political campaigns.

Taken together, these relationships describe a network of aligned actors positioned across the American institutions that write the rules for pesticides, enforce those rules, and defend them in court. The implications extend beyond one company or product line: Decisions shaped by Bayer’s access to the Trump administration are affecting pesticide regulation, how chemicals are assessed, our nation’s farm policy, and the ability of Americans to seek justice in court.

Bayer’s reach into to Trump’s inner circle

The most potent Bayer connections to the Trump administration involve a group of Florida lobbyists and former lobbyists who hold power in Trump’s Washington: Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Brian Ballard, who employed both Bondi and Wiles as lobbyists for years before they joined the Trump administration.

Wiles, one of Trump’s most powerful advisors in Washington, worked for Ballard Partners as a lobbyist and then partner for a decade until 2022. From 2016 to 2022, she also worked as a senior advisor to Trump’s presidential campaigns.

Ballard raised more than $50 million for Trump’s 2024 campaign, and served on the 2024 inaugural and transition finance committees; he is widely seen as one of the most influential people in D.C. in who does not hold an official government title.

Ballard’s firm Ballard Partners became the highest-earning lobbying firm in D.C. in 2025, setting a record for the most lucrative year for any lobbying firm in U.S. history. The firm registered to lobby for Bayer in December 2024. The firm also now lobbies for the American Chemistry Council, a trade group that includes Bayer among its corporate members.

Both Ballard and his partner, Daniel McFaul, who served on Trump’s 2016-2017 presidential transition team, are registered to lobby for both Bayer and the American Chemistry Council. The two organizations have paid Ballard Partners a combined half million dollars since Trump was elected the second time, according to federal lobby disclosures.

One of the ACC’s priorities this year is revising the Toxics Substances Control Act, the nation’s main toxic chemicals law. A new Republican bill seeks to narrow the scientific evidence regulators can use to assess health risks and would give chemical companies a larger role in assessing how their products are evaluated.

As Attorney General, Bondi leads the Justice Department and wields broad power over federal legal strategy and the government’s positions in court. Like Wiles, Bondi moved back and forth between her lobbyist job at Ballard Partners and roles supporting Trump. Bondi joined Ballard Partners in January 2019 to launch and chair the firm’s corporate regulatory compliance practice. She left later that year to assist with Trump’s legal defense for his first impeachment inquiry, then rejoined Ballard Partners for five years from 2020 to 2025 before taking the top job in the Justice Department.

For more Ballard Partners executives with ties to Trump see our Bayer Lobby Tracker.

Another Bayer tie to Wiles is the lobbying and public relations firm Mercury Public Affairs.Trump’s chief of staff was co-chair of Mercury from 2022 to November 2024, immediately prior to joining the White House. The firm registered to lobby for Bayer in August 2025. While at Mercury, Wiles also served as co-chair of Trump’s presidential campaign in 2023 and 2024, according to financial disclosures.

Registered lobbyists for Bayer at Mercury Public Affairs include Bryan Lanza, who was deputy communications director for Trump’s 2016 campaign and communications director for Trump’s first presidential transition team. Lanza joined Mercury in 2017 and has been a frequent guest on cable news shows as a surrogate and for Trump.

*Bryan Lanza of Mercury Public Affairs appeared on CNN as a senior advisor to the Trump campaign. He is now a registered lobbyist for Bayer.

More Bayer ties to the White House

Another key White House aide with ties to Bayer’s legal network is Ryan Baasch, Trump’s deputy assistant to the President for economic policy. In this role, Baasch helps convert Trump’s economic agenda into coordinated federal policy. From 2016-2021, Baasch was an associate at Latham & Watkins, a law firm that represented Bayer on Roundup settlement issues and represented Monsanto in a case involving dicamba. The firm also represented Monsanto and CropLife America in a glyphosate warning case.

Another aide close to Trump in 2025, Trent Morse, was a senior associate at Ballard Partners from 2020 to 2022, then moved to Mercury Public Affairs as a senior vice president. As deputy assistant to the President and deputy director of presidential personnel for eight months, Morse was part of the team responsible for recruiting, vetting and recommending candidates for political appointments throughout the executive branch. He left the White House in August for a lobbying job.

USDA officials’ ties to Bayer

The U.S. Department of Agriculture oversees farm policy, crop systems, and biotechnology approvals, shaping the subsidies, research, and planting decisions that drive demand for Bayer’s seeds and chemicals. The agency has long faced criticism over its servility to the chemical industry, and the Trump administration is no exception. Current USDA officials with ties to Bayer and its chemical industry allies include:

Stephen Vaden, deputy secretary of agriculture, is a former associate at Jones Day(2014–2017), a firm that represented Bayer on its acquisition of Monsanto, and Squire Patton Boggs (2011-2014), which represented Bayer and Monsanto in cases involving glyphosate and PCBs.

Richard Fordyce,undersecretary for farm production and conservation, is the former agriculture business growth director for the public relations and marketing firm Osborn Barr Paramore (2021-2025), which was Bayer’s PR agency for years. A former director of the United Soybean Board, Fordyce was administrator of the Farm Service Agency in Trump’s first term.

Scott Hutchins,undersecretary for research, education, economics & chief scientist, spent over 30 years at Dow AgroSciences (now Corteva), most recently as global R&D director. He served in this same USDA role in the first Trump administration.

Pat Swanson,administrator of the Risk Management Agency, was a director for the lobby groups American Soybean Association and the Iowa Soybean Association, where she advocated for Bayer’s pesticides.

Bill Beam,administrator of the Farm Service Agency, served for nine years on the United Soybean Board, which collaborates with Bayer on research initiatives. Beam previously served as the deputy administrator for farm programs at the FSA (2018–2021).

Peter Laudeman, senior policy advisor for trade and foreign agricultural affairs, is a former political affairs manager of Corteva Agriscience (formerly DowDuPont) from 2020-2022, and legislative assistant for the National Corn Growers Association from 2018-2020.

Bayer’s pursuit of federal preemption

Bayer’s case before the Supreme Court has high stakes for public health protections and the legal right of individuals to hold companies accountable in court.

Federal preemption – the idea that federal law can override state law in some circumstances – has long been a priority for chemical and food companies that want a single, often weaker, national standard for regulation and liability, while consumer and health groups argue that states must retain the right to set higher health and safety standards.

The issue is central to Bayer’s case before the Supreme Court: the company argues that because the EPA approved glyphosate, cancer claims tied to Roundup should be barred under state failure-to-warn laws. The federal government’s position on whether pesticide approvals preempt state laws has shifted across administrations, underscoring how much the outcome depends on who holds power, and who influences it.

In May 2025, two appellate attorneys with deep experience at the U.S. Department of Justice, Jennifer Scheller Neumann and Amelia Yowell, joined Holland & Hart LLP,a firm that provides legal and lobbying services. A month earlier, the firm had registered to lobby for Bayer.

Neumann spent 20 years at the DOJ’s Environment and Natural Resources Division, most recently as chief of the appellate section overseeing all appellate litigation involving federal environmental laws. She was a signatory on the DOJ’s 2019 amicus brief in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals supporting Monsanto (now Bayer). The brief argues that EPA’s approval of glyphosate preempts state failure-to-warm laws.

The Biden administration reversed that position in 2022, urging the Supreme Court to reject Bayer’s case on the premise that federal pesticide law should not preempt state failure-to-warn laws.The Trump Justice Department reversed it again in 2025 – arguing the Biden-era position was wrong and that juries shouldn’t second-guess EPA science.

Oral arguments before the Supreme Court are scheduled for April 27. A win for Bayer could turn EPA pesticide approvals into a nationwide liability shield, elevating the agency’s slow and often industry-dominated chemical assessment process into a final word on pesticide safety, at a time when peer-reviewed research continues to emerge linking pesticide exposure to cancer, neurological harm, and other chronic illnesses.

As Nathan Donley of the Center for Biological Diversity warned, such a precedent would mean that “the only thing that matters legally in determining a pesticide’s safety is what EPA claims to be true, even if those claims completely ignore the best available science.”

Slashing capacity at EPA

Bayer allies also pervade the U.S. agency charged with protecting health and the environment – in positions where they influence what chemicals and pesticides are approved and how these products are regulated. Chemical industry lobbyists now occupy the top four jobs at the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention (OCSPP), the division in charge of regulating chemicals and pesticides. EPA officials loosened ethics standards to allow it.

Douglas Troutman, assistant administrator at OCSPP, is the former co-CEO and chief lobbyist for the American Cleaning Institute (ACI), which represents major chemical manufacturers. Troutman worked at the lobby group for 17 years before joining the Trump administration.

Nancy Beck, principal deputy assistant administrator at OCSPP, was a senior director at the American Chemistry Council – a lobby group representing Bayer, Dow Chemical, DuPont and other chemical manufacturers – from 2012 to 2017. In Trump’s first EPA, she held advisory roles within the White House at NEC and OMB. Between Trump administrations she worked at Hunton Andrews Kurth, a law firm that offers, among other services, glyphosate litigation defense to companies facing lawsuits from cancer claims.

Lynn Ann Dekleva OCSPP’s deputy assistant administrator for new chemicals, also held this role during the first Trump administration. In between, she was a senior director at the lobby group American Chemistry Council.She is a 30-year veteran of DuPont chemical company, where she workedas a program manager and engineer.

Kyle Kunkler, OCSPP deputy assistant administrator for pesticides, is a former pesticide industry lobbyist. He was director of government affairs, with a focus on biotech and pesticides, for the American Soybean Association from 2020-2025, and prior to that spent three years managing government affairs on food and agriculture for the Biotechnology Innovation Organization lobby group. CropLife America, the main lobby group for the pesticide industry, gave him a “Rising Star” award in 2020.

*Bayer was a gold sponsor at CropLife America 2021 where Beck was a featured speaker alongside her colleague Matt Leopold, who was EPA’s top lawyer during the first Trump administration. Hunter Andrews Kurth is a leading firm for pesticide litigation.

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More EPA officials with ties to Bayer include:

Steven Cook, deputy assistant administrator for the Office of Land and Emergency Management, oversees Superfund sites. Bayer is associated with several Superfund sites due to its pesticide and chemical manufacturing. Cook spent over 20 years as the in-house corporate counsel for LyondellBasell, one of the world’s largest plastics and chemical companies. LyondellBasell has a 50/50 joint venture with Bayer (a propylene oxide and styrene monomer plant). LyondellBasell CEO Peter Vanacker is board chair of the American Chemistry Council.

Aaron Szabo,assistant administrator for air and radiation (appointed in July 2025) was a partner and lobbyist at CGCN Group (2018–2023), which has been registered to lobby for the American Chemistry Council during the past decade. From 2023 to 2024, he was a senior director and attorney at Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath, where he represented chemical interests, including the ACC, before returning to the EPA in January 2025.

Alex Dominguez,deputy assistant administrator for mobile sources, was a registered lobbyist with Massie Partners, where he represented the National Corn Growers Association, a group whose members are consumers of Bayer’s seeds and pesticides. He worked in that role from 2023 to January 2025.

More Trump officials tied to Bayer

As assistant secretary of legislation at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Gary Andresis a primary liaison between HHS and Congress. He was previously the senior executive vice president of public affairs at the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, the main trade group for biotech companies including Bayer. At BIO, Andres directed the lobbying strategy for the entire biotech sector, which included defending the regulatory framework for GMOs and associated agrichemicals. He previously worked at lobbying firm Dutko Worldwide which has represented Bayer.

Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy also has ties to a Bayer lobby firm; he was senior counsel and advisory board member of BGR Group from 2019 to 2023 and was a registered lobbyist for the firm in 2020, though there is no record of him lobbying for Bayer.

13 lobby firms working for Bayer in Washington

Bayer’s direct lobbying spending is significant, but its political influence expands considerably when viewed alongside allied trade and commodity groups that together form a well-financed and coordinated lobbying network. In 2025, Bayer retained at least 13 lobby firms and at least 49 registered lobbyists registered to lobby for the company (including Bayer’s six in-house lobbyists) as of the fourth quarter, federal disclosures show.

Bayer spent at least $9.19 million on federal lobbying last year. While it is not among the highest-spending single corporations lobbying in D.C., the agribusiness sector ranked ninth with $219.9 million in lobbying expenditures in 2025 – the highest year on record for the sector. We include the sector total because Bayer’s influence is amplified by an integrated industrial agribusiness system that acts in concert – from pesticide-dependent commodity crops to factory farms and ultra-processed food production – to shape policy in its favor.

Within the sector, groups directly lobbying for favorable pesticide policies include trade groups representing pesticide manufacturers – the American Chemistry CouncilandCropLife America – and commodity groups such as the National Corn Growers Association and American Soybean Association that rely on Bayer’s products.

These four groups spent a combined $22 million on federal lobbying in 2025, with 12 more outside lobby firms and 79 more registered lobbyists in the fourth quarter.

Bayer’s lobbying activity last year was its highest in recent years, but lower than the company’s peak in 2016, 2017 and 2018, just before the Bayer/Monsanto merger and following the 2015 WHO cancer agency finding that glyphosate is a probable human carcinogen.

*Source: OpenSecrets

These numbers don’t reflect the whole picture of Bayer’s lobbying activities. The Lobbying Disclosure Act requires registration only after certain spending and activity thresholds are met, so public filings do not capture all of the paid influence work taking place in Washington.

They don’t reflect state-level activity, either. Pesticide related PAC spending surged in late 2024 as companies sought to limit damage awards in courts across the nation. In Iowa alone, Bayer spent a record amount last year trying to pass a state immunity bill critics called the Cancer Gag Act.

Read more about Bayer’s lobby force in our Bayer Lobby Tracker.

More lobbyists tied to Trump

Political scientists have long documented how lobbying shapes public policy by securing access to decision-makers, and helping corporations turn their priorities into laws and regulations. These dynamics help explain how companies like Bayer can translate access in Washington into concrete policy wins.

More than 30 people in leadership positions at lobby firms retained by Bayer have direct ties to Trump’s current or former administrations or presidential campaigns, our analysis shows. Many of these lobbyists are not personally registered to lobby for Bayer, but may be assisting in ways that do not trigger lobby registration, for example, advising the firm’s Bayer lobbyists.

As noted earlier, Ballard Partners – the firm that employed both Susie Wiles and Pam Bondi, and is run by one of Trump’s biggest political fundraisers – is a fundamental connection for Bayer o Trump’s orbit. In addition to Brian Ballard and Daniel McFaul, the two lobbyists at the firm who are registered to lobby for both Bayer and the American Chemistry Council, other partners at Ballard have connections to Trump:

Hunter Morgen, a D.C.-based partner in the firm, served over three years in senior positions during the first Trump administration – as special assistant to the President and senior advisor for policy and strategy in the White House working on trade and immigration issues with Peter Navarro and Stephen Miller. Prior to his White House role, Morgen was policy advisor for the State Department in the Office of Policy and Planning. He previously worked on Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and transition team. In 2020, Trump appointed Morgen to the Presidential Council on Improving Federal Civil Architecture. Morgen – along with Brian Ballard, Daniel McFaul, Syl Lukas (a senior partner at Ballard) and Susie Wiles – were included among a list of donors invited to an October 2025 gala for Trump’s new $250 million East Wing ballroom.

*Trump has said the new ballroom is being “paid for 100 percent by me and some friends of mine, donors,” raising concerns about conflicts of interest.

Mike Rubino, another D.C. partner at Ballard, was among the first hires on Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign where he was a senior advisor directing operations in ten states and winning nine of them, according to his bio. He joined the first Trump administration as a senior official at HHS before leaving for the private sector where he worked alongside Corey Lewandowski, who is currently a key figure at the Department of Homeland Security.

Ballard D.C. Partner William Russell was the aide responsible for Trump’s daily travel and logistics for nearly four years of the first administration. Russell also worked on Trump’s 2016 and 2024 campaigns.

Brian Hughes, a partner at Mercury Public Affairs– the other lobby firm that previously employed Susie Wiles – was NASA chief of staff from May to December 2025. He joined Mercury in January 2026. Brian Hughes was Trump’s Florida campaign manager in 2024 and communications director for Trump’s transition team. Danielle Alvarez, another partner at Mercury, held communications and advisory roles in Trump’s 2020 and 2024 campaigns.

Other Bayer lobby firm ties to Trump’s White House include:

Amy Swonger, a principal at Invariant– a firm registered to lobby for Bayer – worked in the Executive Office of the President for most of Trump’s first term, as assistant to the president and as director and deputy director of legislative affairs.

Jordan Bonfitto,a director at Invariant, was a policy advisor at the National Economic Council in Trump’s first White House, focused on the agricultural and biotech portfolios. From February to October 2025, Bonfitto was the chief of staff for marketing and regulatory programs at the USDA under Secretary Brooke Rollins. He joined Invariant in November.

Other notable Bayer lobby firm ties to Trump:

Holland & Hart, a lobby firm Bayer retained in April 2025, employs former EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler, who held the top job at EPA for part of Trump’s first term. Wheeler is a partner at the firm and head of federal affairs. Troy Lyons, a registered lobbyist for Bayer and senior director of federal affairs at Holland & Hart, held senior roles in Trump’s first EPA working under both Wheeler and Trump’s first EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt.

At BGR Government Affairs, several senior lobbyists have ties to Trump. Managing Director David Urban was a senior advisor on Trump’s 2016, 2020, and 2024 campaigns; Practice Head and Principal William Crozer left the firm during Trump’s first term to serve as special assistant to the president and deputy director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs; and PrincipalJoseph Lai was aspecial assistant to the President for legislative affairs (2017-2019), where he led the outreach and vote-counting efforts to confirm Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, as well as other major appointees.

Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, longtime lobbyists for Bayer and Monsanto, also has notable advisors and partners with ties to Trump. Geoff Verhoff, senior advisor at the firm, served on the Trump-Pence victory finance leadership committee 2017-2021 and was the vice chair of the RNC Finance Committee in those years. Partner Kelly Ann Shaw, was deputy assistant to the President for international economic affairs and the U.S. lead negotiator (Sherpa) for the G7, G20, and APEC in 2018 and 2019. Senior Advisor Anna Abramdeputy commissioner for policy, legislation and international affairs at the FDA from 2017 to 2021.

For more ties between Bayer’s lobby firms, the Trump administration and other routes of influence see our lobby tracker:

IFrame Content

This analysis of Bayer-Trump connections reflects only what is visible in public records. Additional financial, political, or personal ties – including undisclosed funding streams, if they exist – may remain hidden. This story is a work in progress. We will update it. You can help by sending us what you may know about ties between Bayer and the Trump administration, including the federal agencies. Contact Stacy Malkan via Signal or email stacy@usrtk.org.

Updates made February 26:

Added another USDA official (Peter Laudeman) with ties to Bayer.
Added total number of lobbyists and lobby firms retained by four trade and commodity groups that work closely with Bayer: American Chemistry Council, CropLife America, National Corn Growers Association and American Soybean Association.

Categories: Monsanto/Bayer, Pesticides Tags: Primary Article

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11 25

MAHA Slams “Corporate Capture” While Trump Strips Regulations

between frenzied claims about Tylenol and disparaging remarks about autism, the voices of the “Make America Healthy Again” movement empowered by President Donald Trump have directed criticism at the country’s massive food, pharmaceutical, and chemical industries — still-too-rare targets for the leaders of either political party in the U.S.

When the White House unveiled its comprehensive report on how to “Make Our Children Healthy Again” in May, it slammed “corporate capture” of regulatory bodies and argued that companies responsible for making children less healthy wield undue influence in Washington. A subsequent strategy report, released last month, called to “protect public health from corporate influence.”

“It was one of the first times I saw the federal government actually call out corporate capture and how chemical companies influence regulation,” said Darya Minovi, a senior analyst for the Center for Science and Democracy.

But the Trump administration’s political marriage of unbridled crony capitalism and fringe health conspiracism is not without its contradictions.

While the “Make America Healthy Again,” or MAHA, movement preaches a healthy utopia for the nation’s children free of real and imagined toxins, public health experts say the Trump administration has pursued an aggressive deregulation campaign that has opened the floodgates for toxic chemicals in our food, water, and air — while also defunding vital medical research and spreading dangerous medical misinformation.

“There’s a lot of rhetoric about problems that they’re solving,” Minovi said. “But when I’m looking at the actual actions that the administration is taking, largely, these actions are not making any kids or families healthier.”

A glaring tension between the MAHA movement’s purported goals and the Trump administration’s aggressive deregulatory strategy is the issue of environmental toxins, particularly PFAS, also known as forever chemicals, found in many household items.

These chemicals, which can disrupt liver, kidney, and thyroid functioning, are especially harmful to children.

[

Trump EPA’s Next Move: Making It Harder to Sue for Getting Cancer from Roundup

https://theintercept.com/2025/03/21/trump-epa-monsanto-roundup-bayer-cancer-chemicals/)

The strategy report, drafted by the Make America Healthy commission led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., laid out a series of recommendations to “end chronic childhood disease,” which included studying the cumulative effect of chemicals in the environment. But in May, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it was rolling back restrictions on the acceptable levels of these forever chemicals within drinking water, which were put in place during the Biden administration. And in the spring, the agency ended a grant to research children’s exposure to chemicals from soil and dust, accordingto the KFF Health News.

“When it comes to actually taking action, we’re not really seeing policies that are getting ahead of corporate capture and holding the chemical industry responsible,” Minovi said.

Over the coming months, the EPA has announced it will take 31 separate deregulatory actions, including loosening restrictions on power plants that emit air pollution and eliminating safeguards put in place during the Biden administration for petrochemical accidents.

“President Trump made a pledge to Make America Healthy Again by restoring accountability, transparency, and Gold Standard Science in public health decision-making,” wrote Desai. “The President and White House maintain complete confidence in Secretary Kennedy and the rest of the HHS team to deliver on this pledge.”

The Department of Health and Human Services and the EPA did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

Food assistance and educational programs have also come under fire during the Trump administration. Earlier this year, Republicans enacted the most significant cut to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programin history. The program provided food assistance to roughly 1 in every 5 children in the United States, as well as nutrition education.

“A lot of this movement is designed to benefit privileged people who have the resources to access certain healthier foods or a community with clean air,” said Minovi, as opposed to “everyday people who might actually depend on public policies to ensure they have healthy food, clean air, clean water in their community.”

“A lot of this movement is designed to benefit privileged people who have the resources to access certain healthier foods or a community with clean air.”

The recommendations emerging from HHS and the MAHA movement about vaccines and autism are particularly troubling, said Jill Rosenthal, director of public health policy at the Center for American Progress. “It’s a matter of promoting a personal agenda that RFK has rather than following decades of good science,” she said.

Riddled throughout the MAHA strategy and separate report are concerns over vaccines and the vaccine schedule, which is used to determine the timing for childhood vaccinations.

Both RFK Jr. and Trump have peddled pseudoscientific conclusions connecting autism to vaccination, suggesting that the vaccine schedule needs to change. During the press conference last week, Trump advised against vaccinating children for Hepatitis B until they’re 12 years old, which runs at odds with medical guidelines.

“They’re making it more difficult for children to get routine childhood vaccinations. We know that vaccination has saved millions of lives, and so any efforts that make it harder for children to access vaccines are really, really jeopardizing kids’ health,” said Rosenthal. “Instead of following the science and believing what evidence we already have, we’re just creating a lot of distrust and making it harder for people to keep their kids healthy.”

The recent recommendations that pregnant women avoid Tylenol also carry risk for pregnant people and their future children.

“In the near term, I think that pregnant patients are going to be worried enough that they seek alternate forms of medication to treat their pain,” said Dr. Mariana Montes, a former pediatrician and obstetric anesthesiologist. “That’s extremely concerning, because there is nothing that’s been proven safe for pregnancy except for acetaminophen.”

Ibuprofen, the active ingredient in Advil, has been known to lower amniotic fluid — the liquid in utero that surrounds and protects the fetus — and can have negative effects on kidney and heart development, said Montes.

“Patients might choose to take ibuprofen without knowing the effects, and then unknowingly actually harm a healthy pregnancy because they’re so worried about taking Tylenol,” she said.

[

RFK Jr. Talks About Public Health, but He’s Joining an Administration That’ll Make Us Sicker Than Ever

https://theintercept.com/2024/11/14/rfk-jr-health-human-services-water-air-project-2025/)

Left with fewer options they believe are safe, Rosenthal warns that pregnant people might forgo medication altogether, even when they have a fever. “If women avoid taking Tylenol, for instance, when they have a fever, it can increase the risk of birth defects,” she said. “So by scaring women away from taking needed medication, it can actually impact their health and the health of their developing babies.”

The stigma these types of pronouncements cause for people with autism is also a serious concern.

“It’s necessary to point out the ableist language in this whole autism debacle,” said Minovi. “Of course, it’s a condition that needs to be understood and studied, and obviously impacts families significantly, but the way in which the administration, particularly RFK, talks about it is dismissive and negative about people’s lived experiences.”

Republicans, who once denounced former First Lady Michelle Obama for attempting to make school lunches moderately healthier, now inhabit a coalition whose purported goals would have instantly launched “nanny state” accusations just a few years prior.

But the MAHA movement has been so successful despite its inherent contradictions, Rosenthal said, because there’s a “kernel of truth” to what it’s preaching.

“For instance, ultra-processed food is not the first choice for how we want to take care of our bodies,” Rosenthal said, “but at the same time, is that the best way to use limited resources and protect or promote child health? Not when we have kids who don’t have enough to eat, right?”

Minovi said it’s understandable that people are drawn to this movement — which only heightens culpability for people like RFK Jr. and Trump.

“These are families that are just trying to do right by their kids, and the concerns that folks are raising are valid,” said Minovi. “The behavior of the leaders in this movement is nothing short of predatory.”

ref 2 11 15 25

Kennedy Jr. made health policy the cornerstone of his failed presidential campaign, critiquing America’s health care and public health systems with bold, often controversial proposals.

From vaccine “safety” to food and environmental health, Kennedy’s platform challenged the status quo, calling for sweeping reforms to improve transparency, accountability, and personal freedom in medical decision-making.

He’s raised concerns about the chronic disease epidemic that many are fighting in silence and has been a vocal critic of the industrial food system, pointing to the objective dangers it poses to public health.

He’s coined the slogan #MAHA — Make America Healthy Again — a phrase that has gained more traction in the health-conscious corners of the country than the original MAGA. You can often find it boldly displayed in juice bars, wellness shops, and fitness centers, where it has become emblematic of a movement that purports to prioritize health over the politics of the moment.

And honestly, I get it.

I’m hyperfocused on health. After a grueling battle with long Covid following my infection in 2022 and the many, many years I’ve spent uncovering the grave realities of water contamination, air pollution, and disease outbreaks as a reporter and filmmaker, I’ve fully embraced the mantle of an overprotective, fiercely vigilant mom.

Kennedy aligned himself with an administration committed to weakening the protections that have the most direct impacts on our health.

For the most part, my kid eats whole, organic foods, his water filtered to pristine purity eight times over. His clothing is 100 percent organic cotton, and when there’s pollution or we enter crowded spaces indoors, he wears an N95 mask. By our society’s standards, I might seem extreme. But to me, it’s not madness — it’s what happens when you live in a country that’s dangerously out of step with reality.

So, to Kennedy’s supporters, I understand your fervor. But here’s where I’m lost.

Kennedy has aligned himself with an administration — and been announced as Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services as a reward — that is committed to weakening the very protections that have the most direct, proven impacts on our health, particularly the health of our children.

He has paradoxically placed his support behind a president committed to dismantling the regulatory frameworks that ensure clean air, safe water, toxic-free work environments, and uncontaminated food. These are not just abstract concepts — they are the very protections that shield us and our children from the invisible, insidious dangers that lurk in our environment everyday.

By aligning himself with leaders associated with Project 2025’s radical overhaul of environmental regulations, he is effectively endorsing a future in which corporate interests are prioritized over the health of all Americans, especially children.

Clean Air and Water

Project 2025, an ambitious policy agenda crafted by conservative think tanks for the next Republican president, aims to diminish the Environmental Protection Agency’s role in regulating the environment. At the core of this initiative is the plan to remove the EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act, the foundation of the nation’s air quality standards. If enacted, this would severely weaken federal oversight of pollution, undermining decades of progress in protecting public health and the environment.

Without the Clean Air Act’s regulatory framework, fossil fuel companies — along with other industrial sectors — would face far fewer restrictions on emissions, particularly those related to particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, and carbon emissions. They would operate with less oversight and fewer penalties for pollution, allowing them to prioritize cost-saving measures over environmental protection.

The consequences would be disastrous for everyone who breathes. Air pollution is linked directly to respiratory illnesses, cardiovascular disease, and cancer.

Their assault doesn’t end with our air.

Project 2025 also threatens the Clean Water Act, which regulates pollutants in our waterways and drinking water. The Clean Water Act has been instrumental in ensuring that public health is protected from harmful contaminants like lead, arsenic, bacteria, pesticides, industrial chemicals, and substances like PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) and dioxins, which are known carcinogens.

Without the law’s protections, municipalities and industries would be emboldened to delay or avoid the necessary actions to replace lead pipes, fix aging infrastructure, or prevent contamination of public water systems.

As a reporter who spent two years in Flint, Michigan, I witnessed firsthand the devastating impact water contamination has on a community. It’s an ongoing public health crisis of epic proportions. Even a decade later, the community grapples with new life-threatening health complications.

Weakening the Clean Water Act would not only exacerbate existing water crises, but also cripple our ability to address emerging and persistent threats like PFAS — chemicals that have already contaminated drinking water systems nationwide, exposing millions of Americans to serious health risks, including liver damage, thyroid issues, infertility, and cancer. Without federal oversight, PFAS and similar pollutants would spread unchecked.

The consequences would be severe for everyone who drinks water.

And without regulations, there’s no objective measure to define what levels of pollution or contamination are dangerous, leaving individuals to navigate complex and often conflicting information on their own.

This creates particular challenges for the 35 percent of Americans who rent, as they are at the mercy of landlords when it comes to addressing issues like lead in water or radon in the air. If a landlord dismisses these hazards as subjective opinions, tenants have little recourse without enforceable legal standards, leaving families vulnerable to significant health risks caused by negligence or greed.

The fight for health begins with the most fundamental right: clean air and water.

The fight for health begins with the most fundamental right: clean air and water. Without them, all else falls away.

Yet, in a striking irony, the very man championing the cause of public health, which inspired so many to support him and consequently Trump, seems poised to support policies that dismantle the protections vital to preserving that health. So I call on the latest Kennedy to gain power in Washington to address the stark contradictions between the values he claims to champion — our society’s health and well-being — and the policy framework laid out in Project 2025, which threatens to undermine those very ideals.

Kennedy speaks of prioritizing the health of the American people, but Project 2025’s proposals promote deregulation and weaken critical environmental protections, putting our air, water, food, and future at risk.

Now that his chosen candidate empowered him to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, it’s time for Kennedy to confront this glaring dissonance head-on and make clear where his true priorities lie.

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ref 1

trump-epa-monsanto-roundup-bayer-cancer-chemicals

Every spring, summer, and fall, Jimmy Draeger would walk the length of his 11-acre property with a hand sprayer and a tub of Roundup. He’d mist around the flower beds, the patio, the fence line, diluting the concentrated herbicide with water as the label directed.

Nestled deep in the woods of the Missouri Ozarks, Draeger was used to seeing an explosion of weeds and shrubs in the warm months at the home he’s shared with his wife, Brenda, for more than 30 years. He didn’t think much of using Roundup to keep them at bay.

Then he was diagnosed with stage four non-Hodgkin lymphoma. According to a lawsuit filed by the Draegers in 2022, Jimmy had a chemotherapy port installed in his chest, developed neuropathy in his hands and feet, and lost control of his bowels, coordination, and sexual function. He became clinically depressed, vision-impaired, and unable to bathe without Brenda’s help.

[

The Playbook for Poisoning the Earth

https://theintercept.com/2020/01/18/bees-insecticides-pesticides-neonicotinoids-bayer-monsanto-syngenta/)

Monsanto, the agrochemical company behind Roundup, was to blame for Jimmy’s lymphoma, the Draegers contended. In November 2023, a jury agreed. Bayer, which acquired Monsanto in 2018, was ordered to pay the Draegers and two other plaintiffs a combined $1.56 billion in damages. (A judge later cut the payout for punitive damages, reducing the total awards to $611 million.)

The Draegers’ case is one of more than 160,000 Roundup lawsuits filed against Monsanto or Bayer since 2015, when the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate, a key ingredient in Roundup, as “probably carcinogenic to humans.”

Most of the lawsuits hinged on failure-to-warn claims: the allegation that Monsanto, and later Bayer, failed to adequately notify customers of glyphosate’s potential cancer risk. Bayer has paid roughly $11 billion to settle these claims while denying any wrongdoing.

Now, the Environmental Protection Agency is considering a Bayer-backed rule that could significantly curtail the lawsuits.

Enter the EPA

Unlike the WHO, the EPA — which, headed by Trump appointee Lee Zeldin, has already announced massive regulatory rollbacks — does not consider glyphosate to be a likely human carcinogen.

“EPA’s cancer classification is consistent with most other international expert panels and regulatory authorities,” EPA Associate Administrator for Public Affairs Molly Vaseliou said in a statement to The Intercept. “EPA does not agree with IARC’s conclusion that glyphosate is ‘probably carcinogenic to humans.’”

Last August, 11 industry-friendly red states, led by Nebraska and Iowa, submitted a 436-page petition asking the agency to amend its labeling rules under the Federal Insecticide, Rodenticide, and Fungicide Act, or FIFRA. The proposed rule change would explicitly prohibit states from labeling pesticides and herbicides with warnings about cancer, birth defects, and reproductive harm if those notices contradict the EPA’s risk assessment.

The states made clear that their ultimate goal is to thwart future lawsuits against pesticide manufacturers. Their petition argued that recent court rulings have created a “gap in FIFRA’s regulatory framework” that the proposed rule change would plug.

“It’s telling of the lengths that pesticide manufacturers will go to make sure that nothing interferes with their profit margins.”

In January, in a move initiated by the Biden administration, the EPA took a first step of accepting public comment on the rule-making petition, with a deadline of March 24 — though this step is exploratory and does not mean a new rule will be issued. Still, the EPA’s decision could have disastrous consequences if Donald Trump’s second administration is as friendly to the chemical industryas it was in his first.

“It’s telling of the lengths that pesticide manufacturers will go to make sure that nothing interferes with their profit margins,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “There’s a reality that the industry itself generates much of the data, and they say it’s safe, and then EPA approves that determination.”

“If we’re not limited to the industry-created data set,” he said, “they see it as a larger threat to their ability to control the universe of science and data that go into the pesticide regulatory review process.”

Warning Labels

The EPA petition follows in the path of other efforts at both the state and federal level to shield Bayer from civil liability.

Last year, state legislatures in Florida, Idaho, Iowa, and Missouri introduced bills that would make pesticide manufacturers immune to failure-to-warn lawsuits if their product labels match EPA assessments. And House Republicans introduced similar language in the discussion draft of the 2024 Farm Bill.

Though all the bills failed, allies of the chemical industry are expected to redouble their efforts this year. Advocates expect at least 21 states to introduce pesticide immunity legislation in 2025. The Florida Senate already has.

Bayer itself bankrolled the push, spending nearly $8.5 million to lobby the federal government in 2024, including to advocate for the “uniformity of pesticide labeling” under FIFRA.

FIFRA already prohibits the sale of “misbranded” pesticides, which includes requiring state health warnings to conform with EPA-approved labels.

“We are very pleased to see the EPA and several state Attorneys General take this step to reinforce that any state labeling requirements inconsistent with EPA’s own findings and conclusions regarding human health, such as a pesticide’s likelihood to cause cancer, constitute misbranding,” Bayer said in a statement to The Intercept. “It reinforces the urgent need for a solution to this issue created by the litigation industry.”

The raft of litigation over Roundup, however, has not always ended badly for Bayer. Federal appeals courts disagree on whether the FIFRA misbranding statute trumps state laws that may require manufacturers to go farther in adequately warning consumers about their products.

The 9th and 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals have ruled in plaintiffs’ favor in recent years, finding that failure-to-warn claims against Bayer in state courts are consistent with FIFRA’s intent; the 3rd Circuit, meanwhile, found the opposite. The split could set the stage for a Supreme Court battle.

The EPA rule change proposed in the states’ petition aims to remedy the circuit split by explicitly classifying labels as “misbranded” if they include health warnings that exceed the EPA’s risk assessment.

The agency’s position on glyphosate has been mired in controversy for decades. In 1991, the EPA mysteriously changed its classification from “suggestive evidence” of glyphosate’s carcinogenic potential to “no evidence.”

Emails Show Monsanto Orchestrated GOP Effort to Intimidate Cancer Researchers

https://theintercept.com/2019/08/23/monsanto-republicans-cancer-research/)

Since then, documents released in Roundup litigation have shown Monsanto cozying up to EPA regulators, ghostwriting scientific papers on glyphosate’s safety, and actively working to discredit journalists and WHO.

In 2015 — the same year the international body’s cancer bureau classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen — The Intercept reported that the EPA had overwhelmingly used Monsanto’s own research to conclude that glyphosate was not an endocrine disruptor.

In 2016, an internal EPA analysis noted an association between glyphosate exposure and an increased risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in four epidemiological studies, The Intercept reported. The EPA analysis was never made public. Instead, the agency drew from industry-backed studies in 2016 to conclude that glyphosate was “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans.”

“The industry itself generates and pays for much of this data, so that is very different of course than peer-reviewed, hypothesis-based, independent science,” said Hartl, of the Center for Biological Diversity. “That creates an inherent tension and conflict of interest.”

“EPA’s long-standing practice is to seek input from a variety of stakeholders and use the best available science,” said Vaseliou, the EPA public affairs official. “EPA evaluates information from all kinds of sources — pesticide companies, other governments, academia, and the published scientific literature.”

[

How Pesticide Companies Corrupted the EPA and Poisoned America

https://theintercept.com/2021/06/30/epa-pesticides-exposure-opp/)

In 2020, during the periodic pesticide review process mandated by FIFRA, the EPA issued an interim decision to reregister glyphosate with a risk assessment that did not identify “any human health risks of concern.” But in June 2022, in a separate case from the FIFRA ruling, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the EPA’s assessment, noting the decision had been made without following the agency’s own cancer guidelines, and ordered the EPA to reevaluate its findings.

The new analysis is still forthcoming.

“In accordance with the court’s decision related to human health, EPA is currently updating its evaluation of the carcinogenic potential of glyphosate to better explain its findings and include the current relevant scientific information,” said Vaseliou. “EPA’s underlying scientific findings regarding glyphosate, including its finding that glyphosate is not likely to be carcinogenic to humans, remain the same.”

Trump’s MAHA Promise

How the EPA decides to proceed with the glyphosate petition will in many ways be a canary in the coal mine for this administration’s approach to chemical regulation.

While Trump’s first term was marked by severe deference to industry, his recent rhetoric has promoted Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again,” or MAHA, agenda.

In a February executive order, the president pledged to eliminate “undue industry influence” and “establish a framework for transparency and ethics review in industry-funded projects” — the same reforms that advocates have long said would strengthen the EPA’s glyphosate review.

Kennedy is a longtime critic of the pesticide industry; in an October, he railed against the country’s agriculture policy for “tilting the playing field in favor of more chemicals, more herbicides, more insecticides” and promised to “ban the worst agricultural chemicals that are already prohibited in other countries.” As a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, a leading nonprofit environmental law group, he took Monsanto to task, helping secure a multimillion-dollar settlement in a Roundup cancer lawsuit in 2018.

There are indications, of course, that the MAHA promise is a smokescreen.

In 2017, Trump’s EPA rejected a proposed ban on chlorpyrifos, a pesticide linked to increased cancer risk. He appointed former American Chemistry Council executive Nancy Beck to oversee toxic chemical regulation. Beck is once again slated to take a senior EPA position; Lynn Dekleva, another ACC lobbyist who fought the EPA’s efforts to regulate formaldehyde, will now run the agency’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention.

Vaseliou said, “Your questions regarding Dr. Beck and Dr. Dekleva are insulting and unfounded. This is yet another question based on false accusations that left propaganda also known as media take as gospel. President Trump made a fantastic choice in selecting Dr. Beck and Dr. Dekleva to work at EPA.”

On March 12, Zeldin, Trump’s EPA chief, announced the agency would begin rolling back 31 environmental regulations — “the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen,” he said — including rules aimed at preventing disasters at hazardous chemical facilities and restricting the industrial pollution of mercury.

“It strikes me that there’s a very significant tension between what the president has promised relating to the overuse of pesticides in this country versus the other elements of his own administration that reflexively do what industry wants no matter what,” said Hartl. “He’s going to have to decide who he’s going to let down: whether it’s his own supporters that believe in his MAHA agenda or his industry benefactors.”

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office of yes

lianne Sheppard was}_ sitting in her office on a Friday afternoon when a colleague approached her with an old study on the safety of chlorpyrifos. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the Environmental Protection Agency had used the study to set a safety level for the exposure to the pesticide, which is widely used on fruits and vegetables. But when Sheppard, a professor and biostatistician at the University of Washington, looked at the original research that was the basis for the paper and the safety thresholds that were calculated from it, she realized that the underlying data didn’t support its conclusion.

“I tried to reproduce their analysis, and I couldn’t,” Sheppard said of the study, which was commissioned by Dow Chemical, the maker of chlorpyrifos, in the late 1960s. The research was conducted by an Albany Medical College professor named Frederick Coulston, who exposed 16 incarcerated men to the pesticide, dividing them into four groups — a low-, medium-, and high-dose group as well as a control — and recording their nervous system responses. The resulting paper, which was written by Dow statisticians based on Coulston’s data, concluded that at the highest dose the pesticide depressed the activity of cholinesterase, an enzyme necessary for neuromuscular function. Sheppard was able to confirm that finding. But while Dow concluded that the middle- and low-range doses had no effect, Sheppard found effects in both groups. She also saw how Dow had used the paper to help the EPA set an incorrect “no-effects level,” or NOEL, which is critical for calculating a safety threshold.

“I realized that in the middle-dose group, which is the one that mattered for the no-effects level, they had conveniently left out one of the two baseline measurement days,” said Sheppard. “The outrageous thing was that the group they declared as NOEL was only that because they left out data from their analysis.” In a peer-reviewed paper published in October 2020, Sheppard and her colleagues concluded that “the omission of valid data without justification was a form of data falsification.”

But by the time Sheppard had discovered the falsification, it was too late; the injustice of Dow’s experiment had already extended far beyond violating the human rights of incarcerated people. Coulston’s study was used for decades to set safety levels for chlorpyrifos that were higher than they otherwise would have been. Asked about the study, EPA spokesperson Kenneth Labbe responded in an email that the Coulston paper was not used in the most recent human health assessment of chlorpyrifos. But Sheppard pointed out that the research has been influential even after the EPA officially withdrew the study from consideration for ethical reasons in 2009 and noted that it continues to underly certain assumptions in chlorpyrifos regulation to this day.

Why didn’t the agency catch Dow’s falsification? “EPA didn’t scrutinize it at the level I did,” Sheppard said. “The science is hard. And once a study has been around, who goes back and looks after it’s been accepted for 10, 15, or 20 years?”

In an email, Kacey Birchmier, media relations manager for Corteva Agroscience, which now owns Dow, wrote that the company disagrees with the analysis and conclusions of Sheppard’s paper. “When used according to the label, chlorpyrifos is safe for all approved uses, as demonstrated by the more than 4,000 studies and reports examining the product in terms of health, safety and the environment,” Birchmier wrote.

:{On one level, the story of the Coultson paper is simple: Decades ago, a seemingly small omission happened to slip past regulators. And yet the consequences of that one statistical sleight of hand, and the government’s failure to notice it, are immense. Between 1992 and 2017, chlorpyrifos was one of the most heavily used pesticides in the U.S., with some 450 million pounds of it sprayed on crops. Countless children and pregnant people were exposed to what we now know were unsafe levels. And those exposures have since been found to increase the risk of a wide range of neurodevelopmental problems in children:{, including ADHD and other attention disorders, autism,}: tremors, and intelligence deficits, as well as memory and motor problems.

Although the true toll of that brain damage is incalculable, pediatrician and environmental health researcher Leonardo Trasande estimates that exposure to organophosphate pesticides, the class to which chlorpyrifos belongs, caused children born in the U.S. in a single year — 2010 — to collectively lose 1.8 million IQ points, costing the country $44.7 billion in productivity, education, and health costs.}:

The Coulston study is just one of many instances in which an industry that is far more powerful and better resourced than the federal agency responsible for regulating it has hoodwinked, bullied, and persuaded the EPA into using inaccurate science at the expense of public health. And that influence over the research used to set the safe levels of pesticide exposure is just one of many tools that agrochemical companies like Dow have successfully wielded to increase and maintain the use of products even when they damage health and the environment.

Interviews with more than two dozen experts on pesticide regulation — including 14 who worked at the EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs, or OPP — described a federal environmental agency that is often unable to stand up to the intense pressures from powerful agrochemical companies, which spend tens of millions of dollars on lobbying each year and employ many former EPA scientists once they leave the agency. The enormous corporate influence has weakened and, in some cases, shut down the meaningful regulation of pesticides in the U.S. and left the country’s residents exposed to levels of dangerous chemicals not tolerated in many other nations.

While it’s impossible to catalog all the ways in which the EPA has failed to protect the public from the harms of pesticides, this reporting has brought to light several instances in which the overlooking, burying, or scuttling of science has had direct consequences for human health. The alarming discoveries include an EPA report warning about the link between the pesticide glyphosate and cancer that never saw the light of day; the failure to consider evidence that a neonicotinoid pesticide causes brain damage; the refusal to investigate evidence that another pesticide that is an ingredient in Roundup may cause cancer; the dismissal of science showing that the widely used pesticide malathion causes cancer; and the agency’s waiving of the vast majority of toxicity tests at the request of industry.

“Yes Packages”

The scientists who have identified these hazards described immense pressure from within the agency to overlook the risks they found. And several said they faced retribution for calling attention to the dangers of pesticides. “If you bring something up that’s an inconvenient truth, you get circumvented for any kind of committee work that you would need to have to get a promotion,” one toxicologist who used to work for the agency’s pesticide office told The Intercept. “It is the unwritten rule that to get promotions, all pesticides need to pass.”

Sometimes the urgency to approve pesticides comes from members of Congress, according to one EPA scientist. Within the pesticide office, staff refer to such cases as “yes packages,” said the scientist, who encountered the term on several occasions in which elected officials reached out to the EPA on behalf of companies whose pesticides were under review. “The companies will contact their local congressman or senator, and then we get what we call a congressional inquiry where they’ll contact our office directly and say, ‘Why is this taking so long?'”

“If you bring something up that’s an inconvenient truth, you get circumvented for any kind of committee work that you would need to have to get a promotion.”

In these cases, the scientist said, managers in the office sometimes urge assessors to approve the pesticide quickly even if they don’t have enough information to ensure their safety. “The science isn’t there, they’re missing some studies that we’re requiring, but management will kind of like throw their hands and say, ‘No, it’s fine. Just make it fit in the guidelines,’” the scientist said, going on to describe the first time they encountered the term. “I said, ‘What do you mean?’ And then we had an internal meeting in which they explained, ‘Oh, it’s a yes package.’”

The scientist described one particular internal meeting in 2015 over a “yes package” — the approval of a pesticide to treat the papaya ringspot virus, which was decimating the papaya crop in Hawaii. Even though the company hadn’t conducted any studies of its safety, managers insisted that the scientists sign off on a decision to approve it. “The rest of us are sitting around thinking, ‘OK, you hire the scientists to do the work, and now you’re telling us as regulatory people to make it fit?’” the scientist recalled. “‘We’re flat out telling you that’s not OK.’” Although the company never submitted data, the pesticide was approved.

Presented with some of the reporting in this article, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., expressed dismay. “These findings are profoundly alarming and point to a troubling pattern of disregard at the EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs,” Blumenthal wrote in an email to The Intercept. “It is utterly unacceptable that scientists’ concerns about potentially dangerous pesticides would be dismissed, and that scientists and whistleblowers would face retaliation. The pesticide industry has brazenly exploited loopholes in federal law for years and strong safeguards are needed to protect the public and our environment from harmful and sometimes lethal pesticide exposure. I will be pushing for these safeguards, continuing my call to ban toxic pesticides like chlorpyrifos, and working to ensure that the EPA’s mission to protect the public from the risks of pesticides is fulfilled.”

In response to questions about this article, EPA spokesperson Kenneth Labbe wrote in an email, “The agency is committed to ensuring our pesticide registration decisions are free from interference and that the agency’s scientific integrity policy, which is a bedrock principle for the Biden-Harris Administration, is upheld. EPA is home to world-class scientists. As it has in the past, the agency will continue to ensure their voices and the role of science will guide its decisions going forward. EPA relies on the best science available and evaluates information from multiple sources — pesticide companies, other governments, academia, and the published scientific literature — in its science evaluation process. Under Administrator Regan’s leadership, EPA has a renewed commitment to protecting human health and the environment by making evidence-based decisions that rely on the input of career scientists.”

Labbe also offered reassurance about the agency’s actions on chlorpyrifos. “Should robust scientific data demonstrate that EPA-registered uses of chlorpyrifos are posing risks of concern to the environment or human health, the agency will take appropriate action,” he wrote. “EPA’s decisions for chlorpyrifos will be a transparent process driven by science and the rule of law, ensuring concerns raised regarding farmworker and children’s safety will be fully addressed.”

A truck sprays DDT at Jones Beach, in New York, to eliminate mosquitoes in 1945.

The Right to Decide

The EPA was established in 1970 in large part because of concerns about pesticides and in small part because of a retired banker and bird enthusiast named Charles Broley. Broley tracked hundreds of bald eagles in Florida in the 1940s, banding the young birds in their nests before they flew northward. In 1947, he began to notice a steep decline in bald eagle numbers, as Rachel Carson recounted in her classic book “Silent Spring.” Between 1952 and 1957, when the pesticide DDT was sprayed to kill mosquitos in the waterways where the eagles fed, about 80 percent of their nests failed to produce any young, according to his tally.

Broley died two years after that count — too soon to see the role his careful study would play in the future of environmental protection. But there’s little question that his observation and Carson’s artful description of the toll of DDT and other pesticides on the eagles, finches, hedge sparrows, linnets, red-winged blackbirds, and “the fulvous tree duck, a tawny-colored, gooselike duck of the Gulf Coast” forever changed the public’s view of pesticides. She made it irrefutably clear that chemicals that had been sold as a solution to insects and other “pests” were also killing many other species, including the bird that served as the national symbol of the United States.

As a freelance writer and employee of the Bureau of Fisheries, Carson had previously focused on the wonders of the sea. But “Silent Spring,” published in 1962, was shot through with outrage at the pesticide companies that were blithely devastating the natural world. She noted a grim pattern: After one toxic pesticide was targeted because of health concerns, it was often replaced by another pesticide that caused similar problems. DDT itself was introduced as a replacement for the pesticide lead arsenate, which was abandoned because it left lead residue on fruit. Carson clearly recognized the folly of presenting organic phosphorus compounds — the class that contains chlorpyrifos, which we now recognize as organophosphates — as a safe solution to DDT, since these replacements harmed the nervous systems of all creatures, including birds.

“Who has decided — who has the right to decide — for the countless legions of people who were not consulted that the supreme value is a world without insects, even though it be also a sterile world ungraced by the curving wing of a bird in flight?” she asked. Two years later, Carson herself died of cancer — too soon for her to know how much her book helped bring about a bipartisan consensus that the public, through government, has the right to protect nature and restrict the use of dangerous pesticides that were harming it.

Pesticide companies attacked Carson and her work. Monsanto magazine published a nasty takedown of “Silent Spring” that both parodied the book and painted a future without pesticides, in which insects take over the Earth. Others questioned her sanity. But Carson’s warnings won the day: Eight years after the publication of “Silent Spring,” President Richard Nixon launched the EPA, using military language to describe its mission — to fight a “war on pollution.” William Ruckelshaus, the lawyer he appointed as the EPA’s first administrator, seemed similarly resolved, vowing that the new agency would have “no obligation to promote commerce or agriculture.” That pointed remark was no doubt a reference to the agricultural lobby that had been intimately involved in the handling of pesticides up to that point, which had been overseen by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In 1972, that responsibility was officially transferred to the EPA in the hopes of lessening the influence of farmers and pesticide makers over the regulatory process.

Starting Out Strong

The young agency got off to a promising start in standing up to corporate influence. In its first decade, the EPA canceled the registration of 12 pesticides, including DDT, aldrin, and dieldrin, which Carson had written about at length. In those early years, the regulatory agency had the power to inspire fear in chemical companies, as was clear from internal documents about the pesticide paraquat. News that the EPA was considering banning the pesticide because there was no known antidote to paraquat poisoning sent executives at Imperial Chemical Industries, which made it, scurrying in search of some evidence of its safety.

The Playbook for Poisoning the Earth

https://theintercept.com/2020/01/18/bees-insecticides-pesticides-neonicotinoids-bayer-monsanto-syngenta/)

But the pace at which the EPA removed pesticides from the market soon slowed. In the 1980s, the EPA canceled the registrations of eight pesticides. In the more than five decades since its founding, the agency has canceled only 37 pesticides. (The EPA said that it has canceled 40 “pesticide products.”) Between 2000 and 2010, the EPA forced a mere four pesticides off the market, and in the past decade, only one. Meanwhile, agrochemical companies have introduced thousands of pesticides. The EPA now managesmore than 16,800 pesticide products and 1,200 active ingredients.

As the number of pesticides in use was exploding, knowledge of their harms was also increasing, with pesticides being linked to a wide range of human health harms. Beyond the brain damage in children wrought by chlorpyrifos, the chemicals have been linked to various cancers, such as leukemia, brain cancer, breast cancer, and testicular cancer; liver, kidney, and lung damage; reproductive harms, including decreased fertility, spontaneous abortions, stillbirth, birth defects, premature birth, and low birth weight; deaths by poisoning; Parkinson’s disease; Alzheimer’s disease; kidney disease; heart disease; autoimmune conditions; and respiratory problems.

We understand more, too, about how the chemicals are leading to the declines of species they’re not supposed to affect. Pesticides are listed as an issue to be addressed in the recovery plan of 186 endangered species, including the trispot darter, the black warrior waterdog, the Texas hornshell, and the rusty patched bumble bee, whose drastic population decline has been tied partially to the use of neonicotinoid pesticides. The “neonics,” a class chemically related to nicotine, slow the learning process in bees and impact their ability to forage and fly long distances. Exposed to the same pesticides, songbirds lose weight and migrate later, which lessens their chances of reproducing, and deer have malformed jaws and reduced lifespans.

For those bald eagles that Broley was tracking in Florida, and for other bird species, too, we now know that DDT was weakening their eggshells, which meant that some birds that were sitting on the eggs to warm them wound up crushing their young instead. Some pesticides cause fish to abandon their nests and broods; others lower resistance to disease and reduce avoidance of predators. And, not surprisingly, many of the chemicals designed to kill bugs, weeds, fungi, and other “pests” harm both humans and other animal species.

The growing evidence of the dangers of these compounds has led the governments of other major agricultural economies to remove some of the chemicals from use. The U.S., once the beacon of hope for pesticide regulation, now lags behind. In 2016, the U.S. used 322 million pounds of pesticides that were banned elsewhere, according to a 2019 study by Nathan Donley, a biologist at the Center for Biological Diversity. Donley said that most of these chemicals had been banned for health and environmental reasons. At least 85 pesticides banned in China, Brazil, or the European Union were still used in the U.S. in 2016, he said, a number that has almost certainly increased since then.

Get Up and Shout

Some of pesticide companies’ success in the U.S. can be attributed to their extraordinarily aggressive approach to dealing with regulators. Monsanto, maker of Roundup and other products that contain the weed killer glyphosate, summed up the company’s commitment to pushing past regulatory limits with the phrase “freedom to operate.” As internal documents released through litigation made clear, Monsanto, which was bought by Bayer in 2018, saw its “freedom to operate” as encompassing ghostwriting purportedly independent scientific papers, cozying up to regulators, and attempting to discredit journalists who exposed the dangers of Monsanto’s products.

Asked about the “freedom to operate,” Kyel Richard, a senior external communications manager for Bayer U.S. Crop Science, responded in an email, “Like many companies and organizations operating in highly regulated industries, we provide information and contribute to science-based policymaking and regulatory processes. Our engagements with all those in the public sector are routine, professional, and consistent with all laws and regulations.”

But Monsanto wasn’t alone in encouraging employees to aggressively push against regulatory barriers, according to Charles Benbrook, a veteran agricultural economist who has spent years poring over internal documents on pesticides as an expert witness in the litigation with Monsanto and Bayer over Roundup, as well as in two cases against Dow and Corteva over chlorpyrifos. Benbrook is also scheduled to be an expert witness in litigation over the herbicide paraquat, made by Syngenta.

“The regulatory affairs staff of all of these major chemical companies have a very clear job: to propose and gain approval of registrations that expand the ways and places and times that the company’s products can be used and to keep all existing registrations fully in place and resist any changes in labels — whether it be application rate, or a limit on timing, or a warning on the label about some health hazard — that might cost them a percent or two in market share,” said Benbrook. “The regulatory affairs departments of these companies actually compete against each other and sometimes brag that they were able to keep one of their high-risk pesticides on the market longer than some other company that threw in the towel prematurely.”

Benbrook described tireless corporate campaigns to portray pesticides as harmless even as independent research showed otherwise. “The companies constantly regurgitate their own spin on the science. And they refer to papers that they get into the journals that have been either commissioned or partially or wholly ghostwritten,” said Benbrook. For glyphosate, which has been under scrutiny for its cancer-causing potential at the EPA since at least 1983, the goal wasn’t just to discredit any scientific evidence that the chemical posed harm, but also to get “people to get up and shout Glyphosate is Non-toxic,” as one 1999 email made clear.

Crop Tours and Barbecue

One of the ways that agrochemical companies convince EPA scientists to get up and shout about their products — or more subtly gain their sympathies — is by inviting them to visit farms. EPA scientists traveled to a tour of a New Jersey farm by bus, and once there, they were served a simple supper of barbecue and corn on paper plates. “It felt fancy in comparison to what we’re accustomed to in government,” said one former staff scientist in the pesticide office, who attended the junket and found it surprisingly affecting.

“It was subtle, but it did change the way I think,” said the scientist, who asked not to be named to avoid professional reprisals. It wasn’t just chatting with a corporate scientist who was seeking approval of the very pesticide the EPA staffer was then reviewing while the two waited in the buffet line or hearing farmers talk about the economic threats posed by weeds. It was the cumulative effect of spending time with these people outside the office.

“It felt kind of brain-washy,” they said. “By the end, I thought, ‘You really do need these chemicals, otherwise you’ll have crop failure.’”

While costing the companies and trade groups just a few hundred dollars per participant, such tours, which OPP staff can attend on work time, are clearly valuable to the agrochemical industry. Among the organizations that hosted recent junkets are the Weed Science Society of America, which sponsors a crop tour in Kansas featuring a session on 2,4-D and dicamba tolerant crop technologies, and the National Potato Council, which advocates for the use of various pesticides, including chlorpyrifos, and holds a summer tour in Idaho that features a side trip to Yellowstone Bear World. The Fertilizer Institute, the National Agricultural Aviation Association, and the Association of Equipment Manufacturers also sponsor events and trips for EPA scientists. And agency staff attended an event at Chesapeake Farms in Maryland; two of the farmers on the “Ask a Farmer” panel at that event also work for Pioneer, a seed company, which makes pesticides that are registered by the agency.

“When you come into the lobby, many times there’s a chemical or ag lobbyist there. They just bop in.”

When asked if there is a limit to the amount that sponsoring companies can spend on farm tours or on how much work time EPA staff can spend on them, Labbe wrote that “EPA abides by all ethics statutes and maintains a culture of the highest ethical conduct with the amount of money sponsoring groups can spend on activities that EPA staff attend. Staff participation in crop tours have provided an increase in awareness and more educated discussions on the subject at hand such as farmworker issues.”

The pesticide industry also has an outsize presence within the agency. The representatives of the companies are usually, though not always, friendly and eager to help, according to several scientists who have worked at the agency’s pesticide office.

“When you come into the lobby, many times there’s a chemical or ag lobbyist there. They just bop in,” said Karen McCormack, a scientist who retired from the EPA in 2017 after working on pesticides for 40 years. “They want to be your friend. They always compliment you. But if you don’t do what they want, they’ll go to your boss or above your boss and say, ‘We can’t work with you anymore.’ And you’ll be taken off the project and put on something that’s meaningless. I’ve seen it happen a number of times.”

There Will Be Cake

That was the experience of one former pesticide assessor who expressed concern about the dangers presented by a pesticide product that contained the chemical bifenthrin, which was submitted to the agency for approval by Vive Crop Protection. An insecticide used to kill ants and mosquitoes in more than 600 products in the U.S., bifenthrin caused “a significantly higher incidence” of lung cancers, as well as liver and bladder tumors, when it was given to lab animals orally, according to the assessor. This finding, along with the fact that it is a pyrethroid, a class of pesticides that are more toxic when inhaled as opposed to ingested — some as much as 100 times more so — should have led to extensive inhalation toxicity testing when it came before the pesticide program’s Hazard and Science Policy Committee in 2012, the scientist said.

But the EPA waived the requirement for extensive inhalation toxicity testing of bifenthrin. The EPA’s Labbe acknowledged that staffers waived the requirement for a longer study but said that the agency reviewed and incorporated a 28-day study supplied by the chemical’s manufacturer into the human health risk assessment for bifenthrin. According to the assessor, the industry study was not nearly long enough to assess lung cancer formation. “You need a study of at least a year and a half,” they said. “Often, in cancer studies, the first tumors show up after 12 months.” Labbe also said that evidence that bifenthrin causes cancer was reviewed — and dismissed. “The Cancer Peer Review Committee (CPRC) did note a higher incidence of lung tumors in female mice in some dose groups in the oral carcinogenicity study; however, there was no significant dose-related trend for these tumors,” Labbe wrote.

An invitation to a party at the Office of Pesticide Programs celebrating the waiving of 1,000 toxicity tests.

Screenshot: The Intercept

In any case, bifenthrin was not the only pesticide that dodged testing to see if it presented dangers. The EPA’s pesticide office granted 972 industry requests to waive toxicity tests between December 2011 and May 2018, 89 percent of all requests made. Among the tests on pesticides that were never performed were 90 percent of tests looking for developmental neurotoxicity, 92 percent of chronic cancer studies, and 97 percent of studies looking at how pesticides harm the immune system.

By law, the companies that submit their products for review pay for these tests, and in a presentation about the waivers last year, Anna Lowit, a senior science adviser in the office, emphasized the savings to these companies: more than $300 million. Lowit also noted that animal lives were saved — a goal that the Trump administration and the chemical industry prioritized within the agency. The EPA developed the guidelines for waiving the tests along with BASF, Corteva, and Syngenta, pesticide manufacturers that all stand to benefit significantly from having their products bypass toxicity testing.

There is no replacement for these waived experiments, according to pediatrician and epidemiologist Philip Landrigan. “There is no other way to know if a chemical is toxic but to test it,” said Landrigan, who co-authored a landmark report on children’s particular vulnerability to pesticides. “If they allow chemicals to come onto the market and to be used widely in the environment and put on food crops without testing them for toxicity, then EPA is clearly not fulfilling its mandate to protect human health.”

Although the toxicity studies were designed to protect health, a core part of the agency’s mission, the leadership of the office of pesticides appeared pleased to have waived them. On September 20, 2018, managers in the office gathered in one of the agency’s conference rooms to celebrate what many people concerned about exposure to pesticides would consider a grim landmark: having waived 1,000 toxicity tests. “There will be cake,” an emailed invitation promised.

“Morale has been bad, and it’s getting steadily worse over the years.”

After trying, and failing, to protect human health by calling attention to the tumors caused by bifenthrin, the EPA pesticide assessor had several requests to be appointed to relevant committees denied, a development they felt was retaliation for raising concerns about the pesticide. Several other EPA scientists who worked on pesticides spoke of being passed over for positions on committees, which are necessary for professional advancement, after they attempted to call attention to evidence of hazards presented by the chemicals.

Tim Whitehouse, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, an organization that represents whistleblowers at public agencies on issues of environmental ethics and scientific integrity, said that the group has recently received several similar reports from people working within the EPA’s pesticide division. “Current and former employees have been reaching out to us in increasing numbers and expressing concerns about the office culture at OPP and the fact that if scientists speak out about their concerns, they will not last long in that division,” said Whitehouse, who described the working conditions in the division of the EPA as very difficult. “Morale has been bad, and it’s getting steadily worse over the years.”

While the agency scientist felt that their career suffered, others saw theirs advance. Jim Jones was head of the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, which includes the pesticide office, when concerns about the pyrethroids were raised — and their toxicity tests waived. He went on to join the board of directors of Vive Crop Protection, the company that made the bifenthrin-containing product, after leaving the agency in 2017.

Jones also became an executive vice president at the Household and Commercial Products Association in 2017. In the organization’s annual report, Jones is quoted as saying that “one of the strengths of HCPA is its strong and mutually respectful relationship with the EPA that continues to give members direct access to officials at every pertinent level of the agency.”

Jones, who is no longer affiliated with either company, said he never spoke with anyone at the EPA about bifenthrin after leaving the agency. In 2020, he started his own consulting company, which represents a range of clients, including private companies, environmental groups, and trade associations.

The Revolving Door

Jones is far from the only high-ranking EPA official who went from regulating pesticides to doing work for the companies that make them. The tradition of leaving the agency for a lucrative job in the industry overseen by it began with Ruckelshaus, the EPA’s very first administrator. Widely admired and hailed for his commitment to the environment, Ruckelshaus left the EPA in 1973 (in Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre”) to work for the timber and paper company Weyerhauser and was later hired by the American Paper Institute, Monsanto, and the waste management company Browning-Ferris Industries.

The path from the EPA’s pesticide office to working in the pesticide industry is particularly well trodden. Since 1974, all seven of the office’s directors who continued to work after leaving the agency went on to make money from the pesticide companies they used to regulate, according to an analysis by The Intercept. (The two other former directors who left the agency went directly into retirement.) Most, like Jones, used their intimate knowledge of the regulatory process to help companies navigate it. Former Directors Marcia Mulkey, Dan Barolo, and Steve Schatzow went on to work as attorneys for the industry. In addition to consulting for industry, former Director Steve Bradbury is now a professor at Iowa State University, where his work is funded by Monsanto, Bayer, Syngenta, and the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation, among others. And Debra Edwards, who served as director of pesticide programs from 2007 to 2010, later joined the board of the agrochemical company American Vanguard.

Many other EPA officials have left the agency to work for the agrochemical industry. Stephen Johnson, who served as assistant administrator for the Office of Prevention, Pesticides and Toxic Substances, as well as EPA administrator, later joined the board of Scotts Miracle-Gro, which markets the pesticide glyphosate in the U.S. Linda Fisher served as assistant EPA administrator before going on to work for Monsanto and DuPont. John Todhunter, an assistant EPA administrator in charge of pesticides, went on to become a pesticide consultant. Bill Jordan served as deputy director of the pesticide office until 2015 and is now a consultant to pesticide companies. Steven Jellineck, a former assistant administrator for toxic substances, founded a consulting firm that would eventually employ many other former employees of the pesticide office and represented Monsanto, Dow, FMC, and the Chemical Manufacturers Association, among other agrochemical companies.

The problem with this continuous flow of experts from the government to pesticide companies — and sometimes back again — isn’t just that it can enable dangerous chemicals to evade regulatory scrutiny but that it also shapes the culture within the agency. “Management officials graduate and move to direct hires with the registrants,” said Bill Hirzy, a 27-year veteran of EPA. “So these management officials are loathe to take any action that is likely to limit their post-EPA employment opportunities.”

The long, intertwined histories of chemical companies and the EPA’s pesticide office help explain why the problems of regulation have persisted through the changes in presidential administrations — and continue even as the Biden administration vows to address the EPA’s scientific integrity problems.

“The Office of Pesticide Programs was about 20 percent worse under Trump, maybe 25,” said Lori Ann Burd, who directs the environmental health program at the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s not like the 360 they did on climate change. They didn’t need to change that much to meet the Trump administration’s agenda.” Burd said that she has noticed only minor changes in the agency’s approach to pesticides under President Joe Biden. “They’re taking a slightly different tone. But in our litigation, it’s the same brass knuckles, fight to the death over everything.”

“FIFRA is encoded to approve pesticides.”

Part of the problem is that the main law that applies to pesticide oversight, the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, which originally passed in 1947, wasn’t designed to protect health or the environment. “FIFRA is encoded to approve pesticides,” said Scott Faber, who leads the Environmental Working Group’s government affairs efforts. “There have been many changes to try to bolt on provisions that ensure that pesticides don’t pose an unreasonable risk to the environment. But the law is ultimately still designed to protect farmers and encourage pesticide companies to bring new products to the market.”

According to the federal statute, the EPA can only refuse to reregister a pesticide if the risks it poses to human health, wildlife, and the environment are greater than the benefits it provides, which are measured in terms of crop yield and quality. So even if a pesticide presents a clear danger, the agency often finds that the danger is outweighed by whatever economic advantages it offers.

“If EPA finds risk, it will look at benefits to growers,” said Patti Goldman, an attorney with Earthjustice. Goldman also said that the EPA finds ways to balance out almost any risk it identifies in an effort to avoid pulling pesticides from the market. “You get to the end, and EPA says the company is willing to use a little less, or use it a little less often, or they’ll put a little bit of a buffer around schools, or require some protective clothing, and then they’ll just say we find the risk is less than the benefits,” said Goldman. “It’s unprincipled.”

The law does require that pesticides not cause “unreasonable adverse effects” to the environment, but that vague endpoint is left to the interpretation of EPA officials, who are in frequent contact with representatives of the companies that make pesticides, who supply them with data and income in the form of registration fees.

This heavy reliance on the powerful industry it regulates leaves the EPA unable to objectively judge the chemicals’ effects, according to Burd. “The bottom-line standard in FIFRA — having an unreasonable adverse effect — that’s a judgment call. And who makes that judgment call? People who call the pesticide industry their ‘client,’” said Burd. As a lawyer whose job involves surveying the impact of pesticides on both wildlife and humans, she feels that the EPA’s pesticide office has consistently abused its legal leeway to weigh in on the side of the chemicals. “As far as this office goes, extinction is not unreasonable, mass poisonings are not unreasonable, and pollinator population collapses are not unreasonable.”

A Huge Mess

Although the law does require data as part of applications to register or reregister pesticides, companies are allowed to supply their own data, and the government often does not have the resources to verify the submissions. The EPA is supposed to review the studies pesticide manufacturers supply, but from the beginning it has struggled to keep up with the volume of the corporate science. When the EPA took over the regulation of pesticides, the U.S. Department of Agriculture sent tens of thousands of studies over in boxes.

“There were piles and piles of them,” said McCormack, who joined an overwhelmed staff when she arrived to work in the pesticide office in 1976. The EPA had recently received the safety data for more than 30,000 pesticide products. “Boxes were everywhere. Some of the studies were missing, some were illegible,” she said. “It was a huge mess.”

In part because of the data overload, Congress decided in 1978 to change the requirements so that companies would only have to test “active ingredients” in pesticide products. All others would be considered “inert” and exempt from testing. From that point on, pesticide makers would also have the option of registering their products “conditionally,” which allows them to sell the chemicals without providing complete safety data to regulators. Since then, thousands of pesticides have entered the market through this loophole. According to the EPA’s Labbe, the agency has taken steps to improve the accuracy of information and internal tracking of conditional registration decisions, as well as to promote consistency, enhance transparency, and improve understanding of decision-making under FIFRA.

But as new pesticides continued to enter the market, the EPA never caught up with industry. “The agency didn’t have the capability with the resources and staffing that Congress gave them,” said Colleen Lanier-Christensen, a doctoral candidate at Harvard University who is studying the EPA. “The expectations were unrealistic. They didn’t have sufficient expertise. There were technical problems.”

In the early 1980s, Congress held hearings on the difficulties of regulating pesticides. One of the upshots was that the EPA was made to go through the registrations of every pesticide that had been approved before 1984. But the mandate didn’t come with additional resources. In fact, the agency’s budget shrank dramatically during that time. So while the pesticide office did eventually review the data and previous risk assessments for the pesticides that had been approved before 1984, it took more than 30 years, and since then, thousands more pesticides have been approved.

“There aren’t enough resources to go through all the studies. And there isn’t enough time,” said McCormack. Because it doesn’t have adequate staff to do the work itself, the pesticide office uses contractors to do an initial review of the science. “What happens then is that people at EPA look at what the contractors said and decide whether to accept it or not,” said McCormack. “For the most part, they just accept it.”

A “danger pesticides” sign is seen next to rows of tomato plants on Oct. 22, 2015.

Photo: Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

The Long Life of Bad Science

Even when an agency scientist does catch a problem with the industry studies, it is sometimes impossible to correct it. That was the case for an EPA toxicologist who was asked in the summer of 2018 to review the toxicity of a pesticide called pelargonic acid. The toxicologist looked at the previous reviews of the chemical going back to 1997, which had found that it posed no health threat. In an effort to be thorough, the scientist decided to look up the archived raw data on which those reports were based and found that several mice had developed leukemia and lymphoma after the chemical was applied to their skin.

“The reviews said there was no chronic toxicity, but when I looked at the actual study, it was clearly the opposite,” the toxicologist told The Intercept. The next logical step, the federal scientist assumed, was to ask the Cancer Assessment Review Committee to reassess the chemical. And when the EPA staffer spoke to several colleagues and managers individually about the situation and showed them the study, each agreed without hesitation that there was cause for concern and that it should be reassessed by the cancer committee.

But a group of managers in the pesticide office did not agree and were especially resistant, the scientist believes, because of the role of pelargonic acid, which, in addition to being used as a weed killer on its own, is one of the “co-formulants” in Roundup.

“When I finally mentioned the connection with glyphosate, all of a sudden everyone pulled back,” the toxicologist said.

The toxicologist feared that because there was data showing that both pelargonic acid and glyphosate could independently cause leukemias and lymphomas, together the compound could be particularly dangerous. They also feared that pelargonic acid might act as a “co-carcinogen” by facilitating the absorption of glyphosate into the skin of people who were exposed to it. A review by the cancer committee could help explain the years of research showing that weed killers that contain glyphosate are more likely to cause cell-cycle dysregulation, a hallmark of cancer, than glyphosate alone.

Pelargonic acid has still not been presented to the cancer review committee and remains in use both as a stand-alone pesticide and an ingredient in Roundup.

But the scientist said that managers in the pesticide office discouraged a reassessment of pelargonic acid from the cancer committee and made the process of requesting it difficult. After raising the concerns, the scientist reported facing increased scrutiny from their supervisor, being repeatedly threatened with disciplinary action, and being written up for failing to meet a deadline that was moved without their knowledge. The scientist subsequently left the division. Meanwhile, pelargonic acid has still not been presented to the cancer review committee and remains in use both as a stand-alone pesticide and an ingredient in Roundup.

Asked about pelargonic acid, the EPA’s Labbe responded that “EPA has concluded that there is no new information that would require pelargonic acid to be reassessed by the Cancer Assessment Review Committee.”

Presented with the account of the EPA toxicologist’s account of pelargonic acid, Bayer spokesperson Kyel Richard wrote, “All formulations of our Roundup brand herbicides have been comprehensively evaluated and approved by experts at regulatory authorities to ensure the products can be used safely according to the label instructions. As consumers ourselves, we welcome the independent and science-based regulatory processes in place that ensure the safe and effective use of our products.”

The glyphosate connection put the chemical, and the toxicologist, near the center of a controversy that has already brought unwelcome attention to the agency’s handling of pesticides. Due to documents released in litigation over whether Roundup and other glyphosate-containing weed killers cause cancer, the public has learned the role that EPA staff played in slowing an Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry study of the compound; that the agency had based its regulatory decisions about the herbicide almost exclusively on the manufacturer’s own science; and that the office had mysteriously switched glyphosate’s cancer classification in 1991 from having “suggestive evidence” of carcinogenic potential to its current status of having “no evidence” of carcinogenic potential.

Yet there is even more evidence that has not previously come to light that some at the EPA have been covering up science showing the cancer-causing potential of glyphosate. In the summer of 2016, the EPA’s Office of Research and Development produced an analysis of seven epidemiological studies that looked at the association between non-Hodgkin lymphoma and glyphosate, which was then the most widely used pesticide in the U.S. The internal report, which was marked “confidential,” found that the four highest-quality studies “all reported elevated risks of NHL associated with exposure to glyphosate even after controlling for other pesticide exposures” and concluded that the studies “provide suggestive evidence of carcinogenic potential between glyphosate exposure and increased risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.”

“They only used the pieces of the meta-analysis that fit the conclusion they wanted to support.”

But the EPA never published this clear expression of concern. Instead, it subsequently released reports in 2016 and 2017 that clearly drew on the earlier document — several sections have identical wording — but reached the opposite conclusion: that glyphosate is “not a probable carcinogen.” The agency also declared that glyphosate is not a probable carcinogen in 2019 and again in 2020, when it reregistered the pesticide for another 15 years. Although its own scientists had found a link between glyphosate and cancer in studies of human populations in 2016 (and the World Health Organization had acknowledged the cancer link a year earlier), the EPA continues to allow the use of the pesticide with the assurance that there is “insufficient evidence to conclude that glyphosate plays a role in any human diseases” and that “there are no risks of concern to human health when glyphosate is used in accordance with its current label.”

According to the EPA’s Labbe, the unpublished report was used internally by staff scientists to discuss epidemiological studies before the completion of a paper that was presented to the agency’s external FIFRA Scientific Advisory Panel. “Several iterations of text were prepared by different staff members during the process of drafting the Issue Paper to aid in discussions and the exchange of scientific opinions. As such, the document does not reflect subsequent staff discussions and revisions,” Labbe wrote. Labbe also emphasized that the studies that were assessed in the report were taken into consideration in the agency’s decision to classify glyphosate as “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans.”

The cherry-picking of data from the buried report was particularly troubling to Genna Reed, a senior analyst at the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists who reviewed the report. “They only used the pieces of the meta-analysis that fit the conclusion they wanted to support,” said Reed, who added that the suppression of the damning conclusion reached in the 2016 report was part of a pattern. “There is clearly a need for more firewalls to prevent political interference with the science.”

Stapled in the Back

In some other cases, concerns about the health hazards of pesticides do make it into the public record — and are still overlooked. This was the case for evidence that acetamiprid, one of the five neonic pesticides approved for use, harms the developing brain. Well known for devastating bees and other pollinators, there is also evidence linking neonics to brain damage in children, including autism-like symptoms, brain malformations, and memory problems. The EPA requires tests to screen for these problems. And the test of acetamiprid’s developmental neurotoxicity showed that the chemical affects rats’ developing brains, according to a 2007 memo written by an EPA statistician named James Nguyen.

According to Nguyen’s memo, Exponent, a company hired to analyze the data by the pesticide manufacturer Nippon Soda Company, misinterpreted the results of that testing, as did the EPA. Although some male rats exposed to a mid-level dose of the pesticide had an impaired startle reflex, which allows them to respond to sudden stimuli, Exponent had dismissed the effects. Nguyen characterized the company’s analysis as “the incorrect reporting of results.”

Although Nguyen recognized the error, the EPA did not reduce the official level at which acetamiprid is considered to have no effects from the one set by the industry’s interpretation of the data. Instead, without addressing the points he raised, the agency simply stapled Nguyen’s memo into the larger file on acetamiprid.

Meanwhile, there is other evidence that neonics can harm the developing brain, causing thinning in some areas and motor problems such as tremors and staggering, as well as delaying sexual development. Since there is neonic residue on foods that kids often eat (including 60 percent of nonorganic applesauce samples tested), there is reason to fear that the pesticide could now be causing brain damage in children.

Despite the evidence, scientists from Exponent, as well as Bayer and Syngenta — all companies that make neonics — have concluded that the insecticides don’t affect the developing brain. And the EPA seems to have largely agreed with their conclusion, having imposed only minimal restrictions on them and refusing to impose a “child safety factor,” which would require setting a more conservative exposure level.

While there are only a handful of studies looking at the neurotoxicity of neonics to humans — some of which show that high-level exposure to the pesticides can cause coma and convulsions — Landrigan, the pediatrician and epidemiologist, anticipates that there will soon be many more. “When I started out as a pediatrician in the late 1960s, the only toxicity of lead that we recognized at that time was coma and convulsions,” said Landrigan, whose work helped establish the now widely accepted fact that even low levels of lead damage children’s brains.

“I suspect they have something else in the pipeline we haven’t yet seen.”

“That same progression took place in the case of mercury, and the same progression took place in the case of chlorpyrifos, and I suspect it will take place with neonicotinoids if they stay on the market — that we’re going to find, with more and more study, more rigorous study designs, and more sensitive tests, that neonics are toxic to children, even down to very low levels,” said Landrigan. “Every single neurotoxin has behaved that way.”

Landrigan sees the chemical industry’s claims that neonics are a safe alternative to older pesticides such as chlorpyrifos as fitting into another broad pattern. “They’ll stand behind a pesticide until they develop the next one, and then they’ll suddenly say, ‘Aha, we have a safer successor,’” said Landrigan. “I suspect they have something else in the pipeline we haven’t yet seen that they’re working on as we speak and will roll it out when the neonics go down.”

The cycle of replacements is taking its toll on wildlife too. While the EPA touts the comeback of bald eagles as a success story, the birds are now being poisoned, and sometimes killed, by a new generation of rodenticides.

It’s darkly ironic that neonics have been presented as a safe alternative to chlorpyrifos and the other organophosphates, whose use skyrocketed because they were considered safe alternatives to DDT, which was itself introduced as a replacement for another dangerous pesticide. With the exception of DDT, all these chemicals remain on the market. In 2015, Bayer registered a new neonic alternative, flupyradifurone, which the company has promoted as having a “very promising” safety profile. Yet flupyradifurone, which was supposed to be “safer,” has already been found to harm bees.

Similarly, the use of paraquat has increased as an alternative to glyphosate as concerns about its association with cancer, and weeds resistant to it, have grown, even though exposure to paraquat has been associated with Parkinson’s disease since the 1980s. Despite mounting evidence of their harms, both pesticides remain on the market, and their manufacturers continue to push for their continued registration. In 2003, Syngenta, the maker of paraquat, identified the science connecting the pesticide to Parkinson’s as “a threat to Syngenta’s paraquat business objectives” and laid out a plan “to shift the focus of serious PD research to other environmental factors.” The company insists that paraquat is safe and effective.

The ongoing use of so many problematic chemicals suggests that the EPA may have taken the wrong lesson from Carson’s book, according to Lanier-Christensen, the historian studying the agency. “They took action on DDT. But if we look more broadly at the critique in ‘Silent Spring,’ it wasn’t really about DDT,” said Lanier-Christensen. “It was about a broader approach to using chemicals to replace other chemicals.”

We Don’t Want to Have Any Problems

Yet another chemical, malathion, was once held up as a safer alternative to DDT. One of the most widely used pesticides in the same class as chlorpyrifos in the U.S., it is sprayed to kill mosquitos and control weeds in landscaping and agriculture. But the EPA has possessed, and dismissed, evidence that malathion is dangerous to people for decades.

In February 2000, a working group at the EPA classified malathion as “likely to be carcinogenic to humans” based on evidence that mice and rats exposed to it developed liver tumors. The designation would have required the agency to do a risk assessment that could have limited exposure to the chemical. But after it learned of the agency’s proposed classification, Cheminova, one of the manufacturers of the pesticide, hired a company to reinterpret the evidence and convened another meeting to discuss the carcinogenicity of malathion. Brian Dementi, a senior EPA toxicologist who was an expert on malathion and led the working group that supported its classification as a likely human carcinogen, was not invited, or even told about, this second meeting, at which the scientists paid to defend malathion suggested downgrading its status to “suggestive evidence of carcinogenicity,” a classification that doesn’t require a risk assessment.

Dementi wrote to Mike Leavitt and Stephen Johnson, then the EPA administrator and deputy administrator, respectively, laying out the evidence that malathion caused cancer and warning that if it was not classified as a likely human carcinogen, “public health will be endangered.” Dementi suggested that the pesticide “should be re-assessed by pathologists not in the employ of the registrant.” In another letter, Dementi said he felt compelled to call attention to the evidence suggesting that malathion caused leukemia and dissent from the EPA’s assessment of it. “In numerous places, for inexplicable reasons, this risk assessment sidesteps or down plays actual evidence of toxicity,” Dementi wrote in 2005. “My justification in setting forth these dissenting opinions resides with my sense of duty, and in the hope the risk assessment will be suitable to protect public health.” Later he wrote an additional letter to the EPA administrator, emphasizing that children were particularly susceptible to malathion.

Bill Hirzy, a scientist and an official in the union that represented Dementi, remembers the pressure to give malathion a pass as intense. “When malathion was up for reregistration, when the heads of the various divisions who were looking at health effects were sitting around the table and planning to address the issue, the science adviser poked his head in the door and said, ‘This is a big-ticket pesticide, and we don’t want to have any problems,’” he said.

Despite the concerns that Dementi raised, malathion was given the less-restrictive designation. Johnson, then the deputy administrator of the EPA, went on to become administrator of the agency and, in 2010, joined the board of Scotts Miracle-Gro, a company that sold malathion, among other pesticides. Since then, mounting evidence has linked the pesticide to numerous cancers, including thyroid cancer, prostate cancer, and breast cancer. In 2015, the WHO concluded that malathion is “probably carcinogenic to humans.” And in 2017, the EPA itself found that 97 percent of federally protected species are likely harmed by it. Nevertheless, malathion remains classified as only having “suggestive evidence of carcinogenicity.” Each year, about 1 million pounds of malathion are sprayed in the U.S.

Johnson did not respond to several requests for comment for this article. In response to questions about malathion, an EPA spokesperson wrote, “EPA is following the next steps in the registration review process for malathion in accordance with President Biden’s commitment to protect human health and the environment. Both the Proposed Interim Decision and Interim Decision for malathion are expected to be completed in 2022. EPA is currently working on a revised human health risk assessment, incorporating physiologically based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) data received earlier this year.”

Dewayne Johnson looks on after hearing the verdict to his case against Monsanto in San Francisco on Aug. 10, 2018.

Photo: Josh Edelson/AFP via Getty Images

Landing in Court

In the most basic sense, the companies that make and sell dangerous pesticides have succeeded in dodging regulators and keeping their products on the market. But if they have been able to waive, bury, and ignore the science that points to those dangers, pesticide manufacturers have not been able to outrun the harms that this science highlighted. By suppressing research used for regulation, the industry has found itself engaged in a much bigger, much more public experiment, the consequences of which are playing out on a global scale — and in the U.S. courts.

As the data Coulston collected more than 50 years ago predicted it would, chlorpyrifos exposure did cause brain damage. Although Dow has agreed to stop making the pesticide and an April federal court ruling will most likely force the EPA to finally revoke its registration, the lawsuits against Dow and Corteva over brain damage from chlorpyrifos are on the rise. Attorney Stuart Calwell has filed six separate suits against Dow and Corteva over chlorpyrifos. Among his clients are the parents of Rafael Cerda Calderon, who was exposed to chlorpyrifos in utero, when his mother was packing citrus fruit and lettuce in a warehouse. Calderon, who is now 18, has been diagnosed with autism and ADHD and has difficulty speaking, bathing, and with other basic tasks of daily life.

Calwell, who said that the lifetime costs of care in such cases can range into the tens of millions of dollars, is now reviewing the records of another 50 potential plaintiffs. Meanwhile, Corteva is scheduled to enter settlement talks in another case on behalf of the daughter of a woman named Marisol Padilla, who was exposed to chlorpyrifos when she was pregnant in a rural community in Monterey, California, and whose daughter developed learning delays and disabilities.

Years after studies found that rates of Parkinson’s disease are measurably higher among people who have used paraquat, litigation against Syngenta, its manufacturer, is also increasing. More than 150 suits from around the country over Syngenta’s responsibility for causing the disease were recently consolidated into a case that is scheduled to be heard in federal court in the Southern District of Illinois.

The 2018 Roundup litigation shows that these cases may meaningfully cut into the companies’ massive profits from these pesticides. That year, a groundskeeper named Dewayne Johnson who used Roundup before developing non-Hodgkin lymphoma won a $298 million judgment against Bayer. Although the stunning verdict, which found that the company acted with “malice, oppression, and fraud,” was reduced to $20.5 million on appeal, there are now some 125,000 plaintiffs suing over glyphosate exposure, and Bayer has already agreed to pay $10.9 billion to settle three-quarters of them. The company’s stock price, which fell 45 percent after the litigation, has not fully recovered.

Some financial analysts are predicting that the chlorpyrifos suits may affect Dow and Corteva’s bottom line too. In May, Bank of America downgraded Corteva stock, citing “the legacy Dow insecticide chlorpyrifos” as its primary concern.

Meanwhile, science showing that some of the effects from pesticides are passed down through generations suggests that the litigation may continue for decades to come. Calwell’s team has documented evidence of the presence of chlorpyrifos and its breakdown products years after active spraying of the chemical had stopped, which may mean that litigation over chlorpyrifos continues long after the use of the pesticide has stopped.

Still, close watchers of the pesticide industry remain skeptical that the lawsuits will fundamentally change how pesticide companies operate. “Whatever it costs them in court is a calculated loss,” said Benbrook. “Even when they spend tens of millions, it is never going to be more than a share of their net profits.”

The inescapable problem is the financial mismatch between the underfunded government agency and the immense corporations that continue to outfox, outmaneuver, and vastly outspend it, according to Benbrook.

“I can guarantee that Monsanto spent more than the entire OPP budget on that litigation. It had to have been way more,” said Benbrook. “How can EPA fight these major chemical companies when they are willing to spend an amount of money that is roughly equivalent to the entire Office of Pesticide Programs annual budget to defend just one chemical?”

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lee fang 2019?

In 2015, the World Health Organization’s cancer research arm, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, classified glyphosate, an active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup, as a “probable carcinogen,” setting off a global debate about the world’s most popular weedkiller.

Over the last four years, Republicans in Congress have excoriated and pushed to defund the IARC, casting their defense of the chemical as a quest on behalf of small American farmers. Rep. Frank Lucas, R-Okla., has written that his outrage over the cancer research is on behalf of the “farmers and food manufacturers who rely on traditional farming methods to produce the food that fuels America — and the world.”

But according to a recent trove of documents, the ongoing political assault on the IARC has been scripted in part by Monsanto, the St. Louis-based chemical and seed conglomerate that produces Roundup and Roundup-resistant crops.

Roundup has been cash cow for the company since the 1970s, fueling billions of dollars in annual profits. Its use has skyrocketed in recent decades since the company developed genetically modified corn and other crops that are resistant to it; it is now the world’s leading herbicide.

A growing number of individuals say that Monsanto failed to warn consumers of the dangers of using Roundup and had marketed the chemical spray as harmless to humans, while internally recommending that its own employees use gloves and protective gear. Critics say that the Roundup formula used in the U.S. also contains a surfactant that makes the herbicide far more toxic than the variation of the spray sold in the European market.

Monsanto, which merged with German multinational pharmaceutical company Bayer AG last year, is facing as many as 11,000 cases relating to glyphosate. Last year, Dewayne Johnson, a former groundskeeper now dying of cancer, was the first to win his jury trial in San Francisco state court against Monsanto, alleging that years of using Roundup contributed to his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Johnson was awarded $289 million by a jury, though a judge later reduced the amount to $78 million. Another plaintiff, Edwin Hardeman, also alleged that he spent decades spraying the glyphosate-based weedkiller with little to no protective gear and developed the same blood cancer, won a similar case in federal court this year.

Plaintiff Dewayne Johnson after hearing the verdict in his case against Monsanto at the Superior Court of California in San Francisco on Aug. 10, 2018.

The newly disclosed files, released by a plaintiff’s law firm, Baum Hedlund, include company emails, documents, and deposition transcripts showing that Monsanto lawyers and lobbyists guided lawmakers, coordinating efforts to question the IARC’s credibility and slash U.S. support for the international body.

The company has denied claims that its products cause cancer, and Monsanto lawyers have declared that Environmental Protection Agency’s designation of glyphosate as safe should clear the company of any legal liability. In a recent marketing campaign, Bayer touted its friendly cooperation with regulators as a sign that the public should have nothing to fear from its products.

But the documents also suggest that the firm has used its influence with lawmakers to antagonize regulators, applying pressure and investigative threats to shape the science used to research glyphosate and other controversial chemical compounds, as part of a larger campaign to silence critics and discredit the IARC.

In June 2015, Michael Dykes, then serving as Monsanto’s vice president of government affairs, laid out the company’s strategy for “managing the IARC issue,” following the cancer research center’s determination that March.

The company, he wrote in an email, had dispatched its team of lobbyists to brief “key staff at EPA, USTR, USDA, and the State Department as well as members of Congress” to raise concerns with the IARC’s scientific process, and with how the decision could impact agriculture as well as international trade. Lobbyists also met with an official at the Department of Health and Human Services; they saw the agency’s support as key “to secure a WHO clarification.”

Later in the year, Dykes updated the Monsanto team with plans to push back against the IARC, including the possible placement of advertisements — in the form of letters from third-party groups — in Capitol Hill newspapers, as well as preparation to use a Senate Agriculture Committee hearing as a venue to get the EPA to reaffirm support for glyphosate. “We will make sure Committee members ask EPA the glyphosate safety question,” Dykes wrote.

Roundup weed killing products on May 14, 2019.

Photo Illustration: Scott Olson/Getty Images

The following year, FTI Government Affairs, one of several consulting firms guiding Monsanto’s political response to the IARC decision, assisted GOP lawmakers with an effort to investigate U.S. support for the IARC.

In one email sent by Todd Rands, a former Monsanto attorney working with FTI, sent a draft of a letter ostensibly written by Rep. Rob Aderholt, R-Ala., a senior lawmaker on the House Appropriations Committee, addressed to Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes for Health. NIH is the government agency responsible for most federal public health research and is the largest funder to the IARC. The letter, in fact, had been written by FTI consultants, along with Rands’s edits, according to his deposition testimony.

The FTI-written letter declared that glyphosate “does not cause cancer,” accused the IARC of peddling “bunk science,” and threatened a reassessment of the NIH budget to ensure that the agency is “committed to only funding organizations that produce information and conclusions based on sound science, robust processes, and credible methodology.”

During his deposition, Rands said that he believed it appropriate for Monsanto to draft a letter on behalf of a lawmaker to NIH, calling such ghostwriting a “common practice in Washington.”

It’s not clear what Aderholt’s office did with the FTI-authored letter. Aderholt’s office did not respond to a request for comment from The Intercept. On June 2, 2016, Aderholt sent a letter to NIH to request a briefing on the IARC’s designation of glyphosate as a probable carcinogen and “the standards that NIH places on research funded by the U.S. taxpayers,” a letter that mirrored many of the demands in the FTI letter, though it used different language.

More GOP letters and demands for investigation over NIH’s funding for IARC followed. Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, then-chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., Chaffetz’s successor as Oversight chair, and Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, then-chair of the House Science Committee, all called for inquiries into IARC funding and the designation of glyphosate as a carcinogen.

The Monsanto lobbyists closely conferred with the committees as they honed in on the IARC’s funding. Drew Feeley, an attorney for the GOP staff of the House Oversight Committee, emailed an FTI consultant to explain that his office was working to attach a line to a government budget bill designed “to apply to IARC” in order to slash its funding over the glyphosate issue. “Thanks again for coordinating,” Feeley wrote to the Monsanto consultant. Feeley, notably, is now serving as an attorney with the Council on Environmental Quality, the White House office that oversees environmental policy.

“We expect the House OGR investigation about IARC to expand as they move into the new administration,” wrote Rands, in an update to Monsanto colleagues.

Last year, under Smith, the House Science VID] Committee an entire committee hearing into questioning the IARC, with a focus on its conduct around glyphosate. Smith subsequently sent more letters to cancer researchers in Norway, demanding they “correct the flaws in IARC.” The House Appropriations Committee followed up by cutting $2 million in funding to the IARC, a symbolic move to distance the U.S. from the international body, which relies on a budget of around $40 million from a range of member countries.

The congressional outreach was only part of a multifaceted effort to control the backlash sparked by the IARC designation.

In recent years, a great deal of new information has come to light around Monsanto’s work to conceal the potential health risks around glyphosate. Earlier this month, new documents revealed that Monsanto operated a “fusion center” to discredit critics of the company, including former Reuters journalist Carey Gillam, who has written extensively about glyphosate. The operation even monitored and considered legal action again singer Neil Young, a critic of Monsanto.

Le Monde, the French newspaper, published an award-winning investigation on the controversy, referring to the Monsanto-run campaign to discredit the IARC as an effort to “intimidate” the cancer research center.

A separate cache of litigation files, released in May, revealed that Monsanto also contracted with Hakluyt, a corporate intelligence firm, to keep close tabs on political elites in Washington. The company consulted with senior Trump and EPA officials, and confirmed that the administration would support Monsanto on glyphosate issues. “We have Monsanto’s back on pesticide regulation,” a domestic policy adviser in the White House told Hakluyt.

The last year has exposed other cloak-and-dagger tactics. The company was criticized for ghostwriting scientific studies on the safety of glyphosate, which were presented as independent research. At the San Francisco civil trial over glyphosate, an FTI consultant working for Monsanto was caught posing as a journalist working for the BBC and another British outlet.

And in 2017, one of the most stunning disclosures revealed that a senior EPA staffer, Jess Rowland, had quietly tipped Monsanto off to the fact that federal agencies had sought to reevaluate the safety of glyphosate, boasting to the company that he could “kill” federal investigations into glyphosate. Shortly before a crucial European Union vote on glyphosate products, the EPA suddenly released a report declaring the safety of the product. The document was later taken down because it had not yet been completed. One Monsanto official relayed to a colleague that Rowland had told him, “If I can kill this I should get a medal,” in regards to the glyphosate review conducted by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, a department of Health and Human Services.

After leaving the EPA, Rowland went to work in the private sector, consulting for chemical companies.

There’s also a revolving door between lawmakers supporting Monsanto and professionals working on behalf of the company. Shortly after retiring from Congress this year, following his investigation of the IARC, Lamar Smith took a job at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, a lobbying firm that represents Bayer-Monsanto’s interests in Washington.

Correction, August 23, 12:00 p.m.*This story has been updated to clarify that Hardeman’s case was in federal court and that Rowland’s comments about killing a federal study of glyphosate referred to ASTDR.

Update, August 23, 2:30 p.m.

*After publication, Bayer sent the following statement: “None of the documents cherry-picked by plaintiffs’ lawyers and their surrogates contradict the findings of the extensive body of science and conclusions of leading health regulators that glyphosate-based herbicides are safe when used as directed and that glyphosate is not carcinogenic. Instead, they show that Monsanto’s activities were intended to ensure there was a fair, accurate and science-based dialogue about the company and its products in response to significant misinformation. We take the safety of our products and our reputation very seriously and work to ensure that everyone – from regulators to customers to other stakeholders – has accurate and balanced information to make decisions about our products.”

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The Pesticide Industry’s Playbook for Poisoning the Earth

JAN 2020

September 2009, over 3,000 bee enthusiasts from around the world descended on the city of Montpellier in southern France for Apimondia — a festive beekeeper conference filled with scientific lectures, hobbyist demonstrations, and commercial beekeepers hawking honey. But that year, a cloud loomed over the event: bee colonies across the globe were collapsing, and billions of bees were dying.

Bee declines have been observed throughout recorded history, but the sudden, persistent and abnormally high annual hive losses had gotten so bad that the U.S. Department of Agriculture had commissioned two of the world’s most well-known entomologists — Dennis vanEngelsdorp, a chief apiary inspector in Pennsylvania, then studying at Penn State University, and Jeffrey Pettis, then working as a government scientist — to study the mysterious decline. They posited that there must be an underlying factor weakening bees’ immune systems.

At Le Corum, a conference center and opera house, the pair discussed their findings. They had fed bees with extremely small amounts of neonicotinoids, or neonics, the most commonly used class of insecticides in the world. Neonics are, of course, meant to kill insects, but they are marketed as safe for insects that aren’t being directly targeted. VanEngelsdorp and Pettis found that even at nonlethal doses, the bees in the trial became much more vulnerable to fungal infection. Bees carrying an infection will often fly off to die, a virtuous form of suicide designed to protect the larger hive from contagion.

“We exposed whole colonies to very low levels of neonicotinoids in this case, and then challenged bees from those colonies withNosema, a pathogen, a gut pathogen,” said Pettis, speaking to

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filmmaker Mark Daniels in his, “The Strange Disappearance of the Bees,” at Apimondia. “And we saw an increase, even if we fed the pesticide at very low levels — an increase in Nosema levels — in direct response to the low-level feeding of neonicotinoids.”

The dosages of the pesticide were so miniscule, said vanEngelsdorp, that it was “below the limit of detection.” The only reason they knew the bees had consumed the neonicotinoids, he added, was “because we exposed them.”

Bee health depends on a variety of synergistic factors, the scientists were careful to note. But in this study, Pettis said, they were able to isolate “one pesticide and one pathogen and we clearly see the interaction.”

The evidence was mounting. Shortly after vanEngelsdorp and Pettis revealed their findings, a number of French researchers produced a nearly identical study, feeding minute amounts of the same pesticide to bees, along with a control group. The study produced results that echoed what the Americans had found.

Drifting clouds of neonicotinoid dust from planting operations caused a series of massive bee die-offs in northern Italy and the Baden-Württemberg region of Germany. Studies have shown neonicotinoids impaired bees’ ability to navigate and forage for food, weakened bee colonies, and made them prone to infestation by parasitic mites.

In 2013, the European Union called for a temporary suspension of the most commonly used neonicotinoid-based products on flowering plants, citing the danger posed to bees — an effort that resulted in a permanent ban in 2018.

In the U.S., however, industry dug in, seeking not only to discredit the research but to cast pesticide companies as a solution to the problem. Lobbying documents and emails, many of which were obtained through open records requests, show a sophisticated effort over the last decade by the pesticide industry to obstruct any effort to restrict the use of neonicotinoids. Bayer and Syngenta, the largest manufacturers of neonics, and Monsanto, one of the leading producers of seeds pretreated with neonics, cultivated ties with prominent academics, including vanEngelsdorp, and other scientists who had once called for a greater focus on the threat posed by pesticides.

The companies also sought influence with beekeepers and regulators, and went to great lengths to shape public opinion. Pesticide firms launched new coalitions and seeded foundations with cash to focus on nonpesticide factors in pollinator decline.

“Position the industry as an active promoter of bee health, and advance best management practices which emphasize bee safety,” noted an internal planning memo from CropLife America, the lobby group for the largest pesticide companies in America, including Bayer and Syngenta. The ultimate goal of the bee health project, the document noted, was to ensure that member companies maintained market access for neonic products and other systemic pesticides.

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The planning memo, helmed in part by Syngenta regulatory official John Abbott, charts a variety of strategies for advancing the pesticide industry’s interests, such as, “Challenge EPA on the size and breadth of the pollinator testing program.” CropLife America officials were also tapped to “proactively shape the conversation in the new media realm with respect to pollinators” and “minimize negative association of crop protection products with effects on pollinators.” Thedocument, dated June 2014, calls for “outreach to university researchers who could be independent validators.”

The pesticide companies have used a variety of strategies to shift the public discourse.

:{“America’s Heartland,” a PBS series shown on affiliates throughout the country and underwritten by CropLife America, portrayed the pollinator declines as a mystery.

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On from early 2013 on the crisis made no mention of pesticides, with the host simply declaring that “experts aren’t sure why” bees and butterflies were disappearing.}:

Another segment, released in January 2015, quickly mentions pesticides as one of many possible factors for honeybee deaths. A representative of the “North American Bee Care Program,” Becky Langer VID to discuss the “exotic pests that can affect the bees.” The program does not mention Langer’sposition as a spokesperson for Bayer focused on managing fallout from the bee controversy.

Michael Sanford, a spokesperson for PBS KVIE, which produces “America’s Heartland,” wrote in an email to The Intercept that “consistent with strict PBS editorial standards and our own,” sponsors of the show provided no editorial input.

Bayer’s advocacy, designed to position the firm as a leader in protecting bee health, included a roadshow around the country, in which Bayer officials handed out oversized ceremonial checks to local beekeepers and students. The firm hosts splashy websites touting its leadership in promoting bee health and sponsors a number of beekeeping associations.

Meanwhile, Bayer has financed that depict individuals who fear that its pesticide products harm nontarget insects as deranged conspiracy theorists.

Honeybees have captured almost all the attention for the dangers of neonics, but they are hardly the only species in decline because of the chemical.

Other forms of influence have been far more covert.

Communications staff with CropLife America compiled a list of terms to shape on search engine results, including “neonicotinoid,” “pollinators,” and “neonics.” One of the consulting firms tapped to coordinate the industry’s outreach, Paradigm Communications, a subsidiary of the public relations giant Porter Novelli, helped lead the effort to shift how pesticide products were portrayed in search engine results.

A slide prepared by Paradigm Communications showcases its push to decouple Google search results for bee decline with neonic pesticides.

The greatest public relations coup has been the push to reframe the debate around bee decline to focus only on the threat of Varroa mites, a parasite native to Asia that began spreading to the U.S. in the 1980s. The mite is known to rapidly infest bee hives and carry a range of infectious diseases.

CropLife America, among other groups backed by pesticide companies, has financed research and advocacy around the mite — an effort designed to muddy the conversation around pesticide use. Meanwhile, research suggests the issues are interrelated; neonics make bees far more susceptible to mite infestations and attendant diseases.

Bayer even constructed a sculpture of the Varroa mite at its “Bee Care Center” in North Carolina and at its research center in Germany, hyping its role as the primary force fueling the decline of pollinators.

A model of honeybee with a Varroa mite on its back at Bayer’s Bee Care Center in Monheim am Rhein, Germany, on Nov. 19, 2013.

Photo: Joanna Nottebrock/The New York Times via Redux

The stunningly successful campaign has kept most neonic products in wide circulation in commercial agriculture as well as in home gardens. The result is a world awash in neonics — and massive profits for companies such as Syngenta and Bayer, which now counts Monsanto as a subsidiary.

Millions of pounds of the chemical are applied to 140 commercial crops every year. In the U.S., nearly all field-planted corn and two-thirds of soybean use neonic-coated seeds. The chemical is found in soil samples from coast to coast, in waterways and in drinking water. Neonics, which are water soluble, have been detected in the American River in California, the River Waveney in England, tap water in Iowa City, and hundreds of other streams and rivers across the world. In Brazil last year, after President Jair Bolsonaro’s government approved dozens of new pesticides, the use of neonics caused the death of more than 500 million bees across the country.

In August, a study published in peer-reviewed journal PLOS One found that the American landscape has become 48 times more toxic to insects since the 1990s, a shift largely fueled by the rising application of neonics.

Honeybees have captured almost all the attention for the dangers of neonics, but they are hardly the only species in decline because of the chemical. Studies have tied neonics to the disappearance of native bees, butterflies, mayflies, dragonflies, amphipods, and a range of waterborne insects, as well as earthworms and other insect invertebrates. Several species of bumblebees in the U.S. and Europe are approaching extinction, a die-off researchers say is tied to the use of neonics and other pesticides.

In September, a study released in the academic journal Science revealed that migrating songbirds suffered immediate weight loss following the consumption of only one or two seeds treated with neonics. Previous research had linked disappearing insect life to dwindling food sources for birds in the Netherlands, but the Science study provided the evidence that bird species were directly affected by the chemical.

Another groundbreaking study published in Nature’s Scientific Reports showed that neonics are likely causing serious birth defects in white-tailed deer, the first time research has shown that the chemical compound could endanger large mammals.

“Bees are the canary in the cornfield,” said Lisa Archer, from Friends of the Earth. “The science linking pesticides to the extinction crisis has grown.”

Scientists are only now taking a closer look at the potential impact of neonics on humans and other mammals.

“Bees are the canary in the cornfield,” said Lisa Archer, the food and agriculture program director at Friends of the Earth. “The science linking pesticides to the extinction crisis has grown.”

Dave Goulson, a professor of biology at the University of Sussex, told The Intercept, “I think perhaps we are reaching a tipping point where people finally begin to appreciate the importance of insects, the scale of their decline, and that blitzing the landscape with pesticides is not sustainable or desirable.”

Bayer and Syngenta reject any claim that their neonic products are harming the environment.

“Neonicotinoid products are critically important tools for farmers, and are approved for use in more than 100 countries due to their strong safety profile when used according to label,” said Susan Luke, a spokesperson for Bayer Crop Science North America, in a statement to The Intercept. “This is why Bayer continues to strongly support their continued safe use, even though the manufacture of neonic products is not a major part of our business.”

“Research claims that have been made questioning neonic safety all share common flaws, such as exposure levels that far exceed real-world scenarios, and the flawed idea that exposure to substances in the environment necessarily means harm,” adds Luke. “It does not, otherwise no one would go swimming in chlorine or drink caffeinated coffee.”

“Since neonicotinoids were introduced in the 1990s, honey bee colonies have been increasing in the United States, Europe, Canada and indeed around the world,” Chris Tutino, a spokesperson for Syngenta, claimed in a statement to The Intercept. He added that “most scientists and bee experts agree that bee health is affected by multiple factors, including parasites, diseases, habitat and nutrition, weather and hive management practices.”

Tutino, in his email, noted that the neonic compound thiamethoxam, used in popular Syngenta products such as Cruiser and Dividend, had undergone “extensive tests evaluating effects on pollinators,” and provided links to five studies, all of which were produced by Syngenta consultants or employees.

Neither company responded directly to questions about the role of neonic products in fueling declines of butterflies, dragonflies, and other insect species beyond bee populations. Both companies highlighted company funding for honeybee health research.

The chemical industry’s comments were disputed by Willa Childress, an organizer with Pesticide Action Network North America.

While it’s true, Childress noted, that managed honeybee hive populations are growing, that is because of the commercial value of honeybees in pollinating a vast array of American agriculture. Beekeepers on average now lose around 40-50 percent of hives every year, well up from historical averages of 10 percent. Many commercial beekeepers are forced to constantly divide hives and buy queens to maintain hive populations, with many relying on government subsidies to scrape by.

“So no, honeybees aren’t doing ‘better than ever,’” said Childress. “And the scientists do agree that multiple interacting factors are driving pollinator decline, including, as chemical companies neglect to mention, pesticide use.”

“Honeybees will not go extinct in our lifetimes,” noted Childress. But, she added, “data on native bees and wild pollinators is far more ‘apocalyptic’ than even the most concerning reports on honey bee losses. Unprecedented numbers of wild pollinators are facing extinction — and we have very limited data on a number of other pollinators that are at risk.”

NOT Long ago,}_ action in the U.S. to restrict neonics seemed imminent.

The pressure began to build in 2010 after Tom Theobald, a beekeeper in Boulder, Colorado, obtained an internal Environmental Protection Agency report showing that the agency’s own scientists had sharply criticized the research used to permit the sale of one of the most popular lines of neonic products.

In 2003, Bayer had secured the temporary right to use clothianidin, a neonic used widely for corn and canola, from the EPA — under the condition that the company conduct a “chronic life cycle study” showing how use of the neonic would affect honeybees by the end of the following year.

The Bayer-funded study, led by Cynthia Scott-Dupree, an environmental sciences professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario, placed hives in clothianidin-treated fields of canola and hives in untreated fields of canola. The tests found little variation between the two sets of hives, but researchers later pointed out that the hives in the study were placed only 968 feet apart from one another. Honeybees forage for pollen up to six miles from their hives.

Scott-Dupree was later appointed the “Bayer CropScience Chair in Sustainable Pest Management” at the University of Guelph. Regulators in Canada and at the EPA used the study to clear clothianidin for unconditional use. Internally, however, EPA scientists expressed concerns.

The memo, written by two EPA scientists, noted that the previous Bayer-funded study failed baseline guidelines for pesticide research and warned that clothianidin posed a “major risk concern” to “nontarget insects (that is, honey bees).”

A dizzying array of research began pointing to problems with neonics. Despite claims that the compound represents a form of precision agriculture, a growing body of research shows that the chemical strays far from targeted crops, often traveling with the wind during planting operations, remaining in the soil for long periods of time, leaching into waterways, and causing acute problems for a wide variety of insect and animal life.

In 2014, Rep. Earl Blumenauer, a Democrat from Oregon, introduced legislation to compel the EPA to take steps to suspend the pesticides. That year, in response to growing controversies around bee decline and the demands for greater accountability over loosely regulated pesticide use, President Barack Obama issued an executive memorandum calling attention to the “significant loss of pollinators, including honey bees, native bees, birds, bats, and butterflies.”

Activists picketed the White House demanding action. Beekeepers and environmentalist groups filed lawsuits challenging the registration status of major neonic products, claiming that EPA had violated its own protocols when licensing products from Bayer and Syngenta. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced a decision to phase out neonics in wildlife refuge areas in the Pacific region.

Around the country, legislators in states across the country proposed bills to restrict neonics. In Minnesota, a bill was signed into law to prevent nurseries from marketing plants as pollinator-friendly if they had been treated with neonics.

For a while, the movement seemed to be gaining traction, which some hoped would lead the U.S. to mirror the EU in moving to regulate the widely used insecticide.

In the end, little changed. The settlements related to the lawsuits removed small-market neonics. The private-public partnerships that grew out of the Obama memorandum lacked any enforcement mechanism to restrict neonic use in agriculture. President Donald Trump rescinded the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service rule. Minnesota legislators quickly repealed the labeling requirement a year after it was passed.

After a hearing in which he pointed to pesticides, Jeffrey Pettis told the Washington Post that he was criticized him for failing to follow “the script.”

In almost every other state, with the exception of Vermont, Connecticut, and Maryland, lobbyists from the pesticide and agribusiness industry successfully killed any significant restriction on neonic products. The scientific community, once focused on studying the impact of pesticides, became splintered, with many of the leading voices going to work for industry or industry-backed nonprofits.

Critics of neonics were quickly sidelined. In April 2014, the House Agriculture Subcommittee on Horticulture, Research, Biotechnology, and Foreign Agriculture — then chaired by Rep. Austin Scott, a Georgia Republican — convened a hearing to discuss the pollinator crisis. The event featured David Fischer, a Bayer official, and Jeff Stone, lobbyist for commercial nurseries. Both men used the hearing to warn against any restrictions on neonics in response to bee decline. The third, Dan Cummings, a representative of the Almond Board, a trade group for almond growers, focused on the threat of the Varroa mite.

A fourth witness, the Department of Agriculture researcher Jeffrey Pettis — the scientist who had collaborated with vanEngelsdorp — noted that unlike traditional pesticides, neonics are found in pollen, increasing exposure to bees. Under questioning from Scott, the committee chair, Pettis reiterated that even without mites, bees would still be in decline, and pesticides raise concern “to a new level.”

After the hearing, Pettis told the Washington Post that he spoke privately with Scott, who criticized him for failing to follow “the script.”

CropLife America, notably, celebrated the hearing performance for its heavy focus on nonpesticide-related factors for bee decline. “One thing that we hope was made clear during the hearing was the crop protection industry’s commitment to addressing this issue,” Jay Vroom, then the president of CropLife America, said in a statement.

Campaign finance records show that CropLife America, just weeks after the hearing, gave $3,500 to Scott, who then sponsored legislation to solve the bee crisis through exemptions to expedite the approval of pesticides used to control the Varroa mite.

And two months after the hearing, according to the Post, Pettis was demoted, losing his role managing the USDA bee lab in Beltsville, Maryland. Pettis later left the government and now serves as president of Apimondia.

Entomologist Jonathan Lundgren, who is researching answers for what might be causing the dwindling honeybee population, on Jan. 9, 2016. Photos: Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post/Getty Images

The Post also details the story of a prominent USDA scientist, Jonathan Lundgren, who researched the dangers posed by neonics to pollinators and spoke publicly about the issue. In 2015, Lundgren suddenly faced suspensions and an internal government investigation over misconduct, a push he believes was motivated by industry for his role in speaking out on pesticides.

“I guess I started asking the wrong questions, pursuing risk assessments of neonicotinoids on a lot of different field crop seeds used throughout the U.S. and how they were affecting non-target species like pollinators,” Lundgren told The Intercept.

The USDA did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. It told the Post that the suspensions had nothing to do with his research. They were for “conduct unbecoming a federal employee” and “violating travel regulations.”

Lundgren now runs Blue Dasher Farm in South Dakota, a research effort to develop ways to rotate diverse sets of crops as a way to increase yields and suppress pests naturally. There are few institutions, he noted, where researchers can pursue science independent of industry influence. “Universities have become dependent on extramural funds, entire programs are bankrolled by these pesticide companies, chemical companies,” he added.

The regulatory system in the U.S. assumes chemical products are generally safe until proven hazardous.

“Generally, we see the U.S. waiting longer than the EU to take action on a variety of pesticides and other chemicals,” said Childress, the organizer with Pesticide Action Network North America. Part of the divergence, Childress continued, stems from a regulatory system in the U.S. that assumes chemical products are generally safe until proven hazardous. In contrast, the EU tends to use the “precautionary principle,” removing products that may cause harm, and requiring proof of safety before allowing them to return to market.

Another major factor, Childress noted, is the widespread corporate capture of American regulatory institutions. The EPA, for instance, employs 11 former lobbyists — including its administrator, Andrew Wheeler, who previously worked for coal interests in opposition to climate regulations — in senior positions.

The pesticide industry also maintains a long history of underhanded methods to discredit its critics.

Monsanto deployed aggressive tactics to punish critics of Roundup, the most widely used herbicide in the world and the company’s marquee product over the last several decades. Emails released through ongoing litigation in California last year showed that the firm used its lobbyists to orchestrate a campaign in Congress to criticize and defund scientists with the World Health Organization’s cancer research affiliate, after that body had declared that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, is a “probable carcinogen.” Many of the documents detailing Monsanto’s role in shaping the public discourse around glyphosate were released during the course of class-action lawsuits filed by cancer victims who blame the company for their illnesses.

Syngenta became infamous after its tactics against University of California, Berkeley Professor Tyrone Hayes were reported. Hayes’s research showed that the company’s signature herbicide, atrazine, appeared to disrupt the sexual development of frogs.

The company dispatched people to follow and record Hayes at public speaking events, commissioned a psychological profile of the professor, and worked with a variety of writers to smear Hayes as “non-credible” and a liability to academics who considered working with him. The effort to sideline Hayes and his research, which included coordination with industry-friendly academics, was revealed in a series of court documents that were disclosed over litigation involving claims that Syngenta had polluted local water sources with atrazine.

In the two lawsuits against Syngenta and Monsanto, subpoenaed documents revealed that both Syngenta and Monsanto maintain a list of “third party stakeholders,” including free market think tanks and scientists the industry could turn to for messaging support.

Many of the think tanks and individuals included in the roster now play a prominent role in the neonic debate. The American Council on Health and Science, which has relied on corporate funding from Monsanto, Bayer, and Syngenta, has published over a dozen articles disputing the dangers posed by neonics.

In one email revealed through the Monsanto-Roundup litigation, Daniel Goldstein, a Monsanto official, wrote to colleagues in all-caps to support the council’s work: “I can assure you I am not all starry eyed about ACSH- they have PLENTY of warts- but: You WILL NOT GET A BETTER VALUE FOR YOUR DOLLAR than ACSH.” The bottom of the email included hyperlinks to articles criticizing demands to regulate both glyphosate and neonic pesticides.

The Heartland Institute, one of the think tanks in Syngenta’s third-party stakeholder list, which has received Bayer donations in the past, has published articles deriding research critical of neonics as “junk science.”

“The pesticide industry is using Big Tobacco’s PR tactics to try and spin the science about their products’ links to bee declines and delay action while they keep profiting,” said Archer, whose group, Friends of the Earth, has documented the lobbying tactics of pesticide makers.

When neonics hit}_ the market three decades ago, they were the first new class of insecticide invented in nearly 50 years, and their use skyrocketed.

As early as the late 17th century, farmers found that they could grind tobacco plants and use nicotine extract to kill beetles on crops. Nicotine acts as an organic insecticide, binding to nerve receptors and causing paralysis and death in aphids, white flies, and other plant-eating insects.

Attempts to use nicotine for a mass-market pesticide, however, frustrated scientists. In early research, sunlight diluted the effectiveness of nicotine-based products. But that changed just over three decades ago, when Bayer scientists at Nihon Bayer Agrochem, the firm’s Japanese subsidiary, first synthesized neonicotinoids in the 1980s — a compound that not only withstood heat and sunlight, but could be applied to the root or seed of a plant and remain effective for that plant’s entire lifespan.

Neonics were hailed as the “Goldilocks compound” because they are “not too hard, not too soft, but just right.”

The new chemical came just in time. Farmers and regulators were seeking alternatives to another class of pesticides — organophosphates, nerve agents sprayed on crops — that had been found to cause cancer in humans. Initial studies of neonics showed that the compound was acutely toxic to insects but unlikely to cause harm to mammals.

As one scientist for Bayer described the invention in a 1993 Science magazine article hailing the introduction of the new class of chemicals, neonics were the “Goldilocks compound” because they are “not too hard, not too soft, but just right.”

And because seeds could be pretreated with neonics, which were absorbed and expressed through the tissue, nectar, and pollen, they could be also produced on an industrial scale, providing agriculture crops with an efficient insect-killing capability without the need for expensive spray treatments or constant reapplication.

In other words, farmers could soak the ground and seeds with enormous amounts of the compound to avoid problems from pests in the future. The delivery mechanism saved money for farmers but set the conditions for chronic overuse of the pesticides.

Estimated agricultural use of imidacloprid. Information compiled from the U.S. Geological Survey’s Pesticide National Synthesis Project.

Map: USGS National Water-Quality Assessment, The Intercept

The first commercial neonic, imidacloprid, was registered with the EPA in 1994 and sold as a potato seed treatment. Business boomed as neonic products spread worldwide to Japan, France, Germany, and South Africa. In the U.S., it became a popular standard seed and root treatment for corn, cotton, soybeans, almonds, and a range of fruits and vegetables.

Neonics were even used for household applications. Bayer produced imidacloprid as a flea treatment on pets throughout the U.S. The Advantage line of flea control took off, with a marketing campaign featuring the Jack Russell terrier “Eddie” from the television show “Frasier” and a 30-foot inflatable flea in Times Square.

Chemical Week called the introduction of neonics a “renaissance for the U.S. insecticides industry” providing “environmentally friendly products.” The Columbus Dispatch, in an article for home gardeners about ways to deliver a “surgical strike” against pests, called for consumers to consider Bayer’s Merit soil treatment, which the paper called “virtually non-toxic.”

The swift adoption of the compound instantly made Bayer, which had previously profited largely from its pharmaceutical line of products, a worldwide player in the agrochemical industry.

“Imidacloprid is our most important product,” the head of Bayer’s pesticide division told investors in 2008.

In 2003, at a forum hosted by Goldman Sachs, Bayer listed Confidor, Premise, and Gaucho, several seed treatments based on neonic compounds, among its top-performing products in a presentation outlining the company’s performance metrics. Another investor presentation, given by Bayer executives in Lyon, France, projected rapid growth from the neonic products, estimating that the firm, which had sales of close to 400 million euros from the portfolio in 1998, would more than double to 850 million euros by 2010.

“Imidacloprid is our most important product,” Friedrich Berschauer, then-head of Bayer’s pesticide division, told investors during a conference call in 2008, according to a transcript of his remarks. Company disclosures underscore Berschauer’s remarks: During that fiscal year, the company reported 932 million euros in sales for its top two neonic compounds.

In 2009, the global neonic market brought in $2.1 billion dollars for the largest pesticide producers. Other agribusiness interests invested heavily in the market. Monsanto beganoffering neonic-based seed treatments through its popular Acceleron product for corn, soybeans, and cotton. Switzerland-based Syngenta rolled out two neonic seed treatments, Actara and Cruiser, quickly positioning itself as a leading insecticide firm alongside Bayer. Many of the early compounds of neonics are no longer patent-protected, allowing other businesses to compete for the market. Valent, BASF (which acquired part of Bayer’s neonic portfolio as a condition of its merger with Monsanto), and Sumitomo Chemical are also leading neonic producers.

The first restrictions on neonics in the EU, announced late in 2013, raised alarm in the industry. “The number for the full year as a consequence of the suspension is about $75 million,” noted John Mack, then-Syngenta’s chief executive officer on a call with investors the following year, referring to the decrease in revenue as a result of the decision. The executives were quick to point out, however, the full brunt of the restriction had been limited because many EU states obtained exemptions from the suspension rule.

In another call with investors, Mack declared that there “is no relationship between” the use of neonics “and the causality of bee decline,” and said he was certain regulators in the U.S. would not take the European approach.

Speaking with investors 2018, Liam Condon, a Bayer executive in charge of pesticide products, warned that the neonic ban in France alone had cost the firm 80 million euros. The wider restrictions imposed on the chemical, Condon continued, “drags our entire European results down.”

Bayer no longer breaks out individual product revenue in its investor reports. Previous financial reporting has suggested that neonics represent as much as 20 percent of its sales. The company’s annual report in 2018 showed that the company’s insecticide division produced more than 1.3 billion euros in revenue.

Werner Baumann, chair of Bayer’s board, announcing its acquisition of Monsanto in 2016, declared that the deal would create “a global leader in the agricultural industry,” delivering insecticides and seed treatments.

The global neonic market generated $4.42 billion in revenue in 2018, roughly doubling over the previous decade, according to new figures provided to The Intercept from Agranova, a research firm that tracks the industry.

The evidence entangling}_ neonicotinoids with bee die-offs began to surface almost as soon as they hit the market.

In the early 1990s, in France, several bee hives near fields planted with neonicotinoids collapsed suddenly, and beekeepers observed mass bee die-offs in the vicinity of sunflower fields treated with Bayer’s imidacloprid-based Gaucho.

The French beekeepers mounted a sustained pressure campaign, including demonstrations of hundreds marching in Paris and outside of Bayer’s factory in Cormery, in central France.

The beekeepers observed that their bees were disoriented and unable to forage, and weakened to a point where disease and parasitic infections spread rapidly, destroying thousands of hives. Beekeepers found bees trembling and dying on the ground, a syndrome they nicknamed “mad bee disease.” They blamed neonics, but Bayer maintained that the chemicals caused no harm.

“We don’t believe the insecticide poses any risks,” Peter Brain, a regulatory affairs official with Bayer, told reporters.

In 1999, facing mounting pressure from farmers, the French government moved to temporarily ban the use of imidacloprid, though other neonicotinoids continued to be used. Annual hive loss continued.

In 2008, officials in Italy, Germany, and Slovenia observed that the sowing of fields with neonic-treated seeds correlated with nearby mass bee die-offs. In one region of Germany, beekeepers reported the loss of 11,500 bee colonies following the planting of nearby canola fields with neonic-treated seeds. Similar observations across the continent led to the temporary restriction of commonly used neonic products in all three countries that year.

The following year, a group of 70 scientists, including prominent biologists, toxicologists, entomologists, and other specialists in Europe formed the Task Force on Systemic Pesticides, an ad hoc group to study neonics and other systemic pesticides. The task force worked to conduct research independent of industry.

Over the years, more and more research appeared to confirm that neonics were not only endangering nontarget insects. In the journal Science, a study confirmed that field-realistic applications of neonics reduced bumblebee fertility by 85 percent. The United Kingdom-based advocacy group BugLife released research that compiled years of academic studies showing that neonicotinoids appeared to be damaging the populations of honeybees, native bees, and other nontarget invertebrates.

The Task Force on Systemic Pesticides brought together over a thousand peer-reviewed studies, concluding that wide-scale use of neonics, along with fipronil, another popular systemic pesticide, were causing “widespread, chronic impacts upon global biodiversity.” The group noted that neonic pesticides linger for long periods in the soil and were found to be contaminating fields and waterways far from agricultural sites. The scientists called for an urgent reduction in the use of the chemicals.

Growing backlash against neonics pushed the EU into action. In 2012, the European Food Safety Authority, the leading pesticide regulator in the EU, released a risk assessment finding that the three most widely used neonicotinoids posed acute risks to bees. The finding set into motion an effort backed by most EU states to suspend the use of neonicotinoids on outdoor flowering plants for two years.

The mounting pressure created a need for the pesticide industry to push back with its own research. In fact, one of the greatest victories for the industry was its effort to cultivate the most influential bee scientists in the U.S.

The first wave}_ of headlines in the U.S. about the rapid decline of bees started in 2006 as beekeepers in Pennsylvania reported drastic hive losses. Other beekeepers also reported staggering losses over the winter that year, at an average ranging around 30 percent, wiping out more than a fourth of the 2.4 million colonies in the country.

The mysterious crisis was termed “colony collapse disorder” in the media. Dennis vanEngelsdorp, then-serving as Pennsylvania acting chief apiary inspector and studying at Penn State University, found himself at the center of the story. “It’s just causing so much death so quickly that it’s startling,” he told the Philadelphia Inquirer. He started with autopsies of dead bees in Pennsylvania, but soon came into contact with beekeepers in Georgia, Florida, and California reporting similar losses.

A team of other prominent bee experts, including vanEngelsdorp, Washington State University entomologist Walter “Steve” Sheppard, and other prominent scientists worked to investigate the crisis. “This is like C.S.I. for agriculture,” said one of the academics on the project, Columbia University’s W. Ian Lipkin, in an interview with the New York Times.

VanEngelsdorp, alongside Jerry Hayes, then-Florida chief apiary inspector and president of the Apiary Inspectors of America, pioneered an effort to survey beekeepers throughout the country to track colony collapse disorder. Bees were sent to his lab and examined for cause of death. VanEngelsdorp started a foundation, the Bee Informed Partnership, to formalize the survey and continue research into possible factors for the disorder.

In interviews with national news outlets, local media, and television stations across the country, vanEngelsdorp became an overnight celebrity. In 2008, he appeared prominently in the award-winning documentary “Silence of the Bees,” depicted as leading the research effort around collapsing bee colonies, and also recorded a well-received TED Talk, “A Plea for Bees.”

In his TED Talk, vanEngelsdorpstressed that honeybee colonies could be rebuilt, given that commercial bee farmers can split a hive into two or buy queens through the mail. But the danger of collapsing bee colonies went beyond the European honeybee, which is used widely for pollinating American agriculture. Native bees were also disappearing at an alarming rate, with no commercial effort to revive them. Bats were disappearing too, he lamented, “and there’s no money to study that.”

“Imagine if every one of three cows died. The National Guard would be out,” vanEngelsdorp said in 2013.

The following year, in September 2009, vanEngelsdorp appeared alongside Pettis at Apimondia. During this period in his career, vanEngelsdorp generally suggested in media interviews that several factors were likely to blame for bee loss. The decline, he told a local paper in Missouri in 2007, could be attributed to “mites and associated diseases, some unknown pathogenic disease and pesticide contamination or poisoning.” The research he presented at Apimondia concluded that “interactions between pesticides and pathogens could be a major contributor to increased mortality of honey bee colonies.”

In the following years, vanEngelsdorp used his voice to dismiss concerns with neonics in the media. His shift in rhetoric coincided with a push by the pesticide industry, in response to rising calls for pesticide restrictions to stem bee losses, began a push to rebrand itself as bee-friendly.

In 2013, he told one reporter, “Imagine if every one of three cows died. The National Guard would be out.” He continued: “Sure, neonics may be a problem some of the time. But not all, or in my humble opinion, most of the time.”

“The jury’s still out,” he told the Raleigh News & Observer, when asked about role of the pesticide in bee decline in 2014. The Associated Press quoted vanEngelsdorpdeclaring, “I am not convinced that neonics are a major driver of colony loss” in 2016. “In many cases, [neonicotinoids] are actually the safest alternative,” he was quoted as saying in another article, expressing skepticism over the push to ban the compound.

When asked about his seeming shift, vanEngelsdorp said in an email that his work focused on honeybees, but he is concerned with the threat posed to other pollinators and insect life. In Maryland, he wrote, high levels of mite infestations “would explain lots of [honey bee] mortality.”

“I should stress that I am speaking about honey bees, not native bees, and the effects of neonics on non-target non-honey bees (Honey bees have a reserve work force that can be lost without consequence as they are social organisms and other non-honey bee bees don’t) is much more pronounced and concerning,” vanEngelsdorp wrote.

Around that time, vanEngelsdorp joined Monsanto’s Honey Bee Advisory Council, a company-backed effort, and appeared at the company’s Honey Bee Health Summit in 2013 as a spokesperson. That same year, Project Apis m., a foundation heavily funded by Bayer, donated to vanEngelsdorp’s nonprofit, the Bee Informed Project, and has since provided at least $700,000 to the lab, according to public tax filings.

In an email, vanEngelsdorp said that although that he has received one grant funding stream from Bayer, that award came in last year and “it would be hard to argue it influenced past work.” The funding from Project Apis m. to vanEngelsdorp’s Bee Informed Project, he added, came from Costco, not the agricultural industry. Other corporate interests, including the Almond Board of California and the General Mills Foundation, have also directly funded the Bee Informed Project.

VanEngelsdorp said that his lab has never received direct funding from pesticide companies.

Bayer, as part of its Healthy Hives 2020 initiative, has dedicated at least $1.3 million to the project in collaboration with Project Apis m., which counts Bayer as one of its largest donors, though the company does not break down individual donor amounts.

The University of Maryland professor also explained that he felt conflicted about joining Monsanto’s advisory board, a position that ended in 2019.

“The purpose of this board is to help guide the development of new tools to help control Varroa, which I think, and the data suggest – are the biggest drivers of loss,” wrote vanEngelsdorp. “So it was a big struggle when I was asked to join the advisory board (which included several beekeepers), because – who wants to have an association with Big Ag?”

“Do I feel conflicted? – all the time,” vanEngelsdorp told The Intercept. ”But do I think my involvement with encouraging the development of a desperately needed new mite control skews my view of drivers of honey [bee] health. No. I think the data is clear.”

He added, “The world is a complicated place. Full of gray. I just have to believe the science will show truth, and hope we can get there by keeping things cordial, and respectful of the idea that people taking different paths towards the same end (save the bees) is not bad.”

“I’m an environmentalist – so have been and continue to be very concerned and vocal about protecting the earth and its biome,” he wrote. “I am certain that in all interviews on this topic I clearly say – the widespread use of neonic coated seeds is a short sighted, wasteful and environmentally unsustainable way of using this product. I strongly advocate for wise use. Use it when you know you need it and not unless you know you do.’ But that quote never gets picked up. But it’s what I think and have thought for a long time.”

Danielle Downey, the executive of Project Apis m., said the group is “transparent about where donated funds come from and what we use them for, keeping in mind donor privacy,” in a statement to The Intercept. “Project Apis m. does keep abreast of the science regarding bee health, which allows us to support industry-relevant projects.”

Downey did not take a position on regulating neonics, and noted that “regarding bans and regulations of pesticides, countries which apply different precautionary and risk assessment paradigms, may reach different outcomes.”

In 2013, vanEngelsdorp also edited a controversial paper authored by a group of consultants that claimed that thiamethoxam, a neonic produced by Syngenta, posed “a low risk to honey bees” when applied to oilseed rape and maize. In a section of its website titled “Bee Decline,” Syngenta cites the study to claim that “there is no direct correlation between neonicotinoid use and poor bee health.”

The paper, which was cited by Syngenta to apply for an exemption in the United Kingdom to the EU’s newly imposed moratorium on neonic products, was later widely panned. In a scathing article for Environmental Sciences Europe, a group of entomologists claimed that the vanEngelsdorp-edited study was not based on “truthful data and methodologies,” arguing that it used seed treatment at lower-than-recommended rates and that the experiment was poorly designed.

“Do I feel conflicted? – all the time,” vanEngelsdorp said. “The world is a complicated place. Full of gray. I just have to believe the science will show truth.

Another group of scientists at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland also eviscerated the vanEngelsdorp-edited paper, noting that it used no formal statistical analysis and came to its conclusion by vaguely inspecting the data. They mocked the method as simply reflecting “the prior beliefs of those involved.” The House of Commons Library, in abriefing paper on neonics, noted that the thiamethoxam study faced criticism for lacking rigor, and that all five of authors of the study “were current or former employees of Syngenta or had been paid by Syngenta for their work.”

VanEngelsdorp also lent his name to a splashy advocacy effort on behalf of the pesticide industry. CropLife America, Bayer, and Syngenta launched the Honey Bee Health Coalition, a new group focused on research into the Varroa mite and other nonpesticide-related causes of bee decline. The group was officially coordinated by the Keystone Policy Center, a supposedly independent third party, in conjunction with beekeeper associations and environmentalists. Records show, however, that the Keystone Policy Center is largely funded by major corporations, including Bayer and Syngenta. And internal documents from the Honey Bee Health Coalition show that its communications to beekeepers were reviewed by its bloc of growers and pesticide company members, including DuPont, CropLife America, Syngenta, and the Agricultural Retailers Association. Farmers and beekeepers paid as little as $500 to join the organization while corporate members paid as high as $100,000 in dues.

Marques Chavez, a spokesperson for the Keystone Policy Center, which organizes the Honey Bee Health Coalition, noted in a statement to The Intercept that the group “supports honey bee health and tackles complex problems in agriculture and beyond by bringing diverse perspectives together.” The statement did not address the proportion of pesticide industry influence, but said that the group maintains a public charter that “outlines the structure and decision-making process utilized by the coalition to identify, refine, and finalize the idea and deliverables that reflect the diverse input and collaborative effort of our members.”

Jerry Hayes, the former Florida apiary inspector, joined Monsanto and became the company’s representative at beekeeper conferences around the country and helped pitch Monsanto’s research into genetic solutions for bees to skeptical beekeepers. Hayes also helped with the launch of the Honey Bee Health Coalition. He recruited vanEngelsdorp to serve as one of the first scientists on the coalition’s steering committee.

They weren’t only ones. The industry also recruited bee industry voices to be the face of the new rebranding. Richard Rogers, an academic consultant and former adjunct professor at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, produced Bayer-backed research in Canada in the early 2000s discounting the dangers posed to bees by neonics applied to potato plants on Prince Edward Island. Rogers was brought on to help lead the Bayer Bee Care initiative when the center was opened in 2012. Dr. Helen Thompson, a leading official environmental official in the United Kingdom who had opposed the E.U.’s directive to suspend the use of neonics,joined Syngenta.

Washington State University entomologist Sheppard was also among the other prominent bee scientists to accept the pesticide industry’s outreach. The same year of the launch of the Honey Bee Health Coalition, Sheppard joined Bayer for a roadshow the company sponsored called the Bee Care Tour. He later joined the company steering committee for its “Healthy Hives 2020” initiative.

Emails obtained by The Intercept show a friendly relationship between the pesticide firms and the recruited academics.

In one exchange, with David Fischer, the manager of Bayer’s Bee Care Center, vanEngelsdorp was asked how to respond to reporters on how to calculate annual hive loss. The Maryland academic suggested a method that diminishes any winter losses of hives by factoring in new hives that have been split off from strong hives, though he noted that such a method “‘lowers’ the loss rate” and has been rejected by European beekeepers.

Daniel Schmehl, an official with Bayer, asked bee scientist Walter “Steve” Sheppard to provide quotes explaining why “the partnership with Bayer Bee Care Center is important for your bee research.”

Screenshot: The Intercept

Daniel Schmehl, an official with Bayer, asked Sheppard to provide quotes explaining why “the partnership with Bayer Bee Care Center is important for your bee research,” as well as other blurbs the company could use. Sheppard appears regularly on Bayer press releases and publications as part of the company’s commitment to bee health.

In another exchange, Rogers, the former adjunct Acadia University professor and now official with Bayer’s Bee Care Center, wrote in 2015 to Sheppard and Jamie Ellis, an associate professor at the University of Florida, to publish a “paper on the definition of a healthy honey bee colony.” Rogersnoted that he had worked on a draft but suggested that, “for the best optics, maybe you or Steve, or someone other than a Bayer staff member should be the lead author.” Ellis agreed and wrote back that he “understood your concern about Bayer staff taking the lead.”

VanEngelsdorp’s shift away from concern about the role of neonics is captured in another documentary about the plight of the bees.

In 2015, the website FiveThirtyEight produced a mini-documentary series, including a feature on the “Fight to Save the Mighty Honeybee.” The film, which was accepted into the Sundance Film Festival, traces vanEngelsdorp in his lab and in the field, exclusively discussing the Varroa mite. Unlike his previous appearance in documentaries about bee decline, the video made no mention of neonics or any other pesticide stress to bee health.

Bayer was thrilled with the documentary. Sarah Myers, an event manager with the chemical company, asked vanEngelsdorp for permission to feature the video on the company’s website. VanEngelsdorp politely let the company know that he did not own the copyright and referred Myers to the producers at FiveThirtyEight’s parent company. Bayer’s Bee Care Center showcased the film.

In an exchange with Paul Hoekstra, a regulatory official with Syngenta, vanEngelsdorp was thanked for agreeing to speak to John Brown, a Canadian attorney helping fight a contentious lawsuit over the registration of neonics.

“I think they were using this group as a PR advantage, but by the same token we have no money in the beekeeping industry,” Hayes said.

The relationship has continued. Earlier this month, the American Beekeeping Federation hosted its 2020 convention. The largest sponsor of the event was Bayer, which showcased a series of talks at the conference to tout the company’s commitment to bee health. Sheppard was featured in a Bayer promotional video at the event. Among the presentations was an address by vanEngelsdorp about mites.

“My association with Bayer has had no influence on my research focus nor my research,” said Sheppard, in a statement to The Intercept that detailed his work helping Project Apis m. identify research proposals for honeybee health using over $1 million in funding from Bayer.

“I cannot speak for Bayer – but the projects funded with their money and administered through Project Apis m. appear to be completely unrelated to any effort to ‘prevent the restriction’ of the use of neonicotinoids,” wrote Sheppard. “I am not naïve enough to think such a major company does not have their own agenda for the promotion or support of their insect control products. However, and emphatically, in the case of the funds distributed by Project Apis m., no such connection was apparent to either Project Apis m. or myself.”

Jerry Hayes retired two years ago from Monsanto after the project he was hired to promote “just didn’t work out.” He now works as an editor at Bee Culture magazine.

In an interview, Hayes said that he was proud of the work the Honey Bee Health Coalition achieved, including the development of guides for beekeepers to manage Varroa infestations. And he views the effort to bring various stakeholders together in one coalition as a unique accomplishment. But he said that pesticide corporations were largely in the drivers’ seat.

“I think they were using this group as a PR advantage, but by the same token we have no money in the beekeeping industry,” said Hayes.

“These guys were funding the organization, they were funding meetings, all of us knew there were perhaps ulterior motives,” he noted. “Without those resources, we wouldn’t be down the road a little bit to making honeybees a little less endangered.”

Hayes said he had followed the controversies around neonics and was concerned about the growing number of studies showing the threat to nontarget insects. Though he’s concerned that restricting the chemical could reintroduce older pesticides with a greater risk to mammals, he added that the drive for profits have fueled the overuse of neonics.

“It all comes down to money. Bayer is taking care of stockholders,” said Hayes.

Hayes said he doesn’t believe vanEngelsdorp’s views on pesticides have been shaped by his ties to industry.

“He’s a good scientist,” said Hayes. “Science changes over time. I think that science progresses and data shows different things at times, but I don’t think Dennis is influenced by money from these other people.”

“But,” Hayes added, when “chemical companies want to support Dennis because if he can come up with solutions to honey bee health, it takes pressure off of them, doesn’t it?”

The owner of J&P Apiary and Gentzel’s Bees, Honey and Pollination Company, works with his honeybees on May 19, 2015, in Homestead, Florida.

Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Despite a sophisticated}_ lobbying campaign to defeat neonic restrictions, Maryland was one of the few states to pass a law banning neonic-based products in consumer products. Industry threw its weight against even this minor bill, which exempts neonics in landscaping and agriculture.

And vanEngelsdorp played a prominent role in nearly defeating the legislation.

In January 2016, the University of Maryland, College Park campus held a summit bringing corporate representatives and researchers together to talk about solutions to the bee crisis. Maryland, California, Massachusetts, and other states were considering restrictions on neonic products. The Obama administration had encouraged an approach that brought together a wide array of stakeholders, known as the Managed Pollinator Protection Plan, or MP3, method of resolving the issue.

State officials tapped the Keystone Policy Center — the same chemical industry-funded nonprofit in charge of CropLife America’s Honey Bee Health Coalition — to manage the process.

VanEngelsdorp, addressing the summit, presided over a PowerPoint that listed a Monsanto affiliation in small type at the bottom, according to Luke Goembel, an official with the Central Maryland Beekeepers Association.

The presentation, said Goembel, made the case that “Varroa mites, not pesticides, were the primary cause of hive losses” and included “an image of a vampire baby to represent a Varroa mite.” VanEngelsdorp, he said, made a mocking comparison, showing a graph with a chart showing the rise of pirate next to a chart showing the increasing loss of hives over time, an “attempt to present the concept ‘correlation does not prove causation,’” and to “ridicule the concern over increasing pesticide use.”

“I was shocked,” Goembel said, “because the journals are full of research that describes many avenues by which pesticides, especially neonicotinoids, almost certainly lead to hive losses.”

The summit included a broad range of speakers, but beekeeper activists complained the discussion was dominated by pesticide makers.

Speaker after speaker claimed that hive loss was only “due to Varroa mites, not pesticides,” according to Bonnie Raindrop, another official with the Central Maryland Beekeepers Association, who attended the event. Only a small percentage of the attendees, Raindrop said, were beekeepers, and those who did make it were separated from one another. The rest, she said, “were people who knew nothing about bees,” including lobbyists, lawn care professionals, and representatives of agribusiness.

“They had a very controlled format,” said Raindrop, “with one beekeeper at each table, the rest industry people, and we were asked to make recommendations for what the MP3 policy should look like.”

Both Raindrop and Goembel brought up the role of neonicotinoids and other systemic pesticides killing bees, but said other participants at the summit shot them down.

The Keystone Policy Center moderators kept the conversation focused largely on mites, “and said beekeepers weren’t doing their due diligence to control mites using chemicals,” she added.

Asked about the beekeeper’s criticism of the Maryland summit, the Keystone Policy Center’s spokesperson, Chavez, said in a statement that the event “involved outreach to a wide variety of stakeholders” and encouraged the public to view the final report produced from the event.

One month after the summit, legislators in Annapolis, Maryland, took up a bill to ban consumer neonics. During the House of Delegates debate over the legislation, a panel of opponents — including representatives from Republican Gov. Larry Hogan’s administration, pesticide industry representatives, and the owner of commercial nursery — repeatedly cited the survey taken by the Keystone Policy Center at the summit as evidence that researchers did not think pesticides were a problem.

Several cited vanEngelsdorp by name, claiming the University of Maryland professor had provided research showing that neonicotinoids did not pose a threat to Maryland hives.

At the hearing, state delegate Clarence Lam, a Democrat, noted that hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific articles identified neonicotinoids as a prime driver of bee decline and scoffed at the industry attempt to use the MP3 summit as a counterexample.

“Presenting data like this is pretty specious,” Lam said. “It’s marginally better than presenting data from a Facebook poll and saying this is what the data shows and this is what the science shows.”

In the end, the industry blitz failed, and, later in 2016, Maryland passed the Pollinator Protection Act. A similar measure passed that year in Connecticut to limit the use of neonics on flowering plants, and last year, Vermont enacted restrictions on consumer use of neonics.

Regulators in Oregon, after outcry following an incident in which 50,000 bees suddenly died in a Target parking lot as the result of the spraying of a neonic-based pesticide, have moved to prevent the use of neonics on linden trees. But in most of the country, there are largely no limitations on the chemical. California regulators also announced an effort to freeze new applications by pesticide companies that would expand the use of neonics.

Gary Ruskin, the co-director of U.S. Right to Know, a watchdog group following pesticide industry influence, which shared some of the emails obtained via records requests between industry and academics with The Intercept, said, “vanEnglesdorp’s close ties to the pesticide industry raise serious questions about the worth and reliability of his research.”

“As companies are increasingly threatened by scientific findings, they search for ways to blunt any independent science that may detract from profits,” Ruskin said. “One great way to do this is to co-opt scientists from public universities, who typically enjoy the public’s trust.”

In one of the emails revealed by Ruskin’s group, vanEngelsdorp wrote to Fischer, the manager of Bayer’s Bee Care Center, apparently irritated that Bayer had published confidential research from his lab, and claiming the data had been misused and posted without his permission.

“Tech team data is confidential so it should not be published — especially by a chemical company!” vanEngelsdorp wrote.

In a response, Fischer removed the line from Bayer’s blog. He also reminded the University of Maryland academic that Bayer had invested significant financial resources into the relationship and made it a priority for the company.

“We value our work with you and other researchers and stakeholders who have committed themselves to addressing this significant problem,” Fischer wrote.

“As you are aware, perception is everything,” vanEngelsdorp responded.

*Nick Surgey contributed research.

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