Last month, the Supreme Court sided with the maker of Roundup weed killer in a case that has revealed limits of the MAHA movement’s support for the Trump administration.
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The case, Monsanto Company v. Durnell, concerned a dispute over cancer warning labels. John Durnell, a community gardener in St. Louis, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma after decades of using Roundup in his work. He sued Bayer, Monsanto’s parent company, for failing to disclose that glyphosate, the active ingredient in the weed killer, is likely a carcinogenic agent. The Environmental Protection Agency has found that glyphosate is unlikely to cause cancer, but the complainants in hundreds of thousands of “failure to warn” lawsuits, Durnell’s most prominent among them, have alleged otherwise, and Bayer has agreed to pay over $18 billion in settlements to date. A Missouri state court awarded Durnell a $1.25 million settlement in 2019.
The Supreme Court reversed that decision in a 7-2 ruling. Writing for the majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that because the EPA has not concluded that glyphosate is a carcinogen, federal regulation does not require Bayer to put a warning label on Roundup containers, and in fact prohibits it from doing so when those warnings would contradict the EPA’s judgment on its risks. Further, he held, the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act of 1972 preempts Durnell, or anyone else, from asking states to impose warning label requirements on herbicides. Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson dissented, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch.
The case’s outcome revealed a fissure between MAHA and MAGA that has been widening over the past two years. Those who want to “make America healthy again” were an important part of President Donald Trump’s 2024 coalition. But since Trump took office, many in the movement have felt betrayed by the president as he has consistently sided against MAHA and its interests. Whether it be food dyes or ultraprocessed foods, the Trump administration has preferred to champion market-driven, voluntary pledges such as cereal companies committing to remove artificial colors, where MAHA would prefer more sweeping and binding change.
As MAHA sees it, the administration has instead opened the floodgates. Earlier this year, Trump signed an executive order intended to ramp up glyphosate promotion and backed the EPA’s approval of new pesticides. The week after the Durnell ruling, the administration attempted to throw a bone to MAHA concerns by touting, without expanding funding for, its regenerative agriculture pilot program. But the executive order offered a squishy definition of regenerative farming — and one that left room for the use of glyphosate. Marion Nestle, a prominent critic of government food policy, noted in her blog Food Politics that the Supreme Court ruling was “un-MAHA,” adding that “if a farm uses glyphosate, it’s not regenerative.” The order, she said, was “really about biofuel production.” After these repeated disappointments, this ruling could be the breaking point.
In the Durnell case, the Trump administration sided with Bayer and got exactly what it wanted. Solicitor General John Sauer wrote in an amicus brief that if the Missouri ruling were allowed to stand, it could create a regulation nightmare, a “State-by-State cacophony” wherein 50 different legislatures could dream up 50 different sets of labeling requirements. “If labeling tells users that a pesticide likely causes cancer in Missouri, might cause cancer in Illinois, definitely causes cancer in Tennessee, and is anyone’s guess in Iowa, users will not know whom to believe,” he wrote. “One State’s requirements could even lead to liability in another.” Better, he concluded, to let the EPA call the shots and make “considered judgments about what warnings are actually necessary to protect public health, and any hope of uniformity.” Even though the World Health Organization has called the world’s most widely used weed killer “probably carcinogenic,” the EPA, on this view, has the power to silence MAHA’s concerns by saying instead of “follow the science,” “follow the regulations.”
After the court’s decision, MAHA’s condemnations of the administration’s support for Bayer were swift. “What happened to America First?” asked Alex Clark, a popular MAHA influencer and host of the podcast Culture Apothecary. “For an administration that promised to take on corporate capture and Make America Healthy Again, this is a STUNNING betrayal.” Another MAHA influencer, the toxicologist Alexandra Munoz, wrote on Instagram: “The DOJ’s support of this case has betrayed the American people.”
Underneath the outrage is the hard fact that the Supreme Court’s decision closes a legal avenue for MAHA in pesticide disputes and opens a path for future pesticides, and many other products subject to health concerns, to use this ruling as a liability shield. If the regulatory rule is that states cannot issue warning labels in contradiction of federal guidelines, then many other cases like Durnell’s fail immediately, at least on the “failure to warn” argument. And if Roundup says it’s just following the EPA’s rules, then other weed and bug killers can say the same.
Whither MAHA, then? The author Vani Hari, a critic of the food industry known as “Food Babe,” urged Congress to revise its regulations in light of the court’s judgment. “This decision will have detrimental impacts for our children and next generations to come,” she told the Washington Examiner. “Congress must act now to make it illegal for pesticide companies to poison us without recourse.”
Of course, the administration’s support for Bayer is not solely about asserting the EPA’s dominance over state regulators. It is about ensuring that large corporations are free to operate without government interference. Earlier this year, when Trump signed an executive order prioritizing production of glyphosate, he called it “a cornerstone of this nation’s agricultural productivity.” The order provoked outrage from the MAHA movement and disappointment from its leader, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health and human services secretary. Kennedy, who had spent years battling Monsanto in court over glyphosate, wrote a lengthy, tortured statement after Trump signed the order. “Unfortunately, our agricultural system depends heavily on these chemicals,” he said, and ultimately backed the administration’s push to increase production.
Glyphosate is one of the most widely studied pesticides in the world, and the EPA and European Union, among other organizations, have approved it as safe enough for human use. And yet its use has been contentious for decades. Kavanaugh, in his opinion, skirts the question of whether or not it actually does cause cancer — the case was not about that question, after all — but in recent years, evidence has emerged that glyphosate in fact could pose more risks to human health than the EPA acknowledges. In 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer released a study, which Durnell said spurred him to sue, claiming that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic to humans.” While the EPA, in its review of the studies on glyphosate, has found it to be safe when “used in accordance with its current label,” that decision does not reflect scientific consensus. In fact, the EPA has changed its tune on the chemical: Eleven years after Roundup hit the market in 1974, it said glyphosate had “carcinogenic potential,” a classification it revised six years later based on further “evidence of non-carcinogenicity.” After facing a firehose of lymphoma lawsuits, it removed glyphosate from its home and garden products in 2023.
Nor does the EPA acknowledge the risk of bias encouraged by corporate research funding — a common MAHA complaint about the agriculture industry. Late last year, the journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology retracted an influential study on the safety of glyphosate from 2000, which the EPA had used in making its original regulatory determination. The reason? The study was in large part written by scientists on Monsanto’s payroll.
Kennedy famously won a multimillion-dollar settlement over glyphosate concerns in 2018. The retraction of the EPA study and the chance to argue at the Supreme Court should have been his moment in the sun. On the day of oral arguments in April, there was a MAHA rally behind the court. But Kennedy was nowhere to be found.
Instead, the rally had the feeling of an ad hoc gathering. There were about 200 people in attendance — mothers, social media influencers, farmers, fashion designers, and fishermen — joined in a quixotic quest to fix America’s agricultural system. Some carried signs demonizing Bayer. Others wore T-shirts proclaiming their commitment to healthy food. All joined in a chant, started by the rally’s organizers: “People versus poison! People versus poison! People versus poison!”
These were people dissatisfied and feeling as if their voices had not been heard. Though MAHA swung in Trump’s direction in 2024, the movement’s energy could easily be repurposed to another champion — if it can find one.
Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) is aware of this fact, and he clearly believes that he could be the new face of the movement. The lawmaker, who is up for reelection this year, delivered his best impression of a fire sermon at the rally, presenting his own long fight against the likes of Bayer and Monsanto as a patriotic fight to secure “liberty and justice for all.”
“Don’t let the false narrative of tribal politics distract you from the truth,” Booker shouted. “This is not a Left or Right issue. This is a right or wrong issue. This is an issue that belies the failed politics of our present and calls our country to a greater moral imagination.”
But what is that greater moral imagination? For Booker, it appears to be a list of platitudes and hackneyed phrases about “our food system” and “our democracy.” Other MAHA luminaries were also less than inspiring. For Clark, who was present at the rally, it involves patronizing the right trendy eateries. At one point, she recommended a spot on Capitol Hill to attendees: “the bee’s knees of MAHA restaurants.” And for Hari, who helped organize the rally, it involves petitioning your representatives. After her speech in front of the Supreme Court, she invited all attendees to bring the fight to the Capitol, where Congress was deliberating over the farm bill. As with the Durnell case, there were many things in the bill with which MAHA had beef, chief among them a provision to shield pesticide makers from lawsuits.
“While they’re doing these arguments inside the Supreme Court, in the building right across the street over there, the Capitol, they’re trying to” — she paused to pick a printable word — “mess it up so that we cannot sue these companies when they cause cancer.”
Hari invited everyone present to take the building by storm: “We’re going to bombard it. We’re going to be there. Our legislators need to know we will not stand for this. It’s people versus poison!”
And with that, she led the crowd across the street, chanting the whole way. But they quickly ran into a problem. They had no protest permit. About a dozen Capitol Hill police officers on bikes confronted the protesters, and one of them, leading Hari over to a tree, explained the rules to her. When she returned to the group, she was sheepish, but not defeated. Although they could not chant in the building, could not bring in their signs, and could only enter two by two, she said that MAHA would still make its complaints heard.
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It was a deflating end to the day, but Hari tried to put on a brave face. “This is where the march ends today,” she said. “This is not where our fight ends.”
Hari was right. MAHA’s fight seems hardly to have begun. A few days later, the House voted to remove the pro-pesticide provisions in the farm bill, marking a win for MAHA and moving the battle lines to the Senate. But with the Supreme Court’s decision, Kennedy’s absentee leadership, and the Trump administration’s antipathy, it is uphill all the way.
Hannah Rowan is managing editor of Modern Age.
