Center for Food Safety Condemns Lack of Action on Pesticides in Draft MAHA Commission Report

Late last week, a leaked draft of the second report from the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission was released. Center for Food Safety (CFS) is extremely disappointed with the draft, which lacks concrete or meaningful recommendations to improve pesticide regulation. The MAHA Commission was supposed to identify and address causes of chronic disease in children, with a focus on limiting exposure to pesticides and ultra-processed foods, but it appears the MAHA Commission has capitulated to the pressure of agriculture lobbyists and the pesticide industry in its latest report.

In the first MAHA Commission report from May, the Commission explicitly identified impacts of pesticides like glyphosate and atrazine on children's health. Yet the leaked draft of the August report offered zero follow-up. Instead, there is only a single line on pesticides generally in the draft, which instructs the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to "ensure that the public has awareness and confidence in EPA's robust pesticide review procedures." However, recent news does not instill confidence in the EPA's review procedures. Since the release of the May report, EPA has proposed to greenlight several concerning new pesticides, and to re-approve the volatile herbicide dicamba for the third time, despite courts twice already holding its prior approvals unlawful. Over 1,000 scientists were fired from the EPA's Office of Research and Development in March. EPA's own federal oversight office highlighted the politicization of science at the agency during the first Trump administration.

"The MAHA Commission has turned its back on Americans desperate for action to combat the overuse of pesticides. Despite the Commission's previous recognition of the overuse of pesticides in America's industrial food system and the potential harm these toxins are causing children, public health, and the environment, they have now capitulated to the pressure of agriculture lobbyists and the pesticide industry. The health of our children and our farmworkers cannot wait around for the Commission to find its way. The Center for Food Safety will continue to undertake legal actions to push the EPA to actually do its job of protecting human health and the environment from the harms of pesticides," said Sylvia Wu, Co-Executive Director of the Center for Food Safety.

CFS is the nation's leading public interest law firm working to protect human health and the environment from the harms of industrial agriculture and has worked diligently for over 25 years to limit the impact of toxic pesticides on America's food system. Our scientific reports first highlighted pesticides' driving role in the species extinction crisis, like the decline of monarch butterflies. Our public interest litigation is responsible for precedent-setting decisions regarding pesticide regulation, and for for the cancellations of numerous notorious insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides.

A groundbreaking 2024 settlement required EPA for the first time to test all pesticides for their endocrine-disrupting effects, which can impair fertility and immune function and cause cancer. In 2022, we achieved a historic victory against glyphosate when the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with CFS and overturned the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) decision that glyphosate was safe for humans and imperiled wildlife. As a result, EPA lacks a lawful human health safety finding for glyphosate to support its ongoing use. Another sweeping victory was a federal court revoking approval of the notoriously volatile pesticide dicamba, which has caused unprecedented damage to millions of acres of crops and wild plants. CFS is now working to challenge dicamba's recently proposed re-registration. Every third bite of food requires bee pollination, and when bee populations began to plummet in part due to a new form of insecticide called neonicotinoids, CFS led the first successful cases challenging their approvals. And for several years CFS has been challenging in court the highly controversial and dangerous herbicide atrazine, a known hormone-disruptor, with exposure linked to birth defects, multiple cancers, and fertility problems.