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cancer
Bayer Continues Push to 'Close the Door' on Glyphosate Victims at US Supreme Court
"Bayer is intent on preserving its right to harm at all costs—a pursuit the Trump administration is all too willing to endorse," said a Food and Water Watch campaigner.
Apr 27, 2026
As pesticide critics held a "The People v. Poison" rally outside the US Supreme Court on Monday, the justices heard arguments in Monsanto Company v. Durnell, a case whose conclusion is expected to have sweeping implications for cancer patients trying to take on the Roundup maker—now owned by Bayer—in the country's legal system.
The case stems from John Durnell's 2019 lawsuit against Monsanto in Missouri state court, alleging that exposure to the herbicide Roundup—whose active ingredient is glyphosate—caused his non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a type of blood cancer. A jury found that the company failed to warn users of the risks associated with the weedkiller, and awarded Durnell $1.25 million in damages.
Bayer argued before the Supreme Court on Monday that Durnell—and others like him—should not be able to bring such a suit because the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act preempts state rules for labeling pesticides when the Environmental Protection Agency doesn't require a cancer warning. Bayer and the EPA continue to insist that glyphosate is safe, despite the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classifying it as probably carcinogenic to humans over a decade ago.
As The Associated Press and Reuters reported, the justices appeared "divided" on Monday, with the AP noting that several "seemed sympathetic to the company's argument that it can't be sued under state law because federal regulators have found Roundup likely doesn't cause cancer. Others, though, grilled attorneys about whether that wrongly stops states from responding to changing research."
Patti Goldman, senior attorney at Earthjustice—which filed an amicus brief in this case on behalf of farmworker organizations—said in a statement that "questions from the justices recognized that the Environmental Protection Agency approves pesticide labels based on the evidence before the agency at a single moment in time, but that evidence can become outdated as real-world exposure grows and scientific studies document resulting harms."
"Federal law requires the manufacturers to update their labels to provide sufficient warnings and directions to protect the public," Goldman stressed, "and state failure-to-warn claims reinforce that obligation—while ensuring children, families, and workers have a path to seek remedies for the harm they suffer."
Other groups that have submitted amicus briefs include Environmental Protection Network—which is made up of former EPA staffers—and the Center for Food Safety, one of the advocacy organizations that joined the rally outside the court. The event was also attended by members of Congress from both major political parties.
"This isn't left v. right—it's right v. wrong," said US Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ). "Big corporations and their lobbyists have captured both parties, putting profits over our families' health. I've fought Monsanto and Bayer for years, and just filed an amicus brief to the Supreme Court to protect our right to sue them for illnesses caused by their products."
Despite President Donald Trump's campaign promise to "Make America Healthy Again," the Republican recently issued an executive order mandating the production of glyphosate, and the US Department of Justice has sided with Bayer in this case—part of a broader trend of his administration serving the pesticide industry's interests.
"Monsanto Company v. Durnell will have enormous consequences for environmental health litigation," Food and Water Watch legal director Tarah Heinzen said Monday. "Bayer is intent on preserving its right to harm at all costs—a pursuit the Trump administration is all too willing to endorse. This case threatens to close the courthouse doors to the many Americans harmed by pesticides."
Heinzen argued that "should the Supreme Court hold that the Environmental Protection Agency's failed pesticide regulatory scheme preempts state failure to warn lawsuits, leaving tens of thousands of sick Americans without legal recourse, Trump and his industry-dominated EPA will be to blame."
"This high stakes case should be a wake-up call for Congress to act," the campaigner added. "Industrial agriculture's pesticide addiction is poisoning America. Congress must pass the Pesticide Injury Accountability Act to safeguard access to justice for all harmed by toxic pesticides."
As The American Prospect noted Monday in its "three-part series on Bayer's crusade for immunity from Roundup-related cancer claims," the company "is now aggressively lobbying Congress to permanently close the door" on the weedkiller's victims, and managed to get an immunity provision included in the 2026 Farm Bill that advanced out of the US House Agriculture Committee last month.
After joining the rally at the Supreme Court on Monday, Friends of the Earth (FOE) US led a protest outside Bayer's headquarters in downtown Washington, DC, delivering hundreds of thousands of petition signatures are calling on the company to phase out the production of toxic pesticides, including glyphosate and neonicotinoids.
"People are sick and tired of being exposed to toxic pesticides while pesticide corporations shirk responsibility," said FOE senior campaigner Sarah Starman, who spoke at the rally. "Bayer and other pesticide companies should not be allowed to profit from chemicals that threaten our health, harm our environment, and undermine the future of our food system. The hundreds of people who rallied outside the Supreme Court and the 200,000 people who signed comments to Bayer are demanding change."
In the leadup to the arguments before the nation's top court, the Environmental Working Group last week sued the Trump administration at the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, accusing the EPA of unlawfully delaying its response to an EWG petition seeking stronger restrictions on glyphosate.
"The EPA's silence leaves families in the dark and falls far short of its responsibility to protect public health," declared EWG president and co-founder Ken Cook. "It's time for the agency to stop stalling and do its job."Keep ReadingShow Less
Trump Joins the War on Cancer... on the Side of Cancer
Nothing can compare to the scale and breadth of Trump 2.0’s across-the-board evisceration of every part of the government that helps with cancer prevention and treatment.
Apr 23, 2026
Last week marked one year of me being cancer free. I’ve shared parts of the story of my excruciating recovery on a couple occasions. Still, it’s been truly surreal to embark on this journey back to health while being inundated with report after report of Trump administration policies that seem intent on increasing the suffering caused by cancer. Where normal governments seek to protect people through research, medical innovation, and funding for early treatment and prevention, this administration has slashed research into cancer, cut funding for medical care, and moved to relax standards on how much exposure to carcinogens companies are allowed to inflict on surrounding communities. This is, in short, a pro-cancer government.
Every administration has been guilty of taking actions that jeopardized public health, but there is simply nothing that can compare to the scale and breadth of Trump 2.0’s across-the-board evisceration of every part of the government that helps with cancer prevention and treatment. For half a century, the United States waged a War on Cancer. Since January 2025, it has instead waged war on cancer’s victims.
Cutting Cancer Research
The most obvious part of the Trump administration’s war on cancer patients is the frontal assault on research seeking to develop new screenings, treatments, and, hopefully, cures for an array of cancers.
On January 21, 2025, his first full day back in office, President Donald Trump imposed a bevy of restrictions on the National Institutes of Health (NIH), including functionally freezing external communications, grant review, and employee travel. By executive fiat, Trump and his right hand man-domestic policy puppet master Russell Vought delayed the disbursement of the NIH’s $47 billion in research funds, including $7 billion under the aegis of the National Cancer Institute (NCI). This consequently forced a pause on the review and approval of new clinical oncology trials. At the end of his second week in office, Trump mandated an instant 15% cap on NIH grant overhead, effectively demanding that the agency spend $4 billion less than planned. After freezing funding until the start of February, the NIH then began ruthlessly, frequently illegally (according to multiple federal court decisions) terminating grants; more than 1,800 were ended between February and June. And while courts have restored many of the improperly terminated grants, there’s a lot less recourse for new grants that are not being issued, leaving many research labs across the country, “running on fumes,” as The Washington Post described it. According to the Post’s analysis, NIH grants this year have fallen by over 50%.
The current suits in the White House would like you to believe the idea of a moonshot to treat cancer and the usage of words like “woman” in scientific research is more controversial than the erosion of decades of medical research and mass defunding of investment in curing one of the most omnipresent diseases in human history.
From the start of this term, the administration has also censored the production and dissemination of federal health research from agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the NIH. This includes illegally scrubbing swathes of publicly available data and web resources and requiring approval from the administration for CDC scientists to publish in external journals. The CDC mandated that no research publication was to use a list of supposedly “DEI” terms, including “LGBTQ” and “biologically female.” In other instances, any inclusion of the word “race,” “gender,” “sex,” “pregnancy,” or even “woman” was grounds for censorship. The result has been a chilling of important investigations that impact how we treat cancer; the type of tumor I had (called a carcinoid) occurs most often in older women.
The CDC, though, would not let a researcher publish that last sentence, if it had its way.
On April 1 2025, four NIH institute directors and another acting director were placed on leave. By late April, the chaos of a rampaging DOGE and mass layoffs had already forced out at least 2,500 staff (more than 10% of the agency’s 20,000 headcount) including two dozen of the 320 in-house research physicians at the NIH Clinical Center. After some of the internal administration restrictions were eased, researchers were still dealing with massive backlogs for basic lab equipment. That May, the administration sent a stop work order to the SMART IRB system, an NIH-funded initiative that streamlined institutional review board approval for clinical trials used by more than 1,300 institutions. A career researcher at NIH told Science that “however bad everyone on the outside thinks it is, it is a million times worse.”
All in all, the NIH has seen a proposed 44% funding cut, with the NCI facing a 37% cut. And it isn’t just NIH; there have been major reductions in cancer research funding from the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs as well. A $1.5 billion Pentagon-directed health research grant fund, about half of which was devoted for cancer research, was slashed by 57%; funding for kidney, pancreatic, and lung cancer were zeroed out. At the VA, DOGE deployed an inaccurate data tool that terminated numerous grants, including one gene sequencing device that was being used to research cancer treatments.
According to STAT, the term “Cancer Moonshot” is now considered “controversial” at NIH, presumably because it was a Biden initiative. It’s difficult to imagine a more appropriate encapsulation of our ongoing reality: The current suits in the White House would like you to believe the idea of a moonshot to treat cancer and the usage of words like “woman” in scientific research is more controversial than the erosion of decades of medical research and mass defunding of investment in curing one of the most omnipresent diseases in human history.
Cuts, Not Cures
The war on cancer patients extends far beyond the scientific agencies. A number of agencies are also rolling back environmental and workplace safety regulations that protect us from cancer.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) alone is rolling back limits on a range of carcinogens including formaldehyde, air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions (which include formaldehyde, nitrogen oxide, arsenic, sulfur, and other carcinogenic compounds), asbestos, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (also called PFAS or forever chemicals), and vinyl chloride. In a triumphant press release, the Trump EPA celebrated its moves to deregulate a host of chemicals, including dangerous air particulate (called PM 2.5), coal ash, and oil and gas wastewater, all of which are carcinogenic. The EPA also recertified Monsanto’s weedkiller Dicamba, which has been linked to higher risk of liver cancer and leukemia (and also banned twice by federal courts already). One of the chemical industry alums tapped to lead the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, Nancy Beck, is known for pushing for the rollback of bans on carcinogenic solvents. To top it all off, the agency is also down 25% of its staff, so it would be poorly positioned to enforce what standards survive the regulation purge.
Elsewhere, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has decimated the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), terminating 85% of its workforce. NIOSH conducted research on how exposure to dangerous chemicals impacted workers’ health, including studying cancer risk among miners and firefighters. The database tracking cancer in firefighters ended enrollment. NIOSH was instrumental in identifying now iconic toxic substances, including carcinogens like asbestos and ethylene oxide, and helping to develop federal workplace safety rules based on those findings.
Even students are being readily placed in harm’s way; the administration’s attack on clean energy programs has blocked school districts’ efforts to replace their diesel buses, and their cancer-causing exhaust, with electric ones. The Department of Interior has announced its intent to bring back the glory days of coal mining, despite coal exhaust spewing toxic air pollutants. To this end, the administration is exempting coal-fired power plants from upgraded air quality regulations. The administration has exempted around 100 industrial sites from Biden-era regulation of cancer-causing air pollutants.
Cartoonish Cruelty
Those are just two fronts in the federal government’s deeply disturbing war on cancer victims. Some 2 million Americans get cancer every year, with more than 600,000 dying from the disease. Thousands upon thousands more will be driven into both of those camps, from all of the policies I’ve mentioned and many, many more. Cuts to the Mine Safety and Health Administration and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Food and Drug Administration’s Food Inspection Service, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which runs an air quality evaluation program that helps to apprise Americans of how safe it is to be outdoors for extended periods, leave all of us more in danger of facing cancer. Medicaid and Medicare cuts, the gutting of consumer protection bodies, and the revolving door with Big Pharma mean that we’ll pay more if we do.
Against this backdrop, the Trump administration sought to burnish its nonexistent cancer-busting image by announcing a $50 million initiative to deploy AI to fight pediatric cancer. The big shiny figure is really a drop in the bucket in terms of impact. Worse, its part and parcel of the White House’s naked embrace of the AI-hype that is driving an industrial buildout that itself causes cancer.
The only logical conclusion to glean from the simultaneous destruction of cancer research, ripping up of the rules and agencies that protect us from it, and willful zeal for fossil fuels (often wrapped up with AI-mania via the data center build out) and exempting them from air quality oversight is that this is a pro-cancer administration. They admitted as much when news broke before Trump was even inaugurated that his EPA would no longer tally the human cost of air pollution.
Whether it’s counted or not, though, it is there. The type of cancer I had is a “mild” one; I still lost a lung, had a vocal cord paralyzed, spent months barely able to get through a day, and still get winded easily. The official position of the US government appears to be that more people should have to endure that.
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Citing Child Cancer Risk, Lawsuit Targets Trump EPA Over Glyphosate
"The EPA's silence leaves families in the dark and falls far short of its responsibility to protect public health," said the Environmental Working Group's president.
Apr 21, 2026
Just days before the US Supreme Court is set to hear arguments related to glyphosate's health risks, the Environmental Working Group on Tuesday sued the Trump administration for unlawfully delaying its response to an EWG petition seeking stronger restrictions on "the most widely used herbicide in the United States and globally."
The filing at the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit calls out the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for failing to act on evidence that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup, "is exposing infants and young children to harmful levels through everyday foods."
EWG and its co-petitioners filed a formal administrative petition under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act in 2018, during President Donald Trump's first term, and amended it the following year. They want the EPA to revoke or modify the glyphosate policy for oats, so it's stricter, and restrict its use as a pre-harvest drying agent.
"Congress required EPA to ensure that pesticide residues in food are safe, with particular protection for children," the new filing states. "Yet, more than seven years after being presented with substantial scientific evidence that the current tolerance for glyphosate in oats may not meet that standard, EPA has failed to make any final, reviewable determination."
EWG president and co-founder Ken Cook declared in a Tuesday statement that "parents shouldn't have to second-guess whether everyday foods like cereal and snack bars are putting their children at risk of cancer."
"The EPA's silence leaves families in the dark and falls far short of its responsibility to protect public health," he continued. "It's time for the agency to stop stalling and do its job."
The World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as "probably carcinogenic" to humanity over a decade ago, while the EPA has repeatedly claimed that it is not likely to cause cancer in humans despite mounting research, the recent retraction of a landmark study on the pesticide's supposed safety, and legal battles between patients and Bayer, which bought Monsanto in 2018.
Next week, the nation's top court is set to hear arguments in a case that, as EWG warned Tuesday, "could have sweeping implications for whether farmers and consumers can keep pursuing lawsuits for harms linked to glyphosate, and whether states can require warning labels on glyphosate products."
The Wall Street Journal noted Monday that while the company continues to insist on glyphosate's safety, it "wants anyone with a claim to join the settlement" negotiated with a team of lawyers representing around 40,000 claimants that "would bring Bayer's total price tag to resolve the Roundup litigation to roughly $22 billion."
Despite Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s campaign promise to "Make America Healthy Again," the administration has notably sided with Bayer in the case before the Supreme Court, and the president in February even issued an executive order mandating the production of glyphosate.
"If anyone still wondered whether 'Make America Healthy Again' was a genuine commitment to protecting public health or a scam concocted by President Trump and RFK Jr. to rally health-conscious voters in 2024, today's decision answers that question," Cook said at the time. "It's a shocking betrayal to all of us but especially the people who live and work near farm fields where glyphosate is used."
Still, EWG is plowing ahead with its legal action, arguing that "the EPA has a clear legal duty to act on this petition, and it has simply refused to do so," as the group's general counsel and COO, Caroline Leary, put it. "This kind of delay has real consequences for families who rely on the agency to ensure children are not exposed to toxic farm chemical residues like glyphosate."
"This is exactly the kind of situation where courts are meant to step in," Leary added. "The EPA cannot avoid its responsibilities simply by doing nothing."
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