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make america healthy again
Skeptics Warn of Greenwashing as Trump Admin Launches Regenerative Agriculture Pilot
One campaigner emphasized that the administration "continues to cut conservation staff, support the pesticide industry, roll back environmental laws, and play trade war games."
Dec 10, 2025
The announcement of the US Department of Agriculture's $700 million Farmers First Regenerative Agriculture Pilot was met with some skepticism on Wednesday, given other recent moves that conflict with the Trump administration's promises to "Make America Healthy Again."
Regenerative agriculture is an approach to farming and ranching that goes beyond sustainability, aiming to improve soil, water, and air quality; boost biodiversity; produce nutrient-dense food; and even help mitigate the climate emergency by storing carbon. Its practices include agroforestry, conservation buffers, cover cropping, holistically managed grazing, limiting pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, and no-till farming.
US Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced the pilot alongside Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the controversial man behind the MAHA movement. She said that "we will deliver this support through existing programs our farmers already know and already trust."
Angela Huffman, president and co-founder of the group Farm Action, a longtime advocate of regenerative farming, welcomed the pilot, noting that "done right, this investment will help farmers lower their input costs, break free from the export-driven commodity overproduction treadmill, and move toward healthier, more resilient, and more profitable farming systems."
Stephanie Feldstein, population and sustainability director at the Center for Biological Diversity, was far more critical of the initiative, warning that "farmers trying to do the right thing for our environment need all the support they can get, but without clear standards, this ill-defined pilot program isn't enough."
"Regenerative agriculture needs to be more than just buzzwords Big Ag uses to greenwash business as usual," said Feldstein. "While the Trump administration promises money for sustainable practices, it continues to cut conservation staff, support the pesticide industry, roll back environmental laws, and play trade war games that hurt farmers and our food system."
As Spectrum News reported Wednesday:
The USDA regenerative agriculture pilot program flows from a Make America Healthy Again Commission report released in September that included more than 120 initiatives to address chronic childhood disease. One of the report's key focus areas was to remove harmful chemicals from the food supply.
On Wednesday, Kennedy said the report promised farmers an "off ramp" to transition away from chemical fertilizers "to a model that emphasizes soil health, and with soil health comes nutrient density... and a transition to a much healthier America for our children."
When the second MAHA report was released in September, some environmental and public health advocates blasted the commission for echoing "the pesticide industry's talking points," while Alexandra Dunn, CEO of the trade group CropLife America, celebrated that "we were heard" by the Trump administration.
The administration has also come under fire for constantly serving the fossil fuel industry; installing an ex-lobbyist, Kyle Kunkler, in a key role at the Environmental Protection Agency and nominating another, Douglas Troutman, for an EPA post; embracing herbicides including atrazine and dicamba as well as "forver chemical" pesticides; and urging the US Supreme Court to shield Bayer, which bought Monsanto, from lawsuits alleging that glyphosate-based Roundup causes cancer.
As Sarah Starman, senior food and agriculture campaigner at Friends of the Earth, highlighted Wednesday, the Trump administration has also been criticized for cutting billions of dollars in funding previously allocated to promoting regenerative agriculture and firing staff at the Natural Resources Conservation Service.
The pilot, Starman said, "is a step in the right direction, and we applaud the intent. But it will only be effective if USDA reverses the past year of massive cuts to on-the-ground conservation staff. Regenerative agriculture requires whole-farm, science-based planning, and right now the agency lacks the army of specialists needed to help farmers design and implement those plans."
"In addition, phasing out harmful agrochemicals—the synthetic pesticides and fertilizers that harm human health and degrade soil health—must be at the center of any regenerative program," she stressed. "The new initiative's incentives for integrated pest management fall far short of what is needed to help farmers get off the pesticide treadmill and spur a transition to a truly regenerative food system."
"The initiative must be updated to include specific, measurable incentives for deep reductions in agrochemical use if it is to deliver truly healthy, resilient soils and promote human health," she added. "Finally, going forward, all major farm subsidies should carry strong conservation compliance requirements so that every public dollar supporting agriculture also supports soil health, water quality, and climate resilience on every acre."
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Warning of Superbugs, Groups Urge Trump EPA to Ban Use of Important Drugs as Pesticides
"Each year Americans are at greater risk from dangerous bacteria and diseases because human medicines are sprayed on crops," one expert said, calling out industry for the "recklessness and preventable suffering."
Nov 24, 2025
Just a month after the head of the World Health Organization warned that "antimicrobial resistance is outpacing advances in modern medicine, threatening the health of families worldwide," a coalition of conservation, farmworker, and public health groups on Monday petitioned the Trump administration to ban the use of crucial drugs as pesticides.
The legal petition provides a list of "active ingredients that are themselves, or whose use can promote cross-resistance to, medically important antibiotics/antifungals," and requests that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) cancel registrations under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act of all products that contain them.
"Research is clear that the use of antibiotics and antifungals as pesticides poses a threat to public health because it contributes to the evolution of pathogens that are resistant to medicine," the petition states, referring to what are often called "superbugs."
"Petitioners make this request because of the critical nature of these drugs and drug classes to human and veterinary medicine, along with scientifically established concerns related to increasing resistance and declining efficacy rates as a result of prophylactic and other uses of these antimicrobials outside of the medical field," the filing continues.
"More than 2.8 million antimicrobial-resistant infections occur in the United States each year, resulting in more than 35,000 deaths."
Noting that the use of antibiotic pesticides also "directly threatens the well-being of humans and animals through contamination of food supplies and crops," the filing adds that "petitioners believe that the most effective way to safeguard human and environmental health is to disallow the use of these ingredients in pesticide products."
The petitioners are the Antibiotic Resistance Action Center at George Washington University, Californians for Pesticide Reform, Center for Environmental Health, Center for Biological Diversity, Center for Food Safety, CRLA Foundation, Friends of the Earth US, Pesticide Action & Agroecology Network, UNI Center for Energy & Environmental Education, and US Public Interest Research Group.
"Each year Americans are at greater risk from dangerous bacteria and diseases because human medicines are sprayed on crops,” said Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a statement. "This kind of recklessness and preventable suffering is what happens when the industry has a stranglehold on the EPA's pesticide-approval process."
Donley and other campaigners have previously called out the Trump administration for spouting pesticide companies' talking points in the September Make America Healthy Again report, installing an ex-industry lobbyist in a key EPA post, and doubling down on herbicides including dicamba and atrazine—the latter of which is commonly used on corn, sugarcane, and sorghum in the United States, and last week was labeled probably carcinogenic to humans by a WHO agency.
Underscoring the urgent need for EPA action, the new petition highlights that "more than 2.8 million antimicrobial-resistant infections occur in the United States each year, resulting in more than 35,000 deaths," according to a 2019 report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Citing another CDC report, the filing points out that "the Covid-19 pandemic only exacerbated the issue due to longer hospital stays and increased inappropriate antibiotic use, leading to an upsurge in the number of bacterial antibiotic-resistant hospital-onset infections by 20%."
Globally, antimicrobial resistance "has increased in 40% of the pathogen-antibiotic combinations monitored for global temporal trends between 2018 and 2023, with annual relative increases ranging from 5% to 15%," according to the WHO analysis released last month. By the end of that period, "approximately 1 in 6 laboratory-confirmed bacterial infections worldwide were caused by bacteria resistant to antibiotics."
WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stressed that "we must use antibiotics responsibly, and make sure everyone has access to the right medicines, quality-assured diagnostics, and vaccines. Our future also depends on strengthening systems to prevent, diagnose, and treat infections and on innovating with next-generation antibiotics and rapid point-of-care molecular tests."
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A Month After Trump Doubles Down on Atrazine, WHO Dubs It 'Probably Carcinogenic to Humans'
"It is outrageously irresponsible that we still allow use of this dangerous poison in the United States," said the Center for Biological Diversity's environmental health science director.
Nov 21, 2025
Just a month after the Trump administration doubled down on the alleged safety of atrazine, a United Nations agency said on Friday that the pesticide—which is banned by dozens of countries but commonly used on corn, sugarcane, and sorghum in the United States—probably causes cancer.
"It is outrageously irresponsible that we still allow use of this dangerous poison in the United States," said Nathan Donley, the Center for Biological Diversity's environmental health science director, in a Friday statement. "This finding is just the latest indictment of the industry-controlled US pesticide oversight process that is failing to protect people and wildlife from chemicals linked to numerous health harms."
Research into and alarm over atrazine have mounted since the World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer initially concluded in 1999 that it was not classifiable as carcinogenic to humans. IACR has now announced new findings for atrazine and alachlor, another herbicide widely used on crops, as well as the agricultural fungicide vinclozolin.
Of the three, only atrazine was previously examined by IARC. From October 28 to November 4, a working group of 22 international experts from a dozen countries met in France to evaluate the carcinogenicity of pesticides. They classified vinclozolin as "possibly carcinogenic to humans, and both alachlor and atrazine as "probably carcinogenic to humans."
The latter two decisions were based on a combination of limited evidence for cancer in humans, sufficient evidence for cancer in animals, and strong mechanistic evidence in experimental systems. IARC said that "for atrazine, positive associations have been observed for non-Hodgkin lymphoma that is positive for the chromosomal translocation t(14;18)."
A couple of weeks before that IARC meeting, the Trump administration sparked outrage with a US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) draft opinion claiming that atrazine does not pose an extinction risk to a single protected animal or plant.
That draft opinion came as President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were already under fire for the second Make America Healthy Again report. After the first MAHA publication noted concerns regarding pesticides, even naming atrazine, agribusiness lobbyists confronted the administration, and the following document ultimately featured pesticide industry talking points.
The second report's "only mention of pesticides is an Orwellian promise to ensure 'confidence in EPA's robust pesticide review procedures'—procedures courts have repeatedly found unlawful and that frontline communities know cannot be trusted," the Center for Food Safety said after its September release. "Instead, it says that it will speed up pesticide approval and it will 'partner' with the pesticide industry to 'educate' the public about the 'robust review' of EPA's regulation of pesticides to provide the public with 'confidence.'"
Then came the USFWS draft, which Center for Food Safety senior attorney Sylvia Wu said "makes clear that despite the rhetoric of MAHA, there will be no robust review of the dangers of pesticides by the Trump administration... Instead, a toxic poison like atrazine will continue to contaminate our lands and waters, making our children sick for decades to come."
Wu's group has long been critical of atrazine. During the first Trump administration, it was part of a coalition that sued over the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) 2020 reapproval of the herbicide. So was the Center for Biological Diversity—which was also angered by the USFWS document, with Donley calling it "an absolute joke."
Donley took aim at the Trump administration again on Friday, after IACR announced its new classification for atrazine.
"Despite its rhetoric to the contrary, there is no better friend of atrazine than the Trump administration," he said. "Hiding behind the rhetoric of MAHA, EPA reapproval of a poison that's likely to keep Americans sick for generations is moving ahead full steam."
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