The pesticide industry has been on a winning streak, securing a string of legal and regulatory victories that have drawn sharp criticism from environmental and public health organizations.
The biggest win came on June 25, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in favor of German agrichemical and pharmaceutical company Bayer. The justices determined that plaintiffs cannot sue the company under state law for failing to include a cancer warning on the label of its Roundup weedkiller, whose active ingredient is glyphosate.
Following the ruling, Bayer’s stock surged to its largest single-day gain in 23 years. The company had been facing tens of thousands of lawsuits from Roundup users who claimed the product caused their cancer.
On Thursday, Bayer moved to persuade a federal judge to dissolve a consolidated federal lawsuit that combines nearly 4,000 additional cancer-related claims. The company has previously warned that the financial weight of that litigation could force it to stop making the weedkiller altogether.
Bayer, which purchased U.S.-based Roundup manufacturer Monsanto in 2018, has since reorganized its Roundup operations into a separate business unit and filed for duties on glyphosate imported from China.
The Trump administration backed Bayer’s position in the Supreme Court case — a stance that put it at odds with pesticide opponents aligned with the “Make America Healthy Again” movement led by U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who had supported Trump in the 2024 presidential race.
Ken Cook, CEO of the Environmental Working Group, a non-profit that pushes for tighter pesticide regulations, said the administration appears to have concluded that “our constituency is these big farmers and pesticide companies.”
Cook said his organization and others fighting for pesticide limits have long been frustrated with the EPA’s pesticide oversight program. He noted that under former President Joe Biden, “it was at least more cautious,” adding, “There’s a big shift.”
The EPA, however, defended its decisions, saying they often include new application restrictions and that “the impact for farmers and the environment is straightforward. Growers get modern, more precise chemistries that do more with less.”
Bayer called the Supreme Court ruling “good for science, farmers, and industries that depend on regulatory clarity for innovation.”
Dicamba Gets Two-Season Green Light
Another herbicide at the center of controversy, dicamba — made by both Bayer and Syngenta — has also seen a favorable regulatory outcome. The chemical is applied to cotton and soybean crops that have been genetically modified to withstand it.
Critics have long argued that dicamba can drift away from where it is applied, damaging nearby plants and crops. In 2024, a U.S. District Court found that the EPA had previously failed to follow proper public input procedures when approving three dicamba products, and it threw out those approvals. That left farmers unable to use dicamba on their crops in 2025.
Then, in February 2026, the EPA announced it was re-approving dicamba products for the next two growing seasons under stricter rules, including a lower maximum application rate and limits on use during hot weather.
The non-profit Center for Biological Diversity, which opposes dicamba use, responded that those new measures would be ineffective and hard to enforce.
The EPA said in an email that the approval was “deliberately temporary” and featured “the strictest guardrails EPA has ever placed on this herbicide.”
Federal Agency Says Atrazine Not an Extinction Threat
The herbicide atrazine, widely produced by Syngenta and commonly used on crops such as corn and sugarcane, has also received a more favorable regulatory assessment.
In May, as part of an ongoing EPA registration review, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued a biological opinion concluding that atrazine does not pose an extinction risk to the threatened or endangered species it examined. “We anticipate that the registration of atrazine is not likely to jeopardize the continued existence of these species,” the agency wrote.
That finding marks a significant departure from a 2021 EPA biological evaluation, which determined that atrazine was likely to negatively affect more than 1,000 protected species.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has noted that some scientific studies have suggested a possible connection between atrazine exposure and elevated rates of certain cancers, as well as premature births.
In 2025, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classified atrazine as “probably carcinogenic to humans.”
Nathan Donley, environmental health science director for the Center for Biological Diversity, was sharply critical of the outcome. “Instead of taking the environmental and health risks of atrazine seriously, the Trump administration has once again done the pesticide industry’s bidding, allowing this extraordinarily dangerous pesticide to continue poisoning our land and water for decades to come,” he said in a statement.
The EPA noted that the biological opinion was issued by a separate agency, and said it would factor in any new scientific findings as its own review of atrazine continues.
Syngenta, on a company website dedicated to atrazine, maintains that when the chemical is used as directed, it does not cause harmful effects to human health or the environment.
