A controversial provision in a FY2026 House appropriations bill has sparked a growing outcry from consumer groups, claiming that it will grant product liability immunity to pesticide manufacturers. Bayer has launched massive publicity campaigns claiming that litigation costs for its popular glyphosate product, Roundup, will burden already struggling farmers and drive grocery prices higher. Environmental and consumer groups counter that glyphosate is a dangerous carcinogen and the company must be held liable for failing to warn users. Are Americans facing a choice between higher food prices and their health?
Bayer purchased Monsanto Company in 2018, acquiring a massive portfolio of lawsuits in the bargain. A reported 181,000 suits have been filed, with Bayer setting aside $16 billion to settle claims. Most of the suits have been filed by people who claim they developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma from residential use. Bayer has reformulated its residential products without glyphosate but now claims that future lawsuits must be barred because “the future of American agriculture is at stake.”
Bayer has been petitioning Midwestern farmers by suggesting that plaintiffs’ suits pit the agrarian way of life against litigious trial attorneys. In between lie citizens alleging they have cancer from Roundup. Bayer claims they are all wrong (all 181,000 of them). The company has paid out over $10 billion in settlements, and several juries have now awarded whopping punitive damage verdicts, finding that the company knowingly sold dangerous chemical products.
Bayer has been scrambling to use legislative initiatives to head these claimants off at the courthouse door. Georgia and North Dakota have enacted laws that would shield pesticide manufacturers from legal liability in their states if the company complies with federal labeling requirements (even if it knew that the warnings were incomplete). Section 453 of the FY2026 Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Bill would halt federal funding for agencies to update pesticide label warnings, assuring even less protection for the citizenry while potentially immunizing pesticide manufacturers by pre-empting state product liability actions nationwide.
When Americans are exposed to product risks without warning, the legal system has traditionally served as a corrective protection. In the 1960s, growing concerns about the possibility that smoking cigarettes caused lung cancer led to federal legislation requiring package warnings to protect the public. When people sickened with lung cancer then sued tobacco companies, defense lawyers interposed the labeling laws for decades to bar suits. The argument was that allowing juries to award damages in different states would compel cigarette manufacturers to create label warnings state-by-state that were more stringent than the federal requirements, conflicting with federal law and burdening one of the nation’s largest industries economically.
How ironic that in enacting a labeling law designed to protect consumers, Congress instead had created a liability shield for manufacturers. Section 453 does not even pretend to be protecting consumers; it purports to prevent patchwork state labeling requirements that will burden chemical companies. Yet current federal law specifically prohibits states from enacting label requirements that differ from federal labeling.
When it enacted the PREP Act to provide legal immunity to vaccine manufacturers, Congress was silent as to any intention to bar parents’ suits for the unauthorized vaccination of their young children. Yet courts have repeatedly ruled that parents have no legal recourse for emergency authorized vaccines such as mRNA shots administered against their wishes. They can still sue for an unauthorized vaccination of traditional vaccines — just not the experimental COVID jabs.
The push by Bayer to shield itself from suits by cancer patients under the guise of protecting American farmers is not limited to glyphosate. Section 453 seeks to insulate all chemical manufacturers, including not just agricultural chemicals, but household cleaning products, hair products, bug sprays, etc. Tens of thousands of products will be blocked from labeling updates under its provisions.
In the case of vaccines, Congress granted Big Pharma manufacturers legal immunity but created a system to pay claimants who were vaccine-injured called the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP). Section 453 could leave thousands of current and future plaintiffs with zero recourse — there is no compensation program.
If money is the issue, then the spike in health care costs inflicted by externalizing the human harms from agricultural and other chemical exposures could far exceed any business savings to Big Chem or Big Ag. Plaintiffs succeed only when their lawyers prove causation in courts of law — that is, when they establish by a preponderance of the evidence that their injury or illness was caused by the named defendant. Chemical giant Syngenta has been sued by thousands of Americans claiming that its pesticide atrazine (banned in Europe back in 2014) caused their Parkinson’s disease. If Section 453 shuts them down, where will scientific evidence ever be presented to protect consumers, and what legal avenue will restrain bad actors?
Human health cannot be measured in dollars. Atrazine is a known endocrine disruptor used widely in corn cropping. It runs off fields into drinking water resources, where it mimics estrogen in the human body. How will young boys ever be protected from a false belief that they are girls if their gender dysphoria is chemically induced, but no one is permitted a day in court to prove it? What if companies had evidence of this impact they didn’t disclose, or evidence that they were prevented from warning consumers and farmers about because of the provisions of Section 453?
The FY2026 House appropriations bill containing Section 453 is likely to face a vote in September. Polls show that Republican and Democrat voters alike oppose granting Bayer legal immunity for its products — apparently, Americans are more concerned about higher cancer rates than higher grocery prices. Bayer hides behind farmers to protect the entire chemical industry at the expense of protecting the health of future generations of children.
President Trump and the GOP must oppose this unpopular provision. Otherwise, they can hardly claim to be Making America Healthy Again, and any such political slogans will ring hollow in the 2026 midterms and beyond.
Author, pastor, and attorney John Klar raises grass-fed beef and sheep in Vermont. His Substack, Small Farm Republic, is based on his 2023 book, Small Farm Republic: Why Conservatives Must Embrace Local Agriculture, Reject Climate Alarmism, and Lead an Environmental Revival. John is a staff writer at Liberty Nation News.
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