EPA has failed us. The MAHA Commission just proved it.

By George Kimbrell

On Sept. 9, the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission released its long-awaited “Make Our Children Healthy Again” Strategy Report, which was supposed to set policy recommendations that would address the urgent public health crisis caused by our industrial food system. Unfortunately, but perhaps predictably, and as foreshadowed by a leaked draft report in August, at the end of the day the MAHA commission utterly betrayed the grassroots MAHA movement, and anyone else that cares about creating a healthier future for our food, serving up only a few crumbs instead of the healthy new meal promised.

An earlier MAHA commission report issued in May 2025 had at least laid out some of the industrial agriculture causes of our societal ills, and specifically called out pesticides, the ubiquitous toxins we intentionally spray on our food and into the broader environment. But the latest report failed to follow up with any actual policy and legal proposals to address pesticides’ now-well-established health and ecological harms (repeatedly acknowledged by Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.), nor propose any reforms to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s structural failure to adequately regulate them.

Just the opposite: any prior references to pesticides’ harms were stripped out and instead the report reads like it was ghostwritten by Monsanto and Syngenta. It instead promises that EPA will actually speed up pesticide approvals. And for stakeholders concerned about the health and environmental harms of these poisons? Not to worry: EPA 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.”

Let me be crystal clear. I’m the legal director of the Center for Food Safety, a nonprofit public interest organization, and based on my now 21 years as a public interest attorney, advocate, and adjunct law professor specializing in food system oversight, I can tell you that there is nothing “robust” about EPA’s regulation of pesticides. In reality it is the antithesis of robust: Instead, it is an oversight system filled with data gaps and regulation loopholes, lacking in public transparency, which has instead required decades of dogged public interest litigation to get the EPA to do its most basic duties. Worse, the EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs is a textbook example of agency capture, where political appointees bend to the influence of pesticide corporations rather than uphold their duty to protect public health and the environment, as instances exposed as undue influence and political taint have shown time and time again.

This policy “improvement” is not reform, it’s Orwellian propaganda. The MAHA report is not a solution, it’s a smokescreen. Whatever promises made to MAHA supporters by Secretary Kennedy to protect our health and children from the toxins in our food system have proved empty; if they ever existed, they were eviscerated by the pesticide industry’s undue influence.

Public interest litigation as accountability

For over twenty five years, CFS has done the job the government refuses to do. Through public interest litigation, we have held federal regulators accountable time and time again:

• In 2022, the courts sided with CFS and farmworkers, determining that EPA’s cancer safety finding for glyphosate—the world’s most widely used herbicide and active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup—was not supported and striking it down.
• Not once but twice in the past decade we have won precedent-setting lawsuits overturning approvals of another major controversial Monsanto pesticide, dicamba, which since its introduction has caused unprecedented harm by drifting off fields for miles and damaging millions of acres of crops and native ecosystems.
• After refusing to do so for decades, in 2024 our litigation compelled EPA to finally agree to test and regulate pesticides for their endocrine-disrupting risk. These chemicals can impair fertility, weaken immune systems, and cause cancers. And for years, we have fought EPA’s approval of atrazine, a hormone disruptor linked to birth defects, multiple cancers, and infertility.
• We brought and won the first cases over neonicotinoid insecticides, the toxins causing the dramatic collapse of bee populations, and continue to fight EPA’s failure to regulate neonic-treated seeds.
• And we have led the fight to stop the commercialization of genetically engineered crops designed to withstand repeated sprayings of these very same toxic herbicides and to require their labeling.

In our cases we seek only equitable relief – to stop harm on the ground – and to win cases that breathe life into the law, requiring more rigorous future oversight. CFS has stepped into the breach for decades because EPA will not do its job. And when we fight, we win because the law and the science are on our side.

Well-known harms

The harms caused by pesticides are not theoretical but well established. Glyphosate is linked to cancer and biodiversity collapse. Dicamba drifts off target, killing crops and devastating ecosystems. Atrazine contaminates drinking water and interferes with hormones at trace levels. Neonicotinoids have driven pollinator populations to crisis levels, threatening one-third of our food supply.

These costs fall hardest on farmworkers and their families, who are exposed daily. They fall on rural communities whose water supplies are poisoned, and on children whose developing bodies are uniquely vulnerable. They fall on ecosystems already buckling under climate chaos, biodiversity loss, and pollution.

EPA knows these risks. Yet the agency continues to side with chemical corporations. And now the MAHA Commission has chosen to rubber-stamp that failure.

The MAHA report does not exist in a vacuum but reflects the overarching anti-health and environment agenda of the Trump administration. In just the first eight months, the administration has

• Proposed a barrage of new toxic pesticide approvals, including several containing PFAS forever chemicals.
• Proposed to re-approve the twice banned volatile dicamba for yet a third time.
• At the same time, denied efforts to restrict glyphosate or atrazine and maintained the approval of more than 85 pesticides banned in Europe and China, which account for over a quarter of US agricultural use.
• Fired over 1,000 EPA scientistsand then outright closed its independent science branch.
• Proposed a 2-1/2-year extension of critical foodborne illness traceability rules—rules CFS won through litigation—prolonging the food safety crisis.
• Doubled down on subsidies for pesticide-intensive corn and soy, while cutting support for fruit, vegetable, organic, and small-scale farmers.

In this context, the MAHA report is not just weak. It is a betrayal.

The bottom line

The MAHA Commission was charged with addressing the childhood chronic disease crisis. Its first report admitted pesticides were a major driver of that crisis. But when the time came to act, it turned its back on the science, the law, and the public.

Instead of proposing stronger protections, it recommended a public relations campaign, partnering with the pesticide industry, to reassure Americans that government oversight is “robust.” Instead of reining in pesticide overuse, it promises to speed up approvals. Instead of challenging the forces driving chronic disease, it has capitulated to them.

For over two decades, we have litigated against this system of failure and seen firsthand how EPA puts the interests of chemical corporations ahead of its duty to protect our health and environment. And I can say unequivocally: the MAHA Report is not reform. It is business as usual.

But at the Center for Food Safety, we will continue to do what the commission has failed to do: watchdog EPA, enforce the law, and fight for a food system that puts people and the planet first. The health of our children and farmworkers cannot wait for more empty promises.

The commission has betrayed the public. We will not.

(George Kimbrell is the legal director for the Center for Food Safety.)

(Opinion columns published in The New Lede represent the views of the individual(s) authoring the columns and not necessarily the perspectives of TNL editors.)