The MAHA Commission Wants You to Stop Worrying About Pesticides

Before he was our secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. vowed to “ban the worst agricultural chemicals already banned in other countries.”  

And just last May, his Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission identified the one billion pounds of pesticides—like atrazine, glyphosate, and chlorpyrifos—used in the United States as being a serious threat to children’s health, citing industry-funded and ghostwritten studies as well as weak laws and regulations as part of the problem.  

So when the commission released its final “strategy” to protect children’s health this fall, what was its bold prescription for how we regulate pesticides? Don’t change a thing. Instead, it recommended that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) work with “food and agricultural stakeholders” (aka chemical companies) to make sure the public has confidence in the EPA’s “robust review procedures” for pesticides.  

If your head is spinning, don’t worry: It’s a common symptom of witnessing extreme backpedaling.  

The reality is that the commission got it right the first time. The EPA’s pesticide-approval process is too weak, too infrequent, and too discretionary to protect our health (or that of other species we share the earth with, like bees, butterflies, and birds).  

Many of the toxicity studies that the EPA relies on are paid for and submitted by chemical companies. Making matters worse, the EPA’s notoriously industry-friendly pesticide office has a history of pressuring staff to approve pesticides and look the other way on documented risks. Once a pesticide is approved, the EPA does only the bare minimum required by law, which is a review once every 15 years. The agency almost never uses its authority to cancel pesticides that fail to meet the legal safety standard, instead engaging in years-long negotiations with pesticide manufacturers while leaving the toxic products on the market.   

The EPA’s failures on toxic neonics highlight a broken process 

Let’s take just one example, drawn from NRDC’s work on neonicotinoid pesticides (neonics). Neonics are neurotoxic insecticides—perhaps the most widely used in U.S. history—that mimic nicotine. If you haven’t heard of neonics, you’ve still likely eaten or drunk them: Monitoring by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found neonics in about half the U.S. population, and more recent testing found them in more than 95 percent of pregnant women tested across the country. 

Today, we have a growing body of science linking neonics to a host of neurological and hormonal harms, including birth defects of the heart and brain, cognitive impairment, and reduced sperm and testosterone. But when neonics were first approved, there was only industry-funded testing to show how the chemicals may affect our health. 

Those tests showed some alarming effects. Rodents exposed to neonics before birth had thinning in key areas of the brain, among other harms. Yet the EPA let industry applicants off the hook when they failed to submit missing data the agency asked for. Even worse, when it came time to set the maximum acceptable level for neonics in food, the EPA waived important protections designed to safeguard children’s brains, permitting 10 times more of the nicotine-like chemicals than the law allows in everything from tap water to fruits and vegetables and even baby foods.   

While we’ve petitioned the agency, it’s unlikely the EPA will change course. And although the agency’s review of neonics is a big failure, given their vast use, neonics are by no means unique. NRDC also sued the EPA for failing to cancel uses of organophosphate pesticides like chlorpyrifos, which are so dangerous that even the agency finds that they pose serious health harms for families and farmworkers. 

Ignoring the problem won’t make America healthy again  

Unless the EPA takes action, Americans will continue to be on the losing end of this process, where pesticides banned or restricted in other countries slip through the system here, and we all get exposed as a result. And while it’s often hard to link particular harms to particular chemicals in a complex world, our health—especially our children’s health—almost certainly suffers. 

Of course, the MAHA Commission knew as much, and it warned about this in its initial draft report.   

Ask the commission today, however, and you’ll hear its members singing a different tune. It’s actually the same one that the chemical industry has been singing for years: Don’t worry, be happy.