A revolt is brewing in MAHA-world. Newly released court documents show the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) directly consulted with pesticide giant Bayer to craft regulations designed to limit the harm caused by its dicamba-based products. To many, this looks like exactly the kind of “revolving door” vested interests—the cozy accommodations and sharing of personnel between regulators and the companies they regulate—that Make America Healthy Again was built to challenge and ultimately defeat. Why is this still happening?
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Says The Guardian, “The documents provide an unusually clear look into the process of developing pesticide regulations, which is typically done out of public view. It shows in detail how the EPA asked Bayer which regulations it wanted, received a response from Bayer, then put Bayer’s choices into a proposed federal rule.”
Dicamba has been linked with significant environmental damage, mainly as a result of its volatility, which means spray can drift large distances on the wind, damaging other crops, orchards, gardens, trees, and wildlife. More worryingly, there’s evidence of a link to liver cancer and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in humans too.
Dicamba is still legal in the U.S., but only because the EPA has continued to ignore a federal court ruling from 2020 that ordered all dicamba-based pesticides to be removed from the market. Instead of doing that, the EPA required the addition of further application instructions on the products’ labeling to minimize drift before reapproving them.
As the documents show, the EPA held a meeting with Bayer in May 2025 and presented its representatives with two options to address the volatility of dicamba. There was a more restrictive option, limiting application to temperatures below 85 degrees, and a less restrictive option, allowing application up to 95 degrees but only if the acreage under treatment was reduced. Other options were presented to address pesticide runoff as well.
Unsurprisingly, Bayer chose the less restrictive option, but the company also proposed another option that wouldn’t require the acreage to be reduced at all, so long as the chemical wasn’t mixed in a tank. The EPA granted that request, and both options were included in the new rules that were then proposed a few months later.
According to Nathan Donley, environmental health science director with the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the litigants, the documents show the EPA “crossing a line.”
“The EPA is allowing Bayer to choose its preferred measures to limit dicamba’s damage as if it was ordering up a late-night dinner à la carte from Chili’s,” he told The Guardian.
“It becomes troublesome when the EPA allows them to regulate themselves by choosing the mitigations.”
The EPA has defended the documents and its actions, saying that they are not a “compliance failure…[but] show the regulatory system working exactly as intended.” Companies are “permitted to submit mitigation ideas that preserve their product’s utility, and EPA also will independently develop its own proposed mitigations.” However, a spokesman emphasized, “the registrant does not dictate terms.”
Among the MAHA grassroots, the response has been furious. Here’s Kelly Ryerson, known as “the Glyphosate Girl,” on Instagram.
“It is now undeniable that the EPA remains fully captured by a crooked collection of pesticide company players who so enthusiastically ignore the substantial losses of farmers and the federal courts who mandated a halt to dicamba use,” she said.
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“In return for this egregiousness, I would like the EPA to propose a menu of options to MAHA for significantly decreasing our exposure to known carcinogens and endocrine disruptors.”
The revelations come at a bad time and remind us that Make America Healthy Again is still a live issue, one that could potentially affect the upcoming midterm elections, maybe even decide them.
Since the opening salvos on the last day of February, the war with Iran has dominated discussion and predictions for the fast-approaching referendum on Trump 2.0. As the war has dragged on, and with it the added cost to ordinary Americans in gasoline and consumer goods, many believe the war will be the defining issue come November. They’re probably right.
But it’s important not to forget that other issues are at play and will also, surely, affect the choice voters make at the ballot box: Trump’s flagship immigration policies, for example, and his pledge to deport 20 million illegals; his economic policies, especially the tariffs; and the mission entrusted to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. of cleaning up the food supply and reversing decades of decline into ever-worse suffering and ill health.
The official strategy of the Republican Party is to focus on the growing radicalism of the left and the inability of the Democrats to restrain candidates like Abdul el-Sayed and James Talarico—or James “Talafreako,” as President Trump likes to call him. The message will be, “But they’re worse.” As I wrote for American Greatness in August, that’s a risky line to take.
In recent months, the anger and displeasure of MAHA enthusiasts has grown. An open letter this month accused President Trump and Secretary Kennedy of a classic “bait and switch” maneuver, substituting relatively trivial issues and easy wins like food dyes for real issues like banning mRNA vaccines, holding Big Pharma to account and confronting entrenched interests. “You will pay a political price,” the letter warned.
The anger, already simmering, boiled over in spectacular fashion at the beginning of the year with President Trump’s executive order on glyphosate. The order defined access to the herbicide as a national security issue and invoked the Defense Production Act to increase domestic production and give immunity from liability to producers. RFK Jr. offered a reasoned defense of the executive order on the basis of glyphosate’s essential role in U.S. agriculture—who wants the American harvest of corn and soy to collapse?—and said the USDA is working on alternatives, including high-tech laser equipment that zaps pests rather than spraying them with chemicals, but critics nevertheless described the order as a betrayal and “America last.”
Personnel and leadership—the withdrawal of Casey Means’ nomination for Surgeon General and replacement with Nicole Saphier, the resignation of Marty Makary from the FDA, and the ousting of Gray Delany—remain key concerns, as well as specific policies on chemicals and vaccines. There seems to be a general sense that the administration, despite the high-profile appointment of Secretary Kennedy and big promises, is back to “business as usual.” That’s not good.
It’s hard to say exactly how much support MAHA brought to the Trump campaign in 2024. Leaders of the MAHA movement and the MAHA Alliance say they were “the difference makers,” and they may be right. Certainly, Kennedy’s support in key states before he dropped out was higher than the margin of victory in 2020 and 2024. A Trump campaign memo from 2024 admitted that even a partial conversion of allegiance from Kennedy’s independent campaign to Trump would be greater than Biden’s winning margin in Arizona and Georgia. Trump’s margin in the popular vote was 1.5 percentage points at the national level; Kennedy was polling at a much higher number, several percent. What we can say for certain is that MAHA is now firmly solidified as a core MAGA concern. About 70 percent of Trump 2024 voters say they support MAHA.
MAHA is, for want of a better word, a genuine organic concern, one that perhaps uniquely reaches across party lines, since even the politically homeless can agree that protecting the nation’s children from a life of obesity and chronic illness is among the worthiest of worthy causes.
All of which is to say, in a tight set of elections—and that’s really the best-case scenario for the 2026 midterms, if we’re being honest—every single vote counts. President Trump cannot afford to neglect the partners who made his return to the White House possible. A reaffirmed commitment to the MAHA mission and a big win or two that isn’t about food additives really could make all the difference.
