Bayer ‘Turns Over Every Stone’ to Stiff Roundup Cancer Victims
This is the first in a three-part series on Bayer’s crusade for immunity from Roundup-related cancer claims, published in partnership with the Center for Media and Democracy. Read the second and third parts of the series.
The executive order President Trump signed in February protecting and encouraging the production of glyphosate, the primary ingredient in Roundup, is a major victory for Bayer AG, the German biotech giant that produces the notorious herbicide.
The company has been aggressively implementing its five-point plan to thwart the ability of cancer patients to sue over claims that it failed to warn them about the link between Roundup and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. But Bayer is not resting on its laurels, and is pushing for a more permanent win in the Supreme Court this spring—and eventually in Congress.
By the time Bayer introduced its plan to stem a flood of Roundup-related lawsuits in 2021, the company already owed billions in verdicts and settlements. Pricey verdicts over the carcinogenic product began to pop up around the country after a San Francisco school groundskeeper won a landmark $289-million damages award in the first failure-to-warn trial over Roundup’s link to cancer in August 2018—just two months after Bayer purchased Monsanto, the company that had been making Roundup.
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Bayer has mounted an aggressive lobbying, public relations, and litigation campaign to shield the company from tens of thousands of similar lawsuits and protect its multibillion-dollar annual sales of glyphosate-based products—especially Roundup, the most widely used herbicide in the world.
When Bayer’s new CEO Bill Anderson came on board in 2023, he pledged to “contain” the company’s Roundup litigation woes by the end of this year and told shareholders that the company is “turning over every stone” to reach that goal.
Bayer earned $2.9 billion from glyphosate sales last year, according to its March 4 annual earnings report, but payouts for Roundup litigation have put the company in the red for the past three years. Bayer’s earnings report shows $1.3 billion in settlement and court judgment payments in 2025—marking a serious jump from the $528 million the company paid the previous year.
These financial and political factors raise the stakes for Bayer as it prepares to present oral arguments before the Supreme Court in a case called Monsanto Company v. Durnell. On April 27, the multinational will argue that it does not have to include a cancer warning on Roundup labels because the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), relying on its 2020 findings that glyphosate is “unlikely to be a human carcinogen,” does not require a warning. Bayer claims that the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), the statute that gives the EPA the authority to regulate pesticides, preempts any conflicting state laws or failure-to-warn claims.
Since Bayer’s lobbying efforts at the state and federal levels have produced mixed results, a win in the Supreme Court is key to its strategy for getting out of the red. Its repeated attempts to add immunity provisions to farm and appropriations bills have failed to get over the finish line to date, and only three of the 14 states in which Bayer has lobbied hard to push immunity legislation have actually passed laws to do that (see Part II of this series).
Bayer’s Investment in Trump Pays Off
Trump’s return to the White House created new opportunities for Bayer’s Roundup immunity campaign. Though the company had spent relatively little on political campaigns and federal elections in the past, it contributed $1 million to Trump’s 2025 inauguration, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets.
Bayer also spent $9.2 million in 2025 to hire scores of lobbyists from more than a dozen firms to push its agenda in Congress and multiple executive branch departments, according to a report by the public health research and news site U.S. Right to Know and data from OpenSecrets. Many of those lobbyists have close ties to members of the Trump administration, including Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and recently fired Attorney General Pam Bondi, giving Bayer an inside track at the White House, Department of Justice, EPA, and Department of Agriculture, among other offices and agencies.
Anderson, Bayer’s CEO, had multiple meetings with top administration officials—including Wiles—prior to Trump’s executive order, as both Politico and The Guardian reported.
And the pay-off has been enormous. The president’s executive order declares that “domestic production of elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides is critical to the national defense.” Bayer is the sole domestic producer of these chemicals, used both for Roundup and to supply the U.S. military with munitions.
In justifying his executive order, Trump maintains that the production of these chemicals is a matter of national security—a finding that opens the door to his invocation of the Defense Production Act (DPA), a law typically reserved for when the country is at war so that the executive branch can compel private companies to produce products needed for national defense.
Critically, the president’s executive order invokes Section 707 of the DPA as a shield that prevents companies such as Bayer from lawsuits related to materials or products produced in accordance with the act.
The true impact of Trump’s executive order—which infuriated his supporters in the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement—remains unclear until courts weigh in on the legality of his liability shield gambit.
In a late February post about the legal merits of the president’s order, Whitney Ray Di Bona, a consumer safety attorney for Drugwatch, pointed out that Section 707 has typically been used to guard against contract disputes and not tort liability. “The Defense Production Act was not written as a broad product liability shield,” she wrote. “But the language of Section 707 is not expressly limited either. Until a court applies it in this context, its reach remains uncertain. Whether this executive order ultimately protects Roundup from lawsuits is still an open question.”
While the DPA’s liability shield has not yet been tested in cases like those brought against Bayer, legal experts are sounding alarms about the potential implications of the order on the ability of future plaintiffs to sue.
William Boyd, a professor at UCLA School of Law and at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, calls the executive order “beyond extreme” and accused the Trump administration of “placating and protecting a German multinational company.”
Boyd disagrees with Di Bona and is concerned that the liability shield will provide blanket immunity. “While the liability protections here are forward looking (that is, they do not resolve Bayer’s existing liabilities from past glyphosate exposures, which is what the Supreme Court will soon be considering), the new protections give Bayer virtually complete liability protection going forward,” Boyd argues. “Bayer can now make and sell as much glyphosate as it wants to without having to worry about any additional new claims stemming from those sales.”
In other words, Trump’s invocation of the Section 707 liability shield may create a strong defense for Bayer against future Roundup-related litigation since the company will be able to argue that national security interests trump any potential injury caused by the herbicide.
Administration Backs Bayer’s Supreme Court Push
The Trump administration has also rallied to Bayer’s defense in the high-profile Supreme Court case that will be argued this week.
Bayer’s lawyers will attempt to convince the justices to rule that the company cannot be sued for failing to warn consumers about Roundup’s health risks because the EPA doesn’t require it to do so. The ruling has the potential to impact 67,000 outstanding lawsuits against Bayer.
“Almost every pesticide injury lawsuit filed in the past 10 years has included a claim that the pesticide manufacturer failed to warn the plaintiff of the health risks associated with using their product and that such failure caused the plaintiff’s injury,” according to Brigit Rollins, an attorney with the National Agricultural Law Center.
While this will be the first time such a case is heard by the country’s highest court, costly litigation surrounding Roundup predates Bayer’s 2018 purchase of Monsanto, which first introduced the popular pesticide to the market in 1971.
After a 2015 study by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified glyphosate as carcinogenic to humans, more than 100,000 lawsuits over Roundup were filed in courts throughout the country. The claims stem from the allegation that Monsanto—and now Bayer—knew that Roundup exposure could lead to cancer. Causes of action in these cases range from failure-to-warn to false advertising.
After the 2018 jury verdict in San Francisco, plaintiffs have been awarded more than $8 billion at trial. Additionally, the company agreed to settle mass litigation in multiple states for $10 billion in 2020 and received preliminary court approval for a $7.25 billion settlement in March of this year. According to the 2025 financial statement filed by Bayer, the company’s total liabilities related to litigation totaled $11.25 billion last year.
Bill Dodero, senior vice president and general counsel at Bayer, says that the latest settlement is intended to help the company’s imminent battle in the Supreme Court. “The proposed class, combined with Supreme Court review … are independently necessary and mutually reinforcing steps in the company’s multipronged strategy to significantly contain the Roundup litigation,” Dodero states in a March 4 press release.
At the heart of the case pending before the Supreme Court is a $1.2-million jury verdict from 2023 that was affirmed by the Missouri Court of Appeals last year. Bayer argues that the Supreme Court must intervene and resolve a circuit court split over the preemptive effects of FIFRA.
In effect, Bayer is arguing that all states are precluded from enforcing warning label requirements on Roundup given that the EPA ordered the removal of cancer-risk warning labels from glyphosate in 2019.
U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer has filed two briefs in support of Monsanto arguing that past court rulings have gotten the issue wrong and that the EPA’s approval of Roundup renders any state’s additional ruling on the subject inconsistent with federal law, and therefore any lawsuit based on state law moot.
“Three out of nine U.S. officials who signed the [latest] brief previously worked for law firms that have represented Bayer, raising questions about whether the Trump administration is providing special favors and benefits to Bayer and siding with a foreign corporation against Americans with cancer,” U.S. Right to Know reported.
The administration’s March 4 amicus brief in support of Bayer argues that without federal preemption, “All 50 states could pick their own warning regimes for health concerns, inhalation risks, first-aid procedures, or water quality, either legislatively or via jury trials … FIFRA rejects that state-by-state cacophony and vests EPA with responsibility to determine [which] pesticide warnings are necessary to protect human health and the environment.”
Bayer’s influence on the farming industry is reflected in the amici briefs filed with the Supreme Court, including one led by the American Farm Bureau Federation, the nation’s largest farming organization, along with 11 other agricultural groups. They argue that glyphosate is so vital to the American food system that pesticide manufacturers like Bayer must be protected at all costs.
On April 4, a coalition of public health, conservation, and sustainable agriculture groups filed a brief in opposition to Bayer. The company is trying to make “it and EPA be the sole arbiters of pesticides’ safety,” said George Kimbrell, the Center for Food Safety’s legal director. “Their position seeking to escape accountability for their toxic products is wrong [in] every possible way: legally, scientifically, and factually.”
Despite strong support from the Trump administration, Bayer has predicted that even if it wins a favorable ruling from the Supreme Court it would still not be completely insulated from future Roundup claims.
Regardless of the Durnell ruling, Bayer plans to continue its lobbying efforts in order to “curtail” pending lawsuits and future waves of litigation. “We’ve said many times that the size and complexity of the glyphosate litigation, as well as the uncertainties regarding the application of federal law, which impact our current and future crop protection portfolio, require a multipronged strategy and no one action by itself is going to bring closure or certainty.”
Arn Pearson and Liisa Silander contributed to this article.
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