Bayer Banks on Congress for Permanent Roundup Immunity
This is the second 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 first and third parts of the series.
In the eight years since it bought Monsanto—along with the liability for its primary product, Roundup—Bayer AG has been saddled with an endless stream of lawsuits and settlement payments for cancer claims related to the most widely used herbicide in the world. Tens of thousands of plaintiffs who contracted non-Hodgkin lymphoma after working with Roundup have sued over the company’s failure to label it as a potential carcinogen.
This year the threat of losing billions more to future litigation has lightened considerably for the German biotech giant thanks to an executive order signed by President Trump in February decreeing glyphosate—the key chemical used in Roundup and produced exclusively in the U.S. by Bayer—as “critical to national defense.” That move could shield Bayer from future cancer claims, according to some legal experts. The company also hopes to further lighten its long-term litigatory liabilities through a favorable Supreme Court decision this spring in Monsanto Company v. Durnell (see Part I of this series).
Not taking anything for granted, Bayer is now aggressively lobbying Congress to permanently close the door on Roundup victims. “Executive action can send an important signal. But executive orders do not provide the long-term legal certainty farmers, manufacturers, and innovators need,” the company’s farm front group wrote in a recent press release. “That’s why Congress must act.”
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After several failed attempts, Bayer has managed to get a Roundup immunity provision embedded in the 2026 House Farm Bill that passed out of committee in early March. The measure mirrors one that the company helped draft and get into the House version of the 2024 Farm Bill during the final months of the Biden administration.
However, once the Senate and House committee chairs released dueling proposals the very same day, the 2024 bill never received a full House vote and stalled out. Congress eventually voted to extend the 2018 version of the Farm Bill in December 2024 and did so again in November 2025 as part of the congressional bill to end last fall’s 43-day government shutdown.
With the Farm Bill stuck in a legislative bottleneck for nearly two years, Bayer turned its sights on an appropriations bill to fund the EPA and the Interior Department through September of this year. The company lobbied to include a pesticides preemption rider that would have kept states from regulating pesticide use and blocked funding for the EPA from being used to adjust the federal government’s guidelines for pesticide labeling—in advance of the agency’s legally required update on Roundup this fall.
The EPA is required by law to review the environmental safety and public health effects of pesticides every 15 years and update its labeling guidelines accordingly. Keeping the EPA from updating its Roundup guidelines would have helped Bayer by prolonging the status quo, but House Democrats managed to remove that provision from the bill in early January, arguing that it would have hindered the EPA from adjusting its guidance in the future.
The same month Representative Chellie Pingree (D–ME) led a successful campaign to strip the rider—dubbed the “Cancer Gag Act” by critics—from the appropriations bill.
Roughly a month later, however, a renewed version of the Farm Bill—now known as the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026—was introduced with the same provision (Section 10205), preventing states and local governments from issuing warnings about the risks of pesticides and making the EPA the sole authority for pesticide safety labeling. The Agriculture Committee passed the revised bill on March 5, and with seven Democrats having voted in favor of it, the bill is expected to receive bipartisan support when it reaches a floor vote, presumably this spring. However, passage in the Senate, where it will likely be reworked, is less certain.
In passing the bill, the committee rejected Pingree’s Protect Our Health Amendment, which called for several safeguards to public health, including the ability for courts, states, and local governments to review applicable regulations and laws about pesticides in a given jurisdiction.
Just before the committee passed the revised Farm Bill, Pingree called out the Trump administration for “choosing corporate profits over Americans’ health.” As she pointed out, the bill “is a gift to Big Chemical, plain and simple. It delivers exactly what giants like Bayer have spent years lobbying for: blanket immunity from lawsuits and the power to gut the state warning label laws that protect families, farmers, and children.”
Pingree’s concerns are echoed by Jacqueline Esposito of the Waterkeeper Alliance, who wrote about the implications of the latest Farm Bill in the context of Trump’s pro-glyphosate executive order. “Combined these measures protect chemical industry profits while leaving communities exposed,” Esposito wrote. “Chemical companies could avoid legal accountability even when pesticides poison water or damage crops, and local governments could lose the power to impose stronger restrictions. These policies don’t just fail to protect water and public health—they actively put millions at risk from harmful pesticides and other toxins, making us all less safe.”
“Congress has the ability to help U.S. farmers and farmworkers transition to safer methods of growing and raising food,” according to the Pesticide Action Network. “But, as written, the bill would further lock us in a dangerous system that perpetuates harm to vulnerable people, public health, and the environment.”
State Lobbying Efforts Yield a Few Wins—and Many Losses
Prior to targeting the federal government and the executive branch, Bayer spent millions lobbying state lawmakers to pass liability shields—with only mixed results.
But despite this and the expense of its ongoing legal battles, the company is continuing its efforts to convince state legislatures to pass bills that prevent cancer patients from initiating pesticide-related litigation against it in the future.
Bayer has backed Roundup immunity bills in 14 states during the 2025–26 legislative session, with bills in play this year in nine states: Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Wyoming. Of those, only two were enacted in 2025—in North Dakota and Georgia.
However, this spring Kentucky became the third state to deliver an immunity shield for Bayer. The state Senate sent SB 199 on to Democratic Governor Andy Beshear on March 19, two days after the House passed the bill, which stipulates that any pesticide label that meets EPA standards is compliant with Kentucky’s duty-to-warn laws. Although the governor vetoed it on March 31, both the Senate and House overrode his veto the following day.
These copy-and-paste bills lawmakers have been passing around are built on the same two key components Bayer relies on in its own lobbying efforts and legal arguments: compliance with EPA standards and adherence to the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA). In addition, some states have added language to their bills that outright bars pesticide-related claims or limits the amount plaintiffs can recover.
Wyoming’s SF 74, which would have forced local pesticide regulations to “not vary” from federal regulations, failed in a state Senate vote on February 10. Florida’s HB 443, which would have amended state law to limit liability against pesticide manufacturers and protect pesticides that have FIFRA-compliant labels, died in a subcommittee on March 13.
In Kansas the House passed HB 2746 in February, but had to revive it on March 17 by attaching it to a food lunch additives bill, SB 390, after it stalled in a Senate committee following the House passage. And in Missouri, the Senate agriculture subcommittee voted to recommend passage of SB 1005 on March 11. However, both legislatures adjourned without further action.
In Iowa the Senate passed a Bayer immunity bill (SF 394) in March of last year, but the House speaker said there was not enough Republican support to bring it to a House floor vote. Trump’s executive order raised fears that the bill could resurface this spring and sparked a protest in the capitol rotunda, but the bill died when the legislature adjourned on April 21. A similar bill failed to advance in 2024.
A February report from the University of Iowa found that Iowa has the second-highest incidence of new cancers of any state in the country, and that it is one of only two states where cancer rates are on the rise.
Jennifer Breon, a senior organizer for the environmental group Food & Water Watch in Iowa, helped organize against Bayer’s bill and said that the company’s $200,000 lobbying campaign over the past two years felt disrespectful to state residents.
“Folks were already concerned about agriculture and links with cancer so in a lot of ways [Bayer’s ads about Roundup] just confirmed … that the industry and the agriculture sector that dominates farming in Iowa [are] not concerned about the people here,” she told the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). “We’re living in a sacrifice zone and our health is being damaged for the corporate bottom line. That made people angry.”
Iowa is one of several Midwest states considered “hotspots” for high rates of glyphosate spraying and non-Hodgkin lymphoma diagnoses, according to data analyzed and published by Food & Water Watch.
Similar companion bills in Tennessee, HB 809 and SB 527, which would have prevented Bayer from being sued in the state for failure to warn about Roundup’s risks, have also failed to make it to the finish line, with only a few days left to go in the session. The Senate passed SB 527 last year, but the House has declined to pick it up. And HB 809 was abruptly pulled from its committee hearing in January in the face of “massive public pushback,” according to the Tennessee Conservative.
Bayer is trying hard “to remove the few tools citizens have to hold pesticide companies accountable,” said Rob Faux of the Pesticide Action Network. “Pesticide companies are seeking a ‘license to deceive.’”
Arn Pearson contributed to this article.
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