The Trump administration quietly issued an executive order this week that could prove deeply uncomfortable for one of its most prominent cabinet members. Signed on February 18, the order invokes the Defense Production Act to safeguard the domestic supply of elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides — the latter being a chemical that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has spent decades vilifying as a public health catastrophe.

The order designates glyphosate-based herbicides as critical to national security, citing their role as “the most widely used crop protection tools in United States agriculture” and warning that any disruption to their supply would devastate American food production. It delegates authority to the Secretary of Agriculture to ensure continued production and explicitly instructs that no regulation issued under the order should threaten the “corporate viability” of the sole domestic producer — a directive that amounts to federal protection for an industry Kennedy has long sought to dismantle through litigation and advocacy.

Kennedy’s history with glyphosate is extensive and adversarial. Through his organization Children’s Health Defense, he championed lawsuits against Bayer (the manufacturer of Roundup, the most recognized glyphosate-based herbicide) and consistently argued that the herbicide was linked to cancer, particularly non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He called for its ban and helped amplify a wave of litigation that cost Bayer billions in settlements. His nomination to lead HHS was, for many of his supporters, an opportunity to finally bring regulatory scrutiny to a chemical they viewed as emblematic of a captured regulatory system. The executive order effectively works against that ambition, locking glyphosate’s protected status into the framework of national defense.

The Science: Where Consensus and Controversy Collide

The debate over glyphosate’s safety is one of the most contentious in modern toxicology, and it doesn’t resolve cleanly in either direction.

On the side of relative safety, regulatory agencies in the United States, Europe, Canada, and Australia have repeatedly reviewed the evidence and concluded that glyphosate, used as directed, does not pose an unreasonable risk to human health. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reaffirmed this position as recently as 2020, stating that glyphosate is “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans.” The European Food Safety Authority reached a similar conclusion in 2023. Glyphosate works by inhibiting an enzyme pathway — the shikimate pathway — found in plants and some microorganisms but absent in humans and animals, which is part of why its advocates argue it is among the more targeted and therefore less harmful herbicides available. Its widespread adoption has also been credited with enabling no-till farming practices that reduce soil erosion, lower fuel consumption, and decrease overall herbicide use compared to older alternatives.¹

The opposing case is not without scientific grounding. In 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), an arm of the World Health Organization, classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans” (Group 2A), primarily based on evidence of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in occupationally exposed workers and animal studies showing tumor development at high doses.² Critics of this classification note that Group 2A also includes red meat and working as a hairdresser, and that IARC’s hazard classification does not account for real-world exposure levels. Still, the IARC determination has provided the scientific backbone for ongoing litigation and continued public concern.

Beyond cancer, researchers have raised questions about glyphosate’s potential to disrupt the gut microbiome. Because the shikimate pathway is present in gut bacteria, some scientists argue that chronic low-level exposure could alter microbial populations in ways that affect immune function, metabolism, and neurological health — though this research remains preliminary and causation has not been established in human populations.³ There is also growing concern about glyphosate-resistant “superweeds,” an ecological consequence of overreliance that threatens to undermine the very agricultural efficiency the executive order seeks to protect.

A Divided Administration

The order puts a sharp point on the internal contradictions of the Make America Healthy Again movement operating inside a deregulatory, agriculture-first administration. Kennedy’s brand of health populism has always sat uneasily alongside the economic interests of industrial farming, and this executive order makes that tension impossible to ignore. Whether Kennedy publicly addresses the contradiction — or quietly defers to presidential authority — may signal just how much influence he actually wields within an administration that has otherwise embraced his rhetorical agenda while protecting the industries he once targeted.

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Endnotes

¹ EPA. (2020). Glyphosate: Interim Registration Review Decision. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

² IARC. (2015). IARC Monographs Volume 112: Evaluation of Five Organophosphate Insecticides and Herbicides. World Health Organization.

³ Rueda-Ruzafa, L., et al. (2019). Gut microbiota and neurological effects of glyphosate. Neurotoxicology, 75, 1–8.