By Alex Jack
An executive order by President Donald Trump early this year has ignited renewed controversy over glyphosate, the widely used herbicide at the center of thousands of cancer lawsuits. Framed by the administration as a matter of national security, the order seeks to ensure continued production of glyphosate and related materials, effectively strengthening protections for Bayer, the manufacturer of Roundup.
The decision was driven in part by concerns over military supply chains, with the White House stating that “the president made this decision based on national security priorities.” Because Bayer is the only producer of white phosphorus—a substance used both in herbicides and military munitions—the administration argued that maintaining production is essential for “military readiness and national defense.”
The shielding order to protect Bayer, the parent company of Monsanto, which manufacturers Roundup, came several weeks before the attack on Iran. The onset of the war in late February led to skyrocketing price hikes in oil, fertilizer, and critical chemicals used in fertilizers as the Strait of Hormuz was shut down. The administration argued that without federal intervention to secure domestic production, the U.S. food supply would remain vulnerable to these “hostile foreign actors.”
Yet the order has intensified criticism from public health advocates, environmental groups, and even members of Congress. Glyphosate has long been under scrutiny for its potential health effects, with the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classifying it as “probably carcinogenic to humans.”
At the same time, Bayer continues to face a vast wave of litigation. Over 165,000 American farmers, gardeners, and others exposed to Roundup have alleged that it caused non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and the company has already paid more than $11 billion in settlements and verdicts. In February 2026, Bayer proposed a further $7.25 billion class-action settlement covering current and future cancer claims, with payments ranging from $10,000 to $165,000 depending on severity and exposure.
Crucially, Bayer has argued—both in court and through lobbying—that federal pesticide law should shield it from failure-to-warn lawsuits if regulators did not require cancer warnings on product labels. The U.S. Department of Justice filed an amicus brief in the United States Supreme Court supporting Bayer in Monsanto Company v. Durnell, a case addressing whether federal pesticide law preempts state law, seeking to invalidate claims brought by citizens harmed by Roundup. This position is now before the U.S. Supreme Court, with arguments scheduled for April.
The executive order, together with these legal efforts, has fueled concern that the ability of individuals to seek redress through the courts may be significantly curtailed. Critics across the political spectrum have voiced alarm. Representative Thomas Massie (R–KY) warned on the House floor that “all three branches of this government are under siege by lobbyists and lawyers from a German company named Bayer.” In a bipartisan attempt to thwart the influence of the chemical industry lobby, Massie and Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-ME) introduced the bipartisan No Immunity for Glyphosate Act, which would prevent pesticide manufacturers from receiving federal liability protections tied to glyphosate.
According to consumer watchdog U.S. Right to Know, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles previously worked at Mercury Public Affairs, a lobbying firm that later registered to represent Bayer in Washington.
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shifted from a staunch anti-glyphosate activist, who won lawsuits against its manufacturer, to supporting a Trump administration executive order boosting its domestic production. While still calling it “toxic by design,” he reframed the chemical as essential for agricultural stability and national security, prioritizing a slow transition to regenerative farming over an immediate ban.
This shift was criticized by his followers (the “MAHA” movement), who were stunned that he was defending a product he once described as a major health threat.
Public and medical reaction has also been swift. Health-conscious constituencies—some of whom had supported the administration’s promises to address environmental toxins—have expressed dismay, seeing the move as a reversal of those commitments. Environmental advocates argue that the focus on military and industrial priorities is overshadowing long-standing concerns about cancer risks and chemical exposure.
In response, lawmakers and advocacy groups are exploring ways to resist or override the policy through legislative action and continued litigation. The outcome of the pending Supreme Court case, along with potential congressional measures, may prove decisive in determining whether federal authority can preempt the rights of individuals harmed by widely used agricultural chemicals.
At its heart, this unfolding situation raises profound questions about the balance between corporate protection, national policy, and individual justice. For many observers, shielding a harmful chemical from legal accountability—despite decades of mounting health concerns and ongoing lawsuits—represents not only a legal turning point, but a moral one.
In this light, the effort to protect glyphosate from litigation stands as a troubling precedent: a consolidation of corporate and governmental power that risks undermining both personal rights and planetary health.
To read the full article, including sections on “The Agribusiness-Military Connection” and “The White Phosphorus Connection,” please become a paid subscriber to Amberwaves. In the rest of the article, Alex recalls how as a reporter in Vietnam in the 1960s he visited a hospital ward of children severely injured by white phosphorus, the same chemical used in manufacturing glyphosate.
The Agribusiness-Military Connection
The glyphosate controversy highlights the little-known connection between agribusiness and the military-industrial complex. Bayer, the storied German pharmaceutical company that introduced aspirin in 1899, merged with other companies in 1925 into IG Farben, the German chemical conglomerate that during World War II built the poison gas facilities at Auschwitz and conducted pharmaceutical experiments on concentration camp prisoners. After the Nuremberg trials, IG Farben was broken up, and Bayer emerged as an independent company. In 2018, it acquired Monsanto, producer of the glyphosate herbicide Roundup.
As plant-based consumer activist Elizabeth Kucinich observed: “Modern chemical agriculture arose in the context of warfare. The twentieth century chemical industry developed many of its core technologies during periods of global conflict, and after World War II chemical manufacturing capacity and scientific expertise were redirected toward agriculture. The language followed the chemistry.”
“We declared war on weeds, war on insects, and war on fungi,” she went on in a recent article “Poisoned Politics Poisons People” on shielding glyphosate from all health claims. “Fields became battlegrounds. Industrial agriculture relies on chemicals designed to kill. Herbicides kill plants. Insecticides kill insects. Fungicides kill fungi. This is Ecocide. These compounds eliminate living organisms in the interests of industrial production. Some targets are labeled pests. Many others are casualties of unregulated industrial production. Pollinators, soil organisms, birds, aquatic life, and beneficial insects disappear from landscapes saturated with chemical inputs.”
“Human beings live inside those same landscapes. Farmworkers, rural communities, and consumers become collateral damage in a system built to deploy lethal chemistry across millions of acres,” Kucinich concluded. “The mentality that accepts ecological destruction in pursuit of control resembles the mentality that accepts civilian casualties as an unavoidable cost of war. Life treated as expendable in one arena rarely remains protected in another.”
The White Phosphorus Connection
Glyphosate’s connection with white phosphorus is especially disturbing. White phosphorus is one of the most fearsome substances in modern warfare: a waxy chemical that ignites on contact with oxygen, throws off dense white smoke, and burns through metal or other protective substances at temperatures high enough to cause catastrophic injuries. Its flames cling to skin, clothing, buildings, and fields, and wounds can reignite when exposed to air. That is why it has become notorious not only as a battlefield obscurant or signaling agent, but as a weapon associated in the public mind with agony, terror, and long-lasting contamination. Human Rights Watch and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) both note that, although white phosphorus is not categorically banned in all circumstances, its use against civilians, civilian objects, or in populated areas can violate international humanitarian law and be prosecuted as a war crime.
Monsanto operates the only white phosphorus production facility in the United States, at Soda Springs, Idaho, and uses most of that white phosphorus to manufacture glyphosate for Roundup; the same supply chain also feeds, through intermediaries, the U.S. military’s white phosphorus munitions production. The same industrial stream that helps produce one of the world’s most controversial herbicides is linked to one of the world’s most cruel incendiary substances. That overlap makes white phosphorus not only a symbol of war’s brutality, but also of the entanglement of chemical agriculture, military supply chains, and corporate power.
Historically, white phosphorus belongs to the wider family of incendiary horrors that scarred twentieth-century warfare. During the Vietnam era, the U.S. military used massive quantities of incendiary weapons, most notoriously napalm, while white phosphorus and related phosphorus munitions were also part of the arsenal used for burning, screening, and flushing out enemy positions.
In 1967, a Vietnamese doctor who headed Terres des Hommes, the branch of an international human rights organization, and medical students gave me a secret tour of a hospital ward of civilian war casualties in Saigon that was concealed from the foreign press. He took me to see a little girl who was burned by white phosphorus, one of the grimmest experiences of my reporting in Vietnam.
Later, white phosphorus was used in Iraq, including Fallujah, and in repeated Middle Eastern conflicts. In Lebanon, Amnesty International in 2023 said one Israeli strike using white phosphorus in Dhayra should be investigated as a war crime, and Human Rights Watch reported in 2024 and again in March 2026 that Israeli forces used white phosphorus over populated residential areas in southern Lebanon, conduct it described as unlawful. Israel has denied illegal use.
Taken together, white phosphorus and glyphosate reveal a chilling continuity: the chemical mindset that treats land, food systems, and human bodies as expendable terrain. One chemical burns fields and flesh in war; the other saturates farms and enters food chains in peace. Their linkage through production and corporate lobbying only deepens the moral indictment. Even where white phosphorus is defended as technically legal in limited military uses, its recurring appearance in civilian landscapes has made it a byword for indiscriminate suffering. In that sense, its connection to glyphosate is not only industrial but symbolic: both stand for a model of power that sacrifices health, ecology, and human dignity to strategic and commercial ends.
Alex Jack is president of Planetary Health and a macrobiotic teacher and author.