Pesticide experts praised “The MAHA Report,” released last week, for acknowledging the need to examine the cumulative effects of multiple pesticides on children’s health. However, they criticized the report’s call for additional studies on chemicals already proven harmful and it’s failure to address genetically modified crops and how they are dependent on pesticide use.
MAY 30, 2025
The report released last week by the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Commission cited cumulative chemical exposure as a key driver of chronic disease in children and pointed to herbicides, pesticides and insecticides as a “possible” source contributing to that exposure.
The report included a detailed chart listing all major chemical exposures for American children. The chart highlighted three agrochemicals — atrazine, chlorpyrifos and glyphosate — that children are exposed to through food, water, dust, lawn treatments and household sprays. However, in its overall assessment of what it called “crop protection tools,” the report said only that “some studies have raised concerns about possible links” between some of the products and children’s health and that human studies on the issue are “limited.”
The report footnoted some key studies that have shown links between agrochemicals and health. However, it also noted that most products comply with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) established safety limits. The report also tempered its assessment of those studies, stating that governmental reviews of epidemiological studies did not find a “direct link” between “the most common herbicide” and adverse outcomes when the herbicide is used as directed on the label.
The report didn’t name the herbicide, but according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), glyphosate has been the most commonly used herbicide in the U.S. for more than 20 years. The report repeatedly emphasized the importance of farmers and committed to putting them “at the center of how we think about health,” by putting “whole foods produced by American farmers and ranchers at the center of healthcare.”
Big Food alleges report damages consumer confidence in ‘safe, reliable food system’
Despite the report’s tempered language, Republican chairman of the U.S. House and Senate agriculture committees said they were “troubled” by the assessment and how it might affect farmers and ranchers, The New York Times reported. Big Food associations, such as the American Soybean Association, issued a statement saying it “strongly rebukes” the report “for being brazenly unscientific and damaging to consumer confidence in America’s safe, reliable food system.”
In March (while the report was being drafted) nearly 350 organizations “representing the food and agriculture community” sent a letter to U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins, and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, defending pesticides and biotechnology as critical to a “safe and affordable” U.S. food supply and arguing that a robust, science-based regulatory process is already in place. They challenged the claims that glyphosate, atrazine and other pesticides have adverse impacts on human health.
Regenerative farmer: ‘shocked this has gotten as far as it has’
Responses by experts focused on consumer and environmental health (whose work is geared toward restoring a healthier agricultural system) were mixed. Most said the report was a significant first step, but didn’t go far enough. Regenerative ranching pioneer Will Harris — who has long argued and demonstrated that a transition from conventional to regenerative agriculture is both possible and profitable — told The Defender that although the report didn’t get “as far as we need to be,” he was “pleased at how far it went.”
Harris said: “I’ve been a farmer all my life. I’m the fifth generation on this farm. I’m really close to this situation in a lot of different ways. And I’m shocked that we have come as far as we have. “I could see this thing being nixed by the powerful forces of Big Food, Big Ag, Big Tech, et cetera. But I’m shocked this has gotten as far as it has.” Harris said farmers are very personally financially invested in the existing industrial system because they have had to make substantial equipment and input purchases to run their farms. As a result, he said, “big changes made rapidly are just not in the cards.”
He suggested that change will more likely come from consumers demanding different and safer products than from the government, which is “driven by men and women who receive incredible amounts of money from lobbyists. They’re not going to change that system.”
Zen Honeycutt, executive director of Moms Across America, told The Defender that “While we are incredibly grateful for the Tour de Force that the MAHA Commission Report is, we must continue to tell the truth about the missing aspects: GMOs [genetically modified organisms], geoengineering and critical aspects of glyphosate were missing. We implore the administration to acknowledge the harms of these major contributors to our chronic disease epidemic.”
Bill Freese, science director at the Center for Food Safety, said the strongest aspect of the report was its treatment of chemical exposures overall, because it “repeatedly hits on the point about cumulative exposures.” The norm is that we look chemical by chemical or pesticide by pesticide, he said. But that doesn’t provide a full picture of harms — “you need to assess exposure to the multitude of chemicals in the environment,” he said.
However, Freese said, the report didn’t mention the second part of the cumulative exposures issue, which is the regulatory side. Freese said the EPA has been charged with assessing cumulative pesticide assessment since the 1996 Food Quality Protection Act was passed, but very little progress has been made. On top of that, different chemical exposures are regulated by different agencies, Freese said. There are regulatory silos, which makes it nearly impossible to take on the broader question of cumulative exposures.
Pesticides are regulated under the Federal Insecticide, Rodenticide, and Fungicide Act, industrial chemicals are regulated under the Toxic Substances Control Act. There’s a different law for Superfund sites. “I don’t see any analysis of how you overcome that.”
‘Clearly, Big Ag interests influenced the outcome of this report’
The study makes many calls for more scientific research into the issues it raises. Freese said while more research is always good, for some of these issues, there’s already enough science to take action. For example, the insecticide chlorpyrifos is a neurotoxin. The herbicide Paraquat is acutely toxic and has strong links to Parkinson’s disease, which EPA acknowledges, but it’s still approved for use in the U.S. Glyphosate has clear links to non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
In an article highlighting the report’s limitations, Honeycutt noted that it didn’t mention harms from GMOs at all, and that hundreds of studies have shown harms from glyphosate, which ought to be addressed. “Clearly, Big Ag interests influenced the outcome of this report,” she wrote. Honeycutt said that when the report states that 99% of tested food samples are compliant with the EPA’s safety limits, it misleads readers to assume those standards are set at levels that would protect human health rather than industry influence.
Freese said the standards for glyphosate have been lowered twentyfold since the 1980s — precisely during the period that glyphosate use skyrocketed. Beyond taking certain pesticides off the market completely, Freese said there needs to be a reorientation of how pest control is conducted — a shift in the reigning paradigm that seeks to eliminate every pest, to one where pests are managed.
More organic is great, he said, but there is also a lot of room for ways to cut down on pesticide use without going totally organic. For example, there are many pesticides — like neonicotinoids, that coat almost all soybean and corn seeds in the U.S. — which studies have shown don’t even offer any real benefits, yet they are the only seeds most farmers can get. Weed-control strategies as simple as planting cover crops can greatly reduce the need for herbicides, he added.
Honeycutt said part of the problem is that farmers aren’t informed about all the options. “We believe that when farmers learn the truth, they will see that the best tools in the toolbox are their hearts (which are BIG!), their minds (INGENIOUS!) and organic practices (more profitable!).”
Trump decimating key protections needed to realize the goals of ‘The MAHA Report’
The MAHA Commission report is calling for more science at the very moment that the Trump administration is gutting the EPA Office of Research and Development (ORD) — the agency’s research arm that would conduct that science.
“It’s a scandal that the agency is being gutted,” Freese said. ORD is a scientific research organization with no regulatory responsibilities. It isn’t subject to industry influence in the same way other sectors of the EPA are, so ORD often comes to different conclusions than groups like the EPA’s pesticides division.
For example, ORD identified glyphosate as a carcinogen when the pesticide wing of the EPA tried to argue that it was safe.
Freese said ORD does the type of work that “The MAHA Report” calls for: assess the adverse effects of cumulative exposure to multiple chemicals instead of the more common existing approach that evaluates each chemical separately.
If ORD is eliminated, no one will be doing that work, he said. The report calls for “unleashing private sector innovation to understand and reduce the cumulative chemical load on our children” — but private sector research is focused on producing and selling the new chemicals/pesticides, not on reducing chemical exposure.
“The MAHA report correctly links childhood disease to environmental toxins, but the Trump Administration’s hostility to science and the firing of thousands of government toxicologists and health scientists will lead to a worsening rather than improvement in children’s health,” Freese said.
The report also mentions that in May 2025, enforceable drinking water standards were set for two compounds in a group of chemicals known as PFAS associated with metabolic disorders, decreased fertility in women, developmental delays in children and increased risk of some cancers, according to the EPA.
This change was actually made by the Biden administration. The Trump administration announced in May that it was delaying the deadlines to meet those standards and rolling back limits on four other related chemicals.