It’s always been a big question during the 2024 presidential campaign and now with President Trump’s second administration. What’s going to happen when the Make America Healthy Again ideas of Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. bump up against profit-driven corporations.
The question was answered yet again with a recent executive order.
President Trump signed an executive order Wednesday invoking the Defense Production Act to guarantee the supply of glyphosate-based herbicides, claiming it’s critical to national security.
“If anyone still wondered whether ‘Make America Healthy Again’ was a genuine commitment to protecting public health or a scam concocted by President Trump and RFK Jr. to rally health-conscious voters in 2024, today’s decision answers that question,” Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, an environmental advocacy group, said in a statement.
“I can’t envision a bigger middle finger to every MAHA mom than this,” Cook said. “By granting immunity to the makers of the nation’s most widely used pesticide, President Trump just gave Bayer a license to poison people. Full stop.”
He said it’s a shocking betrayal to protecting everyone, but especially to the people who live and work near farm fields where glyphosate is used.
For years, Kennedy publicly attacked glyphosate and built a national profile suing its maker, Bayer-Monsanto, over health harms tied to the herbicide.
On the campaign trail, both Kennedy and Trump pledged to confront pesticides such as glyphosate and clean up the food supply to win the trust of health-conscious voters worried about pesticide exposure.
“Elevating glyphosate to a national security priority is the exact opposite of what MAHA voters were promised,” said Cook. “If Secretary Kennedy remains at HHS after this, it will be impossible to argue that his past warnings about glyphosate were anything more than campaign rhetoric designed to win trust – and votes.”
First President Trump sided with Bayer-Monsanto on glyphosate at the U.S. Supreme Court, and now he’s elevating it through the Defense Department, said Cook.
“MAHA supporters were promised reform, and instead, they’ve been treated by MAGA like a convenient group of useful idiots ever since Kennedy joined Trump on the campaign trail,” he added.
