April 17, 2025 – Some Republicans in Congress are worried that members of the Trump administration may consider restricting pesticide use as part of their agenda to improve American health. This week, Senator Pete Ricketts (R-Nebraska) led a group of 79 lawmakers to ask Cabinet members to resist efforts from “activist groups promoting misguided and sometimes malicious policies masquerading as health solutions.”
The concerns come in the form of a letter sent to Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., citing a recent petition that asked the commission to prioritize “eliminating extraordinarily toxic pesticides from food.” Rollins, Zeldin, and Kennedy are part of the Make America Healthy Again Commission that Trump created in February.
Submitted by the Center for Biological Diversity, the petition recommends agencies take several actions that would transform current pesticide policy. For example, it says the EPA should eliminate current allowances for residues of pesticides including atrazine, paraquat, and 2,4-D on food and that the USDA should only subsidize crop insurance for farmers who agree not to use a long list of pesticides, including glyphosate, atrazine, paraquat, and the three most common neonicotinoid insecticides.
The Republican lawmakers wrote in the letter that they are concerned that “environmental activists” are “advancing harmful health, economic or food security policies under the guise of human health.” However, Kennedy himself has pointed to several of the same chemicals in the past as potential causes of rising chronic disease rates, which the petition references.
In February, President Trump also said, on the topic of pesticides, “Bobby Kennedy is actually looking at that very seriously because maybe it’s not necessary to use all of that. We want to be the healthiest country, and we’re not.”
