Last Thursday, June 25, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court did something that should make every American who has ever walked in a park, worried about what we are doing to our health and our environment, or questioned what’s really in their food sit up and pay attention.
In a 7-2 decision, the Court ruled that Bayer cannot be sued under state law for failing to warn consumers of health risks the Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t require to be put on warning labels. The case, Monsanto v. Durnell, was about glyphosate-based Roundup weed killer causing cancer, but the ruling applies to every harm caused by any of the 57,000 EPA-regulated pesticides, from roach sprays to agrochemicals.
Over 100,000 people have filed claims saying Roundup gave them non-Hodgkin lymphoma. A Missouri jury ruled in favor of one of them, a gardener named John Durnell, and awarded him over a million dollars. Now the Supreme Court has wiped that away, and with it, potentially the claims of tens of thousands of other cancer victims.
A jury of regular Americans looked at the evidence and gave John Durnell justice. The Supreme Court just took it away.
How We Got Here: Bayer Bought the Government
This ruling did not come out of nowhere. It has been years in the making, built on one of the most aggressive corporate lobbying campaigns in modern history.The Trump administration filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to side with Bayer. The Justice Department, led by an attorney general, Pam Bondi, who spent years lobbying alongside Bayer’s people at Ballard Partners, argued that because the EPA had approved glyphosate, state-level cancer warnings were out of bounds. Three out of nine U.S. officials who signed that brief previously worked at law firms that have represented Bayer.
According to Stacy Malkan’s investigation at U.S. Right to Know, Bayer has 22 key administration officials with ties to its lobbying or legal network spread across the White House, USDA, and EPA. The top four jobs at the EPA’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention are now occupied by former chemical industry lobbyists. The EPA quietly loosened its own ethics standards to make that possible. Meanwhile, the Trump White House invoked the Defense Production Act to guarantee supplies of glyphosate-based herbicides, treating a cancer-linked weed killer as a matter of national security.
Bayer spent at least $9.19 million on federal lobbying in 2025 alone. Ballard Partners, the firm that has employed White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, became the highest-earning lobbying firm in Washington that same year, a record in the history of American lobbying. A German corporation, using American political connections, to shield itself from American cancer victims.
What the Science Actually Says
Justice Kavanaugh’s majority opinion rests on this idea: the EPA doesn’t require glyphosate to be labeled with a cancer warning, so state juries have no business saying Monsanto failed to warn glyphosate-exposed cancer victims.
But in 2015, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen. Studies keep coming, linking it to liver disease, reproductive harm, and rising cancer rates among young people in the Corn Belt. The science is not settled the way Bayer wants you to think it is.
The Trump administration’s answer to all of this? Cut the National Institutes of Health’s ties with IARC. Remove the scientists doing the research Bayer doesn’t like.As Nathan Donley of the Center for Biological Diversity put it, the only thing that matters legally now is what the EPA claims to be true, even when those claims ignore the best available science. And right now, the people running the EPA came straight from the industry it’s supposed to regulate.
What the Court has done is hand the EPA a level of authority it was never meant to have, essentially making the agency’s warning labels legal shields for pesticide companies.
As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pointed out in her dissent, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the EPA’s warning labels are meant to protect pesticide users against acute and immediate hazards, like the risk of accidental poisoning, not chronic harms that develop over years of use like cancer. The majority got the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act wrong, leaving John Durnell without a remedy for the harm he suffered from Monsanto’s carcinogenic herbicide.
This Is Personal
For OCA, this has never been abstract. We have been in this fight for decades. The hundreds of thousands of people who follow our Millions Against Monsanto Campaign page and Facebook page are farmers, gardeners, parents, and families who have been asking the same question for years: why is a product linked to cancer still being sold without a warning? The Supreme Court just made that question a lot harder to answer in court.
What Comes Next
Here is the thing Bayer does not want you to know: this ruling was narrow. The lawyers fighting these cases were on the phone the day after the decision making clear they are not walking away.
Failure-to-warn claims are done. But lawsuits built on negligence, design defect, and breach of warranty are still very much alive. Bayer faces a July 9 hearing on a proposed $7.25 billion class action settlement, and thousands of cases are still in the pipeline. The war, as one attorney put it, is far from over.On Capitol Hill, Senator Cory Booker has pledged to introduce an amendment to strip the preemptive authority the Court just handed to pesticide companies. Republican Representative Anna Paulina Luna has said she will introduce a bill to hold these companies accountable. This is one of those rare issues where people on both sides of the aisle are furious, and that matters.
Bayer may have won Monsanto v. Durnell, but it will rue the day it kicked our hornets’ nest! Anger at the company had already inspired bills banning or restricting its carcinogenic glyphosate-based Roundup herbicide to be introduced in a dozen states. Let’s make it 50!
TAKE ACTION: Tell Your State Legislators to Ban Glyphosate!
Two journalists have been doing the most important reporting on this story and both are essential reading.
Carey Gillam at The New Lede has the full legal picture of what the ruling means for ongoing and future cases:
Carey Gillam, The New Lede — Monsanto SCOTUS Pesticides Cancer CaseCarey Gillam, The New Lede — Supreme Court Decision Roundup Legal Claims
And Stacy Malkan at U.S. Right to Know has spent months mapping exactly how Bayer built its network of influence inside the Trump administration:
Stacy Malkan, U.S. Right to Know — Tracing Bayer’s Ties to Power in Trump’s WashingtonThis is the kind of journalism that actually changes things. Read them. Share them.
The ‘People vs. Poison’ rally on April 27 outside the Supreme Court drew farmers, MAHA activists, environmentalists, and members of Congress from both parties. That kind of unity does not happen by accident. It happens when the enemy is obvious.
Buy organic, demand labeling, and boycott Roundup. The most powerful vote you cast every day is with your wallet. We have been saying that since 2015 and it has never been more true.
Bayer thought this ruling would end the conversation. It has only made us louder. We have been in this fight for nearly thirty years. We are not done.
