If herbicides are toxic by design—engineered to kill living organisms—then pretending they are harmless is dishonest. And if our entire food system currently depends on them, pretending we can eliminate them overnight without consequences is unserious.
This is the tension President Trump’s recent executive order has forced the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement to confront, and for good reason.
The administration announced in February that it would invoke the Defense Production Act to secure domestic supply chains for key agricultural chemicals, including glyphosate. Immediately, backlash erupted among MAHA leaders and the millions of parents who helped fuel the movement’s political rise.
“MAHA Moms” turned out for President Donald Trump in a big way in 2024, swinging firmly to the right. More than 8 in 10 MAGA Republican parents identify with the MAHA movement, according to a poll late last year. Thought leaders, from the MAHA Institute’s Calley Means to the Culture Apothecary host and Turning Point spokesperson Alex Clark, have been good-faith partners to the Trump Administration over the past year. That alliance is being tested.
The debate over agricultural herbicides is not new. It is the product of decades of policy choices. MAHA leaders argue, however, that how we choose to address this challenge will shape Americans’ health and our natural inheritance for generations to come. The MAHA conviction is simple: We should not build a food system that slowly makes Americans sick.
Glyphosate sits at the center of this debate. A growing body of research, along with billions of dollars in cancer-related settlements, has raised serious questions about its long-term impact on human health and biodiversity. Many agricultural communities report elevated rates of chronic disease. Parents worry about early exposure in children. Farmers themselves face mounting concerns about resistant weeds and declining soil vitality—and a loss of biodiversity in the surrounding environment.
Yet the dependence is real.
While Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. acknowledged this dependence on a podcast, he also agreed with the host that “we are dependent on something that we know makes us sick.” There is currently no cost-effective, scalable alternative to glyphosate that can maintain current national crop yields. Remove these inputs overnight, and food prices surge, yields fall, and American farms collapse at an even faster rate.
This is the governing challenge.
Our current agricultural system did not emerge naturally. For decades, federal policy incentivized monocultures, maximum yield, chemical inputs, and short-term efficiency. Farmers adapted to the rules Washington wrote, and those incentives locked producers into chemical dependence. Now Washington has a responsibility to help unwind that dependence without bankrupting the very families who feed us.
Trump did not build this system, but he did inherit this reality. To the administration’s credit, securing agricultural supply chains is a legitimate national security priority. The United States cannot rely on adversarial nations for critical inputs that sustain our food production. Food security and defense readiness are pillars of sovereignty. But supply chain security at the cost of deeper chemical entrenchment—and blanket immunity for manufacturers—rightfully gives many Americans pause.
Over the past decade, chemical companies have paid tens of billions of dollars to settle claims tied to glyphosate-based products. That scale of litigation reflects real concern. Securing domestic production should not mean shielding corporations from accountability or denying families their day in court. The Kentucky Republican Rep. Thomas Massie’s No Immunity for Glyphosate Act reflects that principle: Sovereignty and accountability are not mutually exclusive.
At the same time, we cannot ignore economic reality. There is no ready substitute that can instantly replace glyphosate without raising costs and destabilizing production. Tilling, for example, damages the soil and adds costs for hardworking American farmers producing our food. If herbicides are toxic by design, the real question is not whether we use them. It is how fast we can replace them with something safer without crashing the food supply in the process.
If anything, this conundrum means that America must once again rise to the occasion. Precision robotics; laser-guided weed control; biological inputs; regenerative systems that rebuild soil health and reduce reliance on blanket spraying: Farmers across the country are already experimenting with these tools. Markets are beginning to scale them. Federal policy should accelerate that transition, not slow it.
America has solved harder problems than this. From modern medicine to the technologies we now carry in our pockets, Americans have long treated challenges as opportunities to build something better.
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The ultimate goal should be to phase out harmful herbicides in a way that does not penalize American farmers for abundant food production. Put simply, we must grow food that does not slowly poison us. While a fully developed, commercially available solution does not yet exist, our long history of American ingenuity leaves no room to doubt that, in the not-so-distant future, it will.
The American tradition is defined by a can-do spirit. We can secure supply chains without deepening dependency. We can protect farmers without abandoning families harmed by unsafe products. We can invest in innovation without pretending the status quo is acceptable. We all want a future better than the one we have today.
These chemicals, with their known harms and trade-offs, cannot be our forever. We must feed our families today while building a safer, healthier world for our children.
