Tell the USDA to Do Its Job: Protect Consumers, Not the Biotech Industry!

In 2017, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), with help from then-President Obama, effectively stripped consumers of their right to know if their food contains ingredients made with genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

In 2020, under the Trump administration’s “free-for-all” approach to regulation, the USDA said it would let companies like Monsanto-Bayer, DowDupont and Syngenta (now owned by ChemChina) “regulate” their own genetically engineered crops.

In 2024, thanks to a lawsuit brought by the Center for Food Safety, that was struck down by the courts.

Now, in 2026, the Trump administration is at it again, seeking public comments on how best to deregulate GMOs.

TAKE ACTION: Tell the USDA to do its job! Protect consumers, not the biotech industry!

From the department of “you can’t make this stuff up,” the USDA called its 2020 rule for reviewing and approving GMOs “Sustainable, Ecological, Consistent, Uniform, Responsible, Efficient,” or “SECURE” for short.

While it was in force, biotech companies were certainly more secure—secure in the fact that they would be allowed to unleash any genetically engineered organism into the environment or into the food system—with no oversight, no independent testing and no accountability.

The USDA’s rule followed Trump’s executive order, issued in 2019, calling for “modernizing the regulatory framework for agricultural biotechnology products.” Which is just shorthand for protecting corporate profits at the expense of human health and the environment.

“SECURE” was a disaster for organic farmers, whose organic certification and livelihoods are threatened by contamination of their non-GMO, organic crops when GMO pollen “drifts” into their fields—along with the pesticides those GMOs are engineered to withstand.

Under USDA’s “no-regulation rule,” almost every GMO was exempt from regulation. And biotech companies were the ones to decide whether or not their frankenfoods were “safe.”

As Dr. Allison A. Snow, professor of evolution, ecology and organismal biology at Ohio State University, wrote to the New York Times in 2015:

Asserting that biotech is safe is like saying that electricity is safe. Genetic engineering can be used safely or stupidly. Scientists, corporations and government agencies try to avoid the latter, and regulators need strong scientific data to evaluate risks.

Snow had this to say to a National Geographic reporter:

"Every transgenic organism brings with it a different set of potential risks and benefits," says Snow. "Each needs to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. But right now only one percent of USDA biotech research money goes to risk assessment."

In other words, we need more—not less—regulation of GMOs, especially in the rapidly changing era of new “gene-editing” technologies such as CRISPR and RNA interference (RNAi).

As Snow said, even before the USDA’s new proposed plan to hand over the regulation of GMOs to biotech corporations:

"We've let the cat out of the bag before we have real data, and there's no calling it back."

The biotech industry has launched coordinated effort and relentless push to get the USDA to deregulate. We have to do the same to keep the regulations that exist in place, while working to get (or keep) the worst GMOs off the market.

Sign the Petition

First name

Last name

ZIP Code

Phone

Country

Letter

To: Brooke Rollins, Secretary, U.S. Department of Agriculture

Re: Docket No. USDA-2026-0133-0001

Dear Secretary Rollins,

I am writing to ask you to halt the USDA’s efforts to “modernize” the regulatory process for genetically modified organisms by effectively allowing biotech corporations to “self-regulate.”

As new genetic engineering techniques are developed, the public should expect the USDA to exercise even greater caution and oversight over these technologies, not less. It is naive and irresponsible to assume that corporations will put public safety concerns ahead of corporate profits.

The biotech industry wants complete deregulation a category of genetically modified organisms the it calls “plant-incorporated protectants.” These are crops that are genetically engineered to produce their own pesticides.

These pesticides aren’t on your food, they are your food!

Pesticide-producing GMOs include Bt crops, which are responsible for the engineered Cry1Ab toxin showing up in the blood of 8 out of 10 newborns.

They also include the scary new gene-silencing GMOs in crops like Bayer-Monsanto’s SmartStax corn. This corn isn’t just genetically modified, it’s engineered to genetically modify the insects that feed on it. When rootworms feed on SmartStax corn, every bite they take delivers a payload of double-stranded RNA that triggers a lethal change in the pests’ gene expression. Who knows what it’s doing to us!

Interfering RNA can trigger immune responses and could actually change human gene expression. Scientists are just beginning to explore how the naturally occurring interfering RNA we get from vegetables and grains regulates our gene expression. For instance, they only recently noticed that double-stranded RNA from rice regulates a liver gene that controls cholesterol metabolism. Virtually nothing is known about the untold numbers of other interfering RNAs that we consume through foods like rice, corn, barley, tomatoes, soybeans, wheat, cabbage, grapes, and carrots. It would have been nice for humanity to get a chance to figure out how what we eat determines which genes are expressed before genetic engineers went messing around with all of this!

With 20 to 30 percent of the 86 million acres of GMO corn now carrying RNAi traits our health is already being impacted. It's unconscionable that the risks weren't studied before RNAi entered the food supply. Especially since research on the use of interfering RNAs as a medical intervention shows that RNAi causes immune reactions in the body, triggering dangerous inflammatory responses.

The EPA assumed (probably incorrectly) that the human gastrointestinal tract provides barriers to absorption that would prevent double-stranded RNA from reaching the bloodstream, but newborn infants don’t have these gut barriers and gastrointestinal problems can also cause gut permeability in adults. The EPA didn’t require Monsanto to consider these populations. In addition to dietary exposure, the EPA should have considered the inhalation of double-stranded RNA expressed in corn pollen, which can be carried by the wind up to a half-mile away.

As a safety-conscious food consumer whose concerns about the environment range from species extinction and soil degradation to air and water pollution, I expect taxpayer-funded agencies like the USDA to protect human and environmental health, not corporate profits.

I also expect the USDA to protect organic farmers, whose crops are threatened by cross-pollination of unregulated, untested GMOs.

I reject the false argument that GMOs are needed to “feed the world.” It's small-scale family farms that feed the world, and they do it without GMOs or the pesticides they're engineered to withstand and produce. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, 80 percent of the world's food is produced by family farmers. There are more than 608 million family farms around the world. Ninety-four percent of these farms are five hectares or smaller, occupying just 17 percent of the world's farmland.

Thanks to the world's small-scale family farmers, there is plenty of food for everyone, but hunger persists because of poverty and war. The 2026 Global Report on Food Crises found that 266 million people across 47 countries experienced high levels of acute food insecurity in 2025 – almost double the share recorded in 2016. Two-thirds of all people facing high levels of acute hunger were concentrated in 10 conflict-ridden countries – Afghanistan, Bangladesh, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Myanmar, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Sudan, Sudan, Syrian Arab Republic, and Yemen, as well as Gaza where famine was confirmed.

Here in the U.S., the greatest share of our top agricultural product, corn, is used to make ethanol fuel, but that isn't blamed for the plight of the 47.9 million Americans who are food-insecure. Everyone knows there is food for them to eat, if only they had the money to buy it. In the U.S., as in other rich countries that enjoy peace within their borders, food waste is a bigger problem than food production.

More GMO commodities are not the answer to world—or U.S.—hunger. What we need is better support for farmers who build soil health (not degrade it) and grow nutrient-dense food for their communities without polluting our waterways.

I call on the USDA to strengthen, not weaken, the review process for all GMO crop and food technologies. This is a reasonable expectation for a government agency whose job is to protect the public.

Thank you.

GMOs