How Trump's Executive Order Uses the Defense Production Act to Protect Bayer
Bayer doesn't just manufacture glyphosate; it mines the phosphorus used to make it. Trump's Executive Order protects both by invoking the Defense Production Act to direct the Department of Agriculture to contract with Bayer to make more glyphosate and mine more phosphorus.
Once that happens, Bayer cannot "be held liable for damages or penalties for any act or failure to act resulting directly or indirectly from compliance with a rule, regulation or order issued pursuant to" the Defense Production Act, even if "any such rule, regulation, or order shall thereafter be declared ... to be invalid."
That means, as long as the Department of Agriculture makes the rules for glyphosate production and phosphorus mining, and under the Executive Order, Bayer can't be held liable for anything it does to comply with them. If the Department of Agriculture orders Bayer to soak every acre of farmland in the country with glyphosate and everyone exposed dies of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, Bayer is off the hook, even if the courts eventually decide the Department of Agriculture had no right to do that.
And glyphosate isn't the only thing Bayer makes with phosphorus. With its partner Israel Chemicals Ltd., it is the War Department's monopoly supplier of white phosphorus weapons. That's what Trump's Executive Order refers to in Section 1, where it states, "Elemental phosphorus is pervasive in defense supply chains and is therefore crucial to military readiness and national defense. It is a key input in smoke, illumination, and incendiary devices..."
The biggest impact of the executive order may be on glyphosate production and phosphate mining. Bayer's manufacturing and mining hubs are hotspots of pollution and disease.
Liability Protection for Glyphosate Production
Bayer is the world's largest producer of glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup weed killer, controlling 40 percent of the global market.
In the U.S., Bayer is the only producer of glyphosate, supplying 70 percent of domestic use. Bayer’s glyphosate factories are in Muscatine, Iowa, Kansas City, Missouri, and Luling, Louisiana, where it’s been poisoning the air, water, and soil for decades.
If residents of these towns were to try to take Bayer to court, could the company defend itself with the Defense Production Act? Monsanto, an experienced military contractor, has tried that before and failed, but no doubt that’s a strategy they plan to continue to use until it succeeds.
Muscatine, Iowa, is infamous for being one of the “poisoned places.” It’s an industrial town with more than one polluter, but the Environmental Protection Agency counts Monsanto (now Bayer) among them. Monsanto has been dumping toxins into the town’s water since it began manufacturing pesticides and herbicides there in 1961. Monsanto’s Muscatine plant is a Superfund site jointly monitored by the EPA and Iowa’s Department of Natural Resources.
These regulators don’t know how much hazardous waste Monsanto has released in Muscatine. Monsanto contaminated the soil and groundwater by spilling waste onto unpaved areas and conveying wastewater through unlined ditches. Toxins have been detected in groundwater as deep as 95 feet and in soil down to 10 feet.
Iowa has the second-highest cancer rate in the country, according to the 2024 Iowa Cancer Registry. The cancer registry estimates that 6,100 people will die in Iowa from cancer this year. Richard Deming, a cancer physician in Des Moines, says “there’s clear association between ag chemical exposure in the state of Iowa and cancer incidence.”
Kansas City, Missouri, has some of the worst air quality and most polluted rivers in the U.S. Monsanto and Bayer, separately, before the merger, were two of many companies ordered to pay for Superfund cleanup of a landfill bordering the Kansas River where benzene, lead, fiberglass, paint sludge, solvents, petroleum refinery wastes and chemical and pesticide manufacturing wastes were dumped. Also, prior to the merger, Bayer was fined by the EPA for violating risk management regulations in its Kansas City storage of millions of pounds of hazardous substances, including ethyl mercaptan, vinyl chloride, phosphorous trichloride, formaldehyde, 2-methyl-1-butene, carbon disulfide, chlorine, hydrogen chloride and hydrazine.
Like Iowa, Missouri is one of the states where pesticide use is highest, and so are the cancer rates.
Luling, Louisiana, just upriver from New Orleans, is part of the industrial wasteland along the Mississippi River known as “Cancer Alley.” Monsanto has repeatedly violated air pollution rules there, prompting fines from the state government. Just like everywhere else it has operated, Monsanto’s Luling plant is a Superfund site. It is co-located with a formaldehyde plant operated by Hexion. The two plants are connected by a pipeline that sends formaldehyde from Hexion to Bayer.
So far, none of Monsanto-Bayer’s employees working in glyphosate production at the Muscatine, Kansas City, or Luling plants have won lawsuits against Bayer, although at least one has tried.
Internal Monsanto communications uncovered through the Roundup lawsuits reveal that many employees were known by the company to have been diagnosed with cancer after workplace exposure. Over the decades, Monsanto compiled a “Cancer Index,” meticulously keeping track of each employee who got sick at each of its locations.
With Bayer’s glyphosate production protected by the Defense Production Act, it could be much harder in the future for employees at their factories and the communities that surround them to bring claims against the company.
Liability Protection for Phosphate Mining
As Trump’s Executive Order suggests, the limiting factor in glyphosate production is the availability of elemental phosphorus. With its purchase of Monsanto, Bayer took control of a vertically integrated supply chain that includes an elemental phosphorus factory in Soda Springs, Idaho, and a phosphate mine nearby, just southwest of the Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks.
This area used to be a thoroughfare for grizzly bears, wolves, wolverines, Canada lynx, bighorn sheep, and sage grouse, but with all the mining, Monsanto turned their habitat into a moonscape. Grouse numbers have plummeted, grizzly bears no longer pass through, wolverines were last sighted years ago, and the Yellowstone cutthroat trout is disappearing. Even the number of deer and elk has diminished.
As Civil Eats reported in “Roundup’s Other Problem: Glyphosate is Sourced from Controversial Mines,” one of the reasons for the wildlife decline is selenium leaching from dumps of mine waste into groundwater, streams, and rivers. Selenium kills cattle and deforms fish.
Bayer hasn’t cleaned up the mess left by Monsanto’s last phosphate mine at Blackfoot Bridge. That was the fourth Idaho mine Monsanto abandoned to federal Superfund authorities.
Nevertheless, in 2025, the Trump administration let Bayer start operating a new one at Caldwell Canyon.
Journalist Bart Elmore visited Idaho and wrote about what he witnessed in “Monsanto’s Superfund Secret”:
I stood just beyond a barbed-wire fence at about nine o’clock at night and watched as trucks dumped molten red heaps of radioactive refuse over the edge of what is fast becoming a mountain of waste. This dumping happened about every fifteen minutes, lighting up the night sky. Horses grazed in a field just a few dozen yards away, glowing in the radiating rays coming from the lava-like sludge. Rows of barley, for Budweiser beer, waved in the distance.
When phosphate ore is refined into elemental phosphorous, it leaves a radioactive by-product known as slag. Monsanto’s elemental phosphorous facility, situated just a few miles from its phosphate mines, produces prodigious quantities of slag that contains elevated concentrations of radioactive material. For years, this slag was actually sold to the town of Soda Springs and nearby Pocatello, and people built their homes and roadways out of it. In the 1980s, however, the EPA conducted a radiological survey of the community and warned that citizens might be at risk from elevated gamma ray exposure. The study concluded that if business continued as usual in Soda Springs, within four decades “the probability of contracting cancer due to exposure from elemental phosphorous slag” would “be about one chance in 2,500 in Pocatello and one chance in 700 in Soda Springs.”
The same disposal strategy was used by Mosaic, another phosphate mining company that could benefit from Trump’s executive order—in fact, it’s the world’s largest.
Instead of herbicides, Mosaic, based in Tampa, Florida, uses the phosphate to make fertilizer. Mosaic produces 74 percent of “concentrated phosphate crop nutrients” across North America.
Mosaic’s phosphate mines currently cover 450,000 acres of Central Florida.
An estimated 50,000 Floridians now live where Mosaic used to mine phosphate. Their homes are contaminated with uranium and radium-226, because all the company did for “reclamation” of the land was to put back the soil and sand excavated from the site. The radioactive material and radiation remained, and the home builders knew it.
In 2017, residents of Lakeland’s Oakbridge and Grasslands communities sued the developers who built their homes on top of old mining sites. In 2024, when the case was settled, it was revealed that before their subdivisions were developed, testing showed radiation levels 11 to 21 times higher than the acceptable risk limit. Homebuyers were never warned of the danger.
In the 2026 legislative session, Mosaic is trying to get Florida lawmakers to relieve it—and the developers it sold phosphate mining land to—of liability.
For every ton of fertilizer Mosaic produces, five tons of phosphogypsum waste is generated. Like Monsanto, Mosaic sold its waste as construction materials.
In 1989, the EPA banned that practice, but in the first Trump administration, EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler announced the agency had changed its mind and decided to let it be used to build roads.
The Center for Biological Diversity is suing to stop an EPA-approved phosphogypsum road-building pilot project in New Wales, Florida.
To learn more about how Mosaic is poisoning Florida, watch the documentary Phosfate and follow the filmmakers on Facebook.
Bayer, Monsanto, and Mosaic are bad actors, constantly skirting the law and trying to change the rules to avoid liability for the deaths, illness, and environmental destruction they cause.
Trump’s move to protect them using the Defense Production Act and to let their radioactive waste be used to build roads is criminal.
To learn how that happened, read U.S. Right to Know’s new report, “Tracing Bayer’s ties to power in Trump’s Washington.”
TAKE ACTION: Tell Congress to Pass the No Immunity for Glyphosate and Pesticide Injury Accountability Acts!