The Environmental Protection Agency, the federal agency theoretically in charge of protecting you from toxic chemicals, handed Bayer a menu of its own regulations and asked the pesticide giant to pick which ones it wanted. This is not a metaphor. There were slides. There was a follow-up email. Bayer ordered the least protective option, and the EPA said yes.
What Actually Happened, Because It Needs to Be Said Plainly
According to internal agency documents obtained through ongoing litigation and reported by The Guardian, the EPA held a meeting with Bayer in May 2025 to discuss restrictions on dicamba, a widely used weedkiller that is drift-prone, destroys crops and vegetation for miles around where it's sprayed, and has been linked to liver cancer and Non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Rather than present Bayer with finalized regulations, the EPA presented the company with options, ranging from more protective to less protective, and then ended the presentation with a slide titled "Registrant response needed" that asked, simply, "Which mitigation option to go forward with?"
Eight days later, a Bayer representative emailed back with their preferred choices. The EPA then put those choices into a proposed federal rule. As The Guardian reports, Bayer chose the least protective option for one regulation, the middle option for another, and also asked for an additional accommodation that the EPA hadn't even offered. The EPA granted that one too.
An EPA manager, apparently unbothered by any of this, wrote in an email that the next step in the process was "getting feedback from the registrants on what mitigation and mitigation implementation option they would like to move forward with." What they would like. The regulatory agency asked the regulated company what it would like.
A Weedkiller With a Body Count and a Fan Club at the EPA
Dicamba has been catastrophic. The Guardian reports that experts have described its drift damage as the worst of any herbicide in the history of American agriculture. It has damaged millions of acres of farmland since its first approval in 2016, harming orchards, vegetable farms, home gardens, native plants, trees, and wildlife refuges across the country. Federal courts have ordered it off the market twice due to its drift problems. The EPA has re-approved it both times.
The current approval, the one shaped in part by Bayer's dinner order, actually provides fewer protections from dicamba drift than past approvals, according to the lawsuit brought by the Center for Biological Diversity and the Center for Food Safety. So we are not talking about a neutral regulatory process that landed in the wrong place by accident. We are talking about a trajectory that keeps moving in one direction: toward less protection, every single time, no matter what the courts say or what the crop damage data shows.
The specific stakes in the May 2025 meeting were about dicamba's volatility, which is the thing that makes it drift into neighboring fields and destroy everything in range. The EPA offered Bayer a choice between restricting applications above 85 degrees Fahrenheit, or allowing applications up to 95 degrees if treated acreage was reduced. Bayer picked the hotter option. Then Bayer also asked to be allowed full-field treatments at higher temperatures under certain conditions, a choice the EPA hadn't even put on the menu. The EPA said sure.
The EPA's Defense Is Somehow Worse Than the Scandal
When The Guardian asked the EPA about this, a spokesperson offered the following response: "Make no mistake: this is not a compliance failure; it is the regulatory system working exactly as intended."
Read that sentence again. The EPA is not denying what happened. They are telling you this is the system working correctly. They want you to know that when a pesticide company linked to a carcinogenic, crop-destroying herbicide gets to choose its own regulations, everything is going according to plan. That is the official position of the United States Environmental Protection Agency.
The spokesperson added that companies "are permitted to submit mitigation ideas that preserve their product's utility" and insisted that "the registrant does not dictate terms." The documents, however, show an EPA presentation ending with a slide asking the registrant to pick their preferred option, followed by an email from the registrant picking their preferred option, followed by those preferences appearing in a proposed federal rule. If that is not dictating terms, the word has lost all meaning.
The People Running This Show Have a Familiar Resume
None of this happened in a vacuum. The Guardian reports that the top four positions in the EPA's toxics office are currently held by former chemical industry leaders. One of them is Kyle Kunkler, a former pesticide industry lobbyist who now serves as deputy assistant administrator and oversees the agency's entire pesticides program. The documents also show the dicamba plan was presented to Nancy Beck, a former lobbyist for the American Chemistry Council who now leads the EPA's office of chemical safety.
This is what regulatory capture looks like when it stops pretending. It used to be that industries would slowly place allies inside agencies over time, building influence gradually enough to maintain plausible deniability. The current EPA has apparently decided plausible deniability is an unnecessary overhead cost. Former lobbyists now literally run the programs they used to lobby. The only thing missing is a brass plaque on the door that says "Bayer Annex."
Nathan Donley, environmental health science director at the Center for Biological Diversity, told The Guardian that while pesticide regulation typically involves some negotiation between industry and the EPA, what these documents reveal is "crossing a line." His quote was more vivid than that: "The EPA is allowing Bayer to choose its preferred measures to limit dicamba's damage as if it was ordering up a late-night dinner à la carte from Chili's."
Farmers Are Losing Crops While Bayer Orders Off the Menu
The irony cutting through all of this is that the people getting hurt by dicamba are not environmentalists in cities. They are farmers, often conservative, often in rural communities that have broadly supported the political movement currently running the EPA into the ground. Drift from dicamba fields doesn't check voter registration before it kills a soybean crop or wipes out an orchard. It just drifts.
Even Kelly Ryerson, a prominent advocate for the Make America Healthy Again movement, was furious. "It is now undeniable that the EPA remains fully captured by a crooked collection of pesticide company players who so enthusiastically ignore the substantial losses of farmers and the federal courts who mandated a halt to dicamba use," Ryerson told The Guardian. When MAHA advocates and environmental litigators are reading from the same page, something has gone badly, visibly wrong.
The litigation from the Center for Biological Diversity and the Center for Food Safety continues. The documents surfaced as part of that ongoing case. Without the lawsuit, none of this would be public. The EPA's default, as The Guardian notes, is that pesticide regulation happens entirely out of public view. This is what it looks like when the curtain gets pulled back for a minute.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe that asking a pesticide company which regulations it prefers, receiving an email with its answer, and then writing those preferences into federal law is "the regulatory system working exactly as intended." The EPA said that. Out loud. In a statement to a reporter. They are not embarrassed. They are not scrambling to explain away an awkward document dump. They are telling you this is fine, this is normal, this is the plan.
It is not fine. Courts have twice pulled dicamba off the market for the damage it causes. The EPA has twice brought it back. Millions of acres of American farmland have been damaged by this herbicide. Farmers have lost crops, orchards, and livelihoods. And the federal agency created to protect the public from exactly this kind of harm spent a meeting in May 2025 showing a pesticide corporation a PowerPoint and asking it to circle its favorite option. The only question left to ask is why anyone should trust a single word this agency says about protecting public health.
The people running this operation are former lobbyists for the industries they now regulate. The documents are in a lawsuit because that is the only mechanism left that forces any transparency at all. And the official response to getting caught is essentially: yes, and? At some point, "regulatory capture" stops being a useful analytical term and just becomes the job description.
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