Trump Admin Backs Bayer’s Bid to Limit Roundup Lawsuits

Reuters’ Diana Novak Jones reported that “President Donald Trump’s administration urged the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday to take up Bayer’s bid to curtail thousands of lawsuits claiming its Roundup weedkiller causes cancer.”

“In a brief filed at the court, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer bolstered Bayer’s effort to limit the lawsuits and potentially avert billions of dollars in damages, saying the company was correct that the federal law governing pesticides preempts lawsuits that make claims over the products under state law,” Novak Jones reported. “‘We see the Solicitor General’s recommendation as an important step towards containing glyphosate litigation,’ JPMorgan analysts said in a note, adding the Supreme Court was likely to rule next year.”

“Bayer has asked the justices to hear its appeal of a lower court’s decision to uphold a $1.25 million verdict awarded by a St. Louis jury in a Missouri state court case in which a plaintiff named John Durnell sued after being diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma he attributed to his exposure to Roundup,” Novak Jones reported. “The German pharmaceutical and biotechnology company, which acquired Roundup as part of its $63 billion purchase of Monsanto in 2018, has said that decades of studies have shown Roundup and its active ingredient, glyphosate, are safe for human use.”

What the U.S. Solicitor General and Bayer Said

Progressive Farmer’s Todd Neeley reported “the U.S. on Monday argued that when the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency created specific labeling requirements when it determined glyphosate is ‘not likely to be carcinogenic to humans’ consistently since 1991, it approved Roundup labels without cancer warnings and prohibited Bayer from adding warnings without agency approval.”

“The solicitor general said the appeals court in Missouri got it wrong when it held that state and federal requirements were essentially the same,” Neeley reported. “…The U.S. acknowledged that its position on the Durnell case is a reversal of the previous administration’s stand on the issue.”

“Bayer said in a statement it believes the backing of the Trump administration will be important in the court’s consideration of the case,” Neeley reported. “‘The support of the U.S. government is an important step and good news for U.S. farmers, who need regulatory clarity,’ Bayer CEO Bill Anderson said in a statement. ‘The stakes could not be higher as the misapplication of federal law jeopardizes the availability of innovative tools for farmers and investments in the broader U.S. economy.'”

“Bayer said it was time for the U.S. legal system to ‘establish that companies cannot be punished under state laws’ for complying with federal label requirements,” Neeley reported.

Supreme Court Could Decide Future of Roundup

Bloomberg’s Jef Feeley reported that “after seven years of fighting Roundup cases in the US, Bayer is still facing about 67,000 claims from plaintiffs who allege Roundup caused their cancer. Bayer insists the weedkiller is safe.”

“The litigation has cast such a pall over Bayer that Anderson is considering whether to stop making glyphosate. The company recently settled a $2.1 billion verdict handed down by a state-court jury in Georgia. Terms of the accord weren’t disclosed,” Feeley reported. “Bayer argued to the nation’s highest court that failure-to-warn claims brought in state court must yield to the US Environmental Protection Agency’s decision not to force Bayer to put a cancer warning on Roundup. Bayer began replacing its glyphosate-based version of the product for residential users with a different formulation in 2022.”

“Some large verdicts against Bayer and Monsanto have been based, in part, on failure-to-warn allegations,” Feeley reported. “The German company has been struggling to come up with a way to deal with the current and projected future caseload of Roundup suits. It said that as of October, it had already resolved more than 130,000 cases, either by settlement or having them thrown out.”