What happens when corporations are allowed to cause harm without consequence? Across the country, state legislatures and Congress are considering laws that would give chemical manufacturers just that: liability shields that protect them from lawsuits, even when their products are linked to cancer, infertility or birth defects.
This push is not theoretical. Georgia’s legislature recently enacted House Bill 211, limiting liability for PFAS contamination — “forever chemicals,” known to damage human health. Several other states are following suit.
In Washington, D.C., the 2024 House Republican farm bill draft included language that would preempt local pesticide protections and deny legal recourse to those harmed by agrichemicals. This provision must not find its way back into the 2025 farm bill.
Pressure is mounting. Seventy-nine members of Congress recently wrote to the administration defending the agrochemical lobby, calling pesticides “essential tools” and warning against “politically motivated attacks on sound science.” But science is not on their side — and neither is the public.
As a long-time advocate for policy reform, I’ve seen this playbook before. When Congress created the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program in 1986, it removed civil liability from pharmaceutical companies. Today, we are watching the same shield being extended to the agrochemical industry except this time it affects every American who eats food, drinks water or breathes air.
This is not a question of agricultural efficiency or feeding America. This is a political maneuver to protect profit, not people. And it comes just as science is revealing new links between chemical exposure and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, endocrine disruption, chronic illness and birth defects. The stakes are enormous.
Fortunately, we have a chance to act. The Make America Healthy Again Commission, chaired by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., was created to address the root causes of chronic disease and environmental contamination. The commission represents a diverse coalition of Americans across party lines who want a food system that heals, not harms.
The administration must reject chemical liability shields at all levels of government, strip preemption language from the farm bill and restore funding to the Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resource Conservation Service. This program is in charge of national soil health, the National Organic Program and regenerative organic agriculture research.
This is not a left-right issue. It is a matter of national wellbeing and the long-term health of America, her working and wild lands, her air and water, her wildlife and her people. Whether you support or question this administration’s broader agenda, protecting public health from corporate harm is something we should all be able to agree on.
Elizabeth Kucinich is a policy expert and producer of the films “GMO OMG,” “Circle of Poison,” and “Organic Rising.” She served as director of policy at the Center for Food Safety, chaired the board policy committee of the Rodale Institute, America’s oldest organic research institute, is a former director of government affairs for the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.