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Consumer Reports and the Environmental Working Group (EWG) are urging Congress to strengthen federal pesticide laws, warning that existing regulations leave Americans — particularly children — vulnerable to potentially harmful chemicals in food, drinking water, schools and neighborhoods.
The groups recently unveiled a Consumer Pesticide Safety Bill of Rights, which calls for cancer warnings, advance notice of pesticide spraying, stricter safeguards for children, the right to sue manufacturers for injuries and other protections.
They want Congress to incorporate the protections into the Pesticide Registration Improvement Act, which expires in September 2027.
“These are reforms that are long overdue,” said Scott Faber, EWG’s senior vice president of government affairs.
The proposal arrives just as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) faces criticism for failing to reconvene its Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee (CHPAC), despite the Trump administration’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) pledge to prioritize children’s health.
70+ experts, groups urge EPA to restore child protection committee
In a recent opinion column in The Hill, CHPAC committee member Jean-Marie Kauth, Ph.D., said the panel has not met since August 2025 and that members expected to be appointed by March have received no word from the agency.
“The Trump administration has failed to actualize this bipartisan mission,” Kauth wrote.
She said more than 70 children’s environmental health experts and organizations recently urged EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin to restore the committee, which advises the agency on pesticide exposure, plastics and other environmental hazards that threaten children’s health.
Kauth, whose 8-year-old daughter Katherine died of leukemia, said her family attributes the illness to exposure to chlorpyrifos, a pesticide previously used for mosquito control. The suspected connection has not been independently established. However, studies exist linking the pesticide to pediatric leukemia and other health issues.
Kauth accused federal regulators of failing to protect children from chemical exposures while allowing industry influence to undermine public health safeguards.
The EPA told The Defender the agency’s CHPAC nomination review process is ongoing and the agency anticipates announcing new membership in the coming weeks.
The EPA said it “does not compromise on public safety, and to suggest our pesticide review process puts the public at risk is a fundamental distortion of the science and our robust regulatory processes.”
According to the EPA statement:
“Let’s be absolutely clear: EPA evaluates every single pesticide with using gold standard science. We map out exactly what effects occur at what specific exposure levels and regularly set exposure limits hundreds or thousands of times below where it would present a health risk. If a proposed use ever poses a human health risk of concern, it does not get approved.”
Despite EPA claims, thousands of pesticides lack cancer warnings
A 2026 analysis by the Center for Biological Diversity found that the EPA required cancer warnings on just 69 — only 1.4% — of 4,919 pesticide products containing ingredients the agency classified as likely human carcinogens.
Kayla Nichols, communications director at Pesticide Action & Agroecology Network, told The Defender existing pesticide laws fall short and fail to explain “how much we do not know about where, when, what, and how much pesticides are applied in our communities.”
Nichols added:
“In order for families and communities to protect themselves from pesticide exposure and advocate for stronger regulations, we must first know that we are being exposed in the first place. There are no federal requirements to notify the public of pesticide application, and most states do not require this either … this proposed Bill of Rights advocates for the public’s right to know when pesticides are applied and where.”
The groups fighting for the bill also cited inadequate safeguards for children. The Food Quality Protection Act generally requires an additional tenfold safety margin when assessing pesticide risks to children unless reliable evidence supports a different margin.
However, a 2020 EWG analysis found the EPA retained that additional protection in only a small minority of assessments examined and “failed to add the mandated children’s health safety factor to the allowable limits for almost 90 percent of the most common pesticides.”
The proposed Bill of Rights would also require greater transparency about pesticide residues in food and drinking water, notification of spraying near homes and schools, and prompt EPA reviews of pesticides banned overseas for health reasons.
An interdisciplinary scholar familiar with the EPA children’s health advisory process told The Defender, “Many of us were thrilled to see the first MAHA report say out loud that a large portion of the 40% of American children now struggling with a chronic illness can attribute their suffering to industries that play far too large a role in our political processes” but “industries have openly bought our politicians lock, stock, and barrel.”
The source said President Donald Trump offered the fossil-fuel industry what it wanted in exchange for a billion-dollar donation to his campaign.
“This scandalous and open indenture of our children to disease and death — now and for generations to come — has just received new attention. The grift now enriching those at the very top of government has a price not only in dollars, but in death and disease, including of our most precious and vulnerable — our children.”
Supreme Court ruling limits pesticide lawsuits
The proposal also follows the U.S. Supreme Court’s June ruling in Monsanto Co. v. Durnell. The court sided with Monsanto, ruling that consumers can’t sue pesticide makers for failing to include cancer warnings on product labels.
The case involved a Missouri man who alleged that prolonged exposure to Monsanto’s glyphosate-based weedkiller Roundup caused his non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The ruling could affect thousands of similar lawsuits against Bayer, which acquired Monsanto in 2018.
The EPA has maintained that glyphosate is not likely to cause cancer in humans — even though the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classified the chemical as probably carcinogenic in 2015.
When asked about this, they said the EPA is “conducting the most rigorous, transparent review in the agency’s history, and we are doing it side by side” with U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Nichols, who called the Supreme Court decision a “huge blow to those seeking compensation for pesticide injuries,” said there is still a path forward to pushing federal and state legislation to hold corporations accountable.
Consumer Reports and EWG want Congress to preserve consumers’ ability to seek damages for pesticide-related injuries.
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Advocates push for awareness
Anne Riederer, an environmental health scientist who teaches at the University of Washington, welcomed the Bill of Rights but said it should address school-based education programs to ensure safety.
“Any efforts to increase parents’ and school administrators’ awareness of the benefits of eating organic and the USDA [U.S. Department of Agriculture] national organics program would likely reduce children’s dietary pesticide exposures by helping people choose items with fewer pesticides,” she told The Defender.
The Bill of Rights is not legislation and does not change existing regulations. But its supporters hope it will shape congressional negotiations over pesticide oversight before the Pesticide Registration Improvement Act expires next year.
When asked if EPA supports any of the protections outlined in the Bill of Rights, an agency representative told The Defender:
“EPA treats our legal obligations seriously and implements our statutory requirements as directed by Congress.”
Related articles in The Defender
- Pesticide-Spraying Trucks Cruising Neighborhoods, Helicopters Raining Down Pellets: Mosquito Control Is a $2 Billion Business in the U.S.
- U.S. Supreme Court Sides with Pesticide Giant Bayer in Landmark Cancer Lawsuit
- Activist Goes on 30-Day Hunger Strike, Demands Driscoll’s Stop Spraying Pesticides Near School
- For Millions of Kids, Back to School Means Back to Pesticide Exposure
- 6 Children in 1 Town Developed Rare Cancer. After Teen Dies, Families Demand Answers About Routine Use of Pesticides
- ‘Deceptively Toxic’: How Regulators, Chemical Companies Get Away With Calling Glyphosate ‘Safe’
- ‘The Advantage Is Real’: Regenerative Agriculture Pays Off, Indiana Farmer Tells RFK Jr.
