By Meryl Nass at Brownstone dot org.

Bayer bought Monsanto in 2018 for $63 billion —a few months before Monsanto lost its first liability case for causing non-Hodgkins lymphoma. I was not a close observer of the case, but the win seemed to hinge on documents obtained during discovery that revealed Monsanto knew a great deal about the injuries its product caused but deliberately hid those findings.

Once there was a win—and the jury awarded the plaintiff with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma hundreds of millions, later reduced—the bandwagon effect began, with other lawyers seeking plaintiffs to sue Monsanto. Eventually over 100,000 plaintiffs were suing Monsanto/Bayer for cancers related to glyphosate, the so-called active ingredient in Roundup. There are other ingredients that are probably toxic too, but they were not at issue. Most plaintiffs were homeowners. Bayer then removed glyphosate from Roundup, producing a new formulation for homeowners.

Still, there were more and more cases and more and more wins in state courts due to Monsanto/Bayer's failure to warn of a cancer risk. Then Monsanto settled about 50,000 of the cases.

The settlements and the big losses have cost Bayer $10 billion so far.

Not only did Bayer pay out a King's ransom, but its stock price tanked. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Bayer, a German company, hired a Texan, Bill Anderson, as CEO to come to its aid. CEO Anderson's career hinged on stanching Bayer's bleed. He initiated a very expensive series of legal and political strategies in the hopes that one would be successful. He also formed a new agricultural industry lobby group with a huge advertising budget.

CEO Anderson got the Bayer board to agree to setting aside around $17 billion for this problem. With $10 billion already spent (the same figure reported 5 months ago) that left him with about $7.6 billion to deal with the 67,000 pending cases and to end the litigation for good.

I discussed the six different tracks Anderson pursued to make this problem go away in this piece. One of those tracks was getting Congress to pass a bill rider that would provide a liability shield by forbidding the EPA from making label changes unless a tedious, years-long process had been undertaken.

The bill rider got a lot of pushback from my readers and many other constitutents during July-September 2025, when it passed the EPA's Appropriations committee on a voice vote, thereby shielding individual members from having to own up to their vote. Apparently it was not going to go through the whole House easily (lots of political capital would have been expended by every member voting for it) and so far, the bill that included the pesticide rider has not been brought to a House vote. There was no companion bill in the Senate, another clue that Congressmembers did not want their fingerprints on this obvious giveaway to Big Pesticide and Bayer at the expense of citizens.

The five other tracks included:

This request to the Supreme Court to rule on the issue, which failed to gain a Supreme Court hearing in 2022, was filed again early last April.

Bills in about 20 state legislatures that would end state causes of action for pesticide injuries, which passed in GA and ND, failed in TN and many other states, and have not been decided in other states.

Threats by Bayer to take glyphosate off the market, which would allegedly harm the agriculture industry, even though there are generic versions of glyphosate available, and allegedly raise food prices drastically. This track was accompanied by a big publicity campaign.

Assertions by Bayer that it was developing 5 newer pesticides and would simply replace glyphosate with something better (and potentially more dangerous). If it kept swapping out pesticides as their harms became known, it could avoid having label warnings placed on them.

Bayer hinted it could spin off part of the company, leaving all the liability in an underfunded spinoff that would not be able to pay claims.

Reme...