If this is the first thing of mine you’ve read: quick catch-up. In February, an executive order shielded Bayer from lawsuits over Roundup. In June, the Supreme Court backed that up, ruling that if the EPA has approved a pesticide’s label, no state court can hold the manufacturer liable for failing to warn you. Days later, the EPA quietly approved a wave of new pesticides, several of them “forever chemicals”, after redefining the term so that most of them no longer legally count. Some of the officials clearing those approvals have direct financial or family ties to the very companies benefiting from them. I’ve written about both of those in detail if you want the full picture. This piece is about what comes next.
What comes next didn’t stop with pesticides. Today, while I was finishing this piece, the pattern completed itself one more time.
The FDA just denied a petition that asked it to set limits on PFAS in food. The group behind it, the Tucson Environmental Justice Task Force, originally petitioned in 2023 for the FDA to check up to 30 PFAS compounds across produce, fish, eggs, milk, and bread.
When the FDA sat on that request past its own legal deadline, the Tucson Environmental Justice Task Force scaled it back in 2025 to something much narrower and harder to say no to: just advisory thresholds for two of the most common, most studied PFAS chemicals, in just seafood and milk.
The FDA said no to that too, citing insufficient evidence, and said it would consider only non-binding “action levels” instead of enforceable limits, meaning contaminated food doesn’t have to come off the shelf even if it’s found.
Let me state that again so that you don’t miss it: the FDA won’t enforce limits, and contaminated food will stay on the shelf.
This is the same agency whose own testing found PFAS in 70% of the seafood it sampled, and independent testing has already found it in Whole Foods and Kirkland Signature milk.
Milk. The product that the administration is pushing with the reinvigorated milk mustache campaign. At the same, Kennedy knows full well that milk is one of the top eight allergens. His late wife, Mary Kennedy, spent decades advocating for food allergy and asthma-related issues. She was a co-founder of the Food Allergy Initiative, the world’s largest private funding source for food allergy research.
Image from MAHA Action January 12, 2026.
There was real hope that this specific agency, under Robert F Kennedy Jr, a long time advocate of families dealing with food allergies, would be the one to finally take this seriously, eliminating chemicals from food is supposed to be the entire point of MAHA.
Instead, this is now three separate federal decision points in one year, EPA, the Supreme Court, and now FDA, all landing on the same side of the same question, on the same class of chemicals.
Every time I write something like that, I get the same message back from a dozen different people: Okay, but what do I actually do with this? Fair question. Outrage without a next step is just a feeling, and feelings don’t move legislation. So here are five specific things, in order of how much time each one takes, starting with the one that takes thirty seconds.
1. Call your representative about H.R. 7601, today, not eventually. The No Immunity for Glyphosate Act would strip the liability shield back out of February’s executive order. It has real bipartisan support, Democrats and Republicans who agree on almost nothing else agreeing on this, but it has sat in the House Judiciary Committee since the day it was introduced, with no hearing and no vote. Bipartisan support without pressure is just a bill nobody’s forcing to the floor. A phone call takes less time than reading this paragraph. Say the bill number. Say you want a hearing scheduled. Hang up. That’s it.
You can Find Your Representative here.
2. Start your own paper trail, and post it under #ChemGate. In 2016, when Mylan raised EpiPen prices 500%, we didn’t wait for a senator to notice. We posted our own receipts until the number was impossible to ignore, and #EpiGate forced a congressional hearing and a $465 million settlement. Do the same thing here. Photograph the label on the cereal, the corn, the soybean oil. Post the pediatrician bill, the allergy test, the fertility workup nobody warned you you’d need. Show the chemicals for sale in your local garden store. Tag it #ChemGate. One photo doesn’t move anything. Ten thousand photos are a movement, and movements are the only thing that’s ever actually worked on this.
3. Learn to read a registration, not just a label. The label on your food will never tell you that diflufenican is a Bayer product, or that chlormequat’s tolerance was just raised to 40 parts per million on oats. That information lives in the EPA’s own public registration filings, dry, unglamorous, and free to search. You don’t need a law degree. You need ten minutes and the chemical name. When you find something, that’s not a stopping point, it’s a caption for step two. Print it, tag it, #ChemGate.
You can research these products yourself here.
4. Support the organizations already doing the unglamorous legal work. Groups like Center for Food Safety and Environmental Working Group are the ones actually filing the lawsuits and FOIA requests that produced the emails I’ve been writing about, the ones showing this redefinition of “forever chemical” was steered, not accidental. The Tucson Environmental Justice Task Force is doing the same thing right now: they’re the ones behind today’s FDA petition, and their attorney has already said they plan to sue and ask a court to order FDA to actually set thresholds.
As she put it, if it’s worth regulating in water, it’s worth regulating in food, your body doesn’t know which route the chemical came in on.
That work is slow, expensive, and it doesn’t go viral. It’s unglamorous. There is no hair and makeup involved, and it’s also the only reason we know any of this at all. A donation, a signature on their action alerts, or just sharing their reporting instead of a vague secondhand version of it, all matter more than they sound like they should. If you donate, tag it, share it with your network and say why. This is #ChemGate.
5. Vote like you remember this in every election that touches the EPA, not just the presidential one. This didn’t happen because of one bad president. It happened because of an appropriations rider, a committee assignment, a confirmation vote for an administrator most people couldn’t name, the unglamorous machinery that decides who runs the agency deciding what’s in your food. Off-year elections, primaries, the school-board-adjacent races nobody covers: that machinery gets built there, quietly, every single cycle. Show up for those too.
None of these five things requires you to become an activist. None of them requires you to be an expert in fluorinated carbon chemistry. What they require is the same thing that made #EpiGate work: enough of us doing one small, specific thing, at the same time, loudly enough that it stops being easy to ignore.
We’ve done this before. Bayer, Syngenta, BASF, and 3M did not get where they are by underestimating regulators. They are, I promise you, underestimating us. Pick one of these five today. Not all five, one. Then tell me you did it. Tag it #ChemGate.
Our children are counting on us.
Called and sending emails. Unreal!
Thank you for providing this information and these action steps.