Ruled Out: How the Supreme Court and the USDA Quietly Rewrote Your Right to Know

The Decision You Heard About, and the One You Didn't

I spent years on Wall Street analyzing food companies. I knew how to read a balance sheet, how to follow the money, how to identify patterns, especially when the numbers didn’t add up.

What I didn’t know was that the biggest risk on those balance sheets wasn’t being disclosed. Not to investors. And certainly not to the families buying the food.

Last week, the Supreme Court made sure it stays that way.

In a 7-2 ruling in Monsanto v. Durnell, the Court decided that if the EPA says a product doesn’t need a warning label, you cannot sue a company for failing to warn you. You cannot go to your state court. You cannot ask a jury of your neighbors to weigh in. The federal government’s word is final, and right now, the federal government says glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, is safe.

Seven justices. Two dissented. The courthouse doors closed.

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Now here’s what they don’t want you to connect: glyphosate and GMOs are not separate stories. They are the same story.

Monsanto didn’t just make Roundup. They engineered the crops, corn, soybeans, canola, sugar beets, to survive being routinely sprayed with it. “Roundup Ready” crops. That’s what GMO meant in practice for most of the last thirty years: plants genetically modified to withstand a chemical that, according to the World Health Organization’s cancer research arm, is “probably carcinogenic to humans.”

So when the Supreme Court rules that you have no legal recourse over what goes on a glyphosate label, they are also ruling on the system that delivered GMO agriculture into your grocery cart without a meaningful label, without your consent, and, if this week’s USDA news is any indication, with even less oversight to come.

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On May 15th, the USDA quietly published what’s called a Request for Information on “Modified Organisms Subject to the Plant Protection Act.”

Washington-speak for: we’re thinking about rewriting the rules on GMOs, and we’d like some input.

Here’s what they’re actually considering. In 2020, USDA put in place a regulatory framework called the SECURE rule that began moving toward risk-based review of genetically engineered crops, fewer automatic exemptions, more scrutiny.

A federal court struck it down in December 2024, and we reverted to older regulations. Now the USDA is using this reset as an opportunity to explore something more sweeping: potentially deregulating GMO organisms that don’t show an obvious “plant pest risk.”

Plant pest risk. That’s the legal hook they’re hanging this on. The Plant Protection Act gives USDA authority over organisms that could harm other plants, spread like weeds, that kind of thing. It says nothing about what ends up in your body. That’s technically the FDA’s job. And the FDA’s GMO disclosure system, the National Bioengineered Food Disclosure Standard, is riddled with holes big enough to drive a combine through.

If the genetic modification can’t be detected in the final product, no label is required. Highly refined oils and sugars from GMO crops? No label. Food served at a restaurant? No label. Meat and dairy from animals raised on GMO feed? No label. And the law doesn’t even use the word “GMO”, it says “bioengineered,” a term that most Americans don’t recognize as the same thing.

Without labels, there is no traceability. Without traceability, there is no accountability. Without accountability, there is no liability. And the industry can keep saying exactly what it has always said: there is no evidence of harm. And they will be right. You cannot find evidence of something you’re not looking for. Every mom who has ever read a label knows this.

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Now let me tell you what a financial analyst sees when looking at everything that has happened in the last six months. Because this isn’t a story about science. It’s a story about money and access.

The contact listed on USDA docket USDA-2026-0133 is a lawyer in the USDA’s Office of the General Counsel. But the political architecture around this rulemaking, who shaped it, who benefits, who had the access to make it happen, tells a more important story.

Let’s start with Trump’s White House Chief of Staff. Susie Wiles was co-chair of Mercury Public Affairs, one of Washington’s most powerful lobbying firms, before she walked into the West Wing. She joined Mercury in February 2022 in an expansion that simultaneously brought on Toby Moffett as a Mercury partner. Moffett is a former Democratic Congressman who went on to become the top government affairs executive at the Monsanto Company, the company whose products are now at the center of every one of these fights.

TIME calls Wiles “one of the most powerful unelected figures in government.”

Wiles and Moffett were colleagues at the same firm at the same time. Moffett lobbied for Monsanto.

But it doesn’t stop at Mercury. Before Mercury, Wiles spent a decade at Ballard Partners, the firm that registered to lobby for Bayer (Monsanto’s parent company since 2018) in December 2024, just as Trump was winning the election. Ballard’s founder is Brian Ballard, who campaign sources told multiple news outlets, bundled more than $50 million for Trump's 2024 campaign.

And here is what the documents show:

Internal government emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request confirm that Bayer’s CEO Bill Anderson met directly with EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin months before Trump’s February executive order. The agenda, in the EPA’s own words, covered “Supreme Court Action”, Bayer would “give an update to the Administrator on where they stand in litigation and labeling options”, and included a line item to thank the agency for updating the glyphosate webpage, a reference to the EPA’s decision to withdraw its support for California’s cancer warning on glyphosate products. Visitor logs confirm the meeting took place.

Politico and The Guardian reported broader meetings between Bayer’s CEO and top administration officials in the lead-up to the executive order. What is beyond dispute in the public record is the lobbying disclosure trail: Bayer’s network of firms had direct lines into the White House, the DOJ, the EPA, and the USDA, and the timeline of what happened next speaks for itself.

The executive order declaring glyphosate “critical to national defense” gave Monsanto’s parent company immunity from lawsuits related to the very chemical at the center of a Supreme Court cancer case.

Then the Justice Department filed not one but multiple amicus briefs in the Supreme Court siding with Monsanto. Trump’s Principal Deputy Solicitor General Sarah Harris argued alongside Monsanto’s lawyer in the courtroom. The administration’s Solicitor General, who first urged the Court to take the case, was D. John Sauer, the former Solicitor General of Missouri, the home state of Bayer-Monsanto’s U.S. headquarters.

Investigators at U.S. Right to Know reviewed the public records and found 16 key Trump administration officials with documented ties to Bayer’s lobbying or legal network, with Bayer deploying 45 registered lobbyists across 13 outside firms, seven of which are now among the highest-paid lobbying operations in Washington. More than 30 senior officials at firms retained by Bayer have direct ties to Trump’s administrations or campaigns. What they found is not a conspiracy theory. It is a lobbying disclosure form. It is a calendar record. It is a public document. It is the system working exactly as it was designed, for the people who paid to design it.

And people across the political spectrum are saying so out loud.

Republican Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky stood on the steps of the Supreme Court during oral arguments and said: “The federal government, and especially the executive branch, do not have this power to issue get-out-of-court free cards. And we’re going to fight it.” He had already introduced the bipartisan No Immunity for Glyphosate Act alongside Democrat Chellie Pingree specifically to undo Trump’s executive order. On the House floor, Massie put it even more bluntly: “All three branches of this government are under siege by lobbyists and lawyers from a German company named Bayer.”

After the ruling came down, Massie didn’t mince words: “Trump DOJ argued alongside Bayer/Monsanto that because the EPA had already blessed glyphosate, no state government could require labels disclosing cancer risk. The EPA and DOJ in this instance were only there to protect Bayer.”

This was a Republican congressman. Saying this. About a Republican administration. That tells you how obvious the capture has become.

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Bayer wants you to believe this is complicated.

But it is not complicated. It is actually very simple.

Follow the money.

The people making decisions about what goes on your food label are the same people who have a financial interest in what is not on your food label.

The revolving door between Monsanto, the EPA, the FDA, the DOJ, and the USDA has been spinning for decades. I documented it in The Unhealthy Truth.

It did not stop. It accelerated.

This week, that door completed another full rotation. The Supreme Court locked in the EPA’s authority over pesticide labels, foreclosing state-level accountability. The DOJ spent months helping make that outcome happen. The White House issued an executive order protecting the company’s production before the case was even decided. And now the USDA has opened the door to reducing oversight of the GMO crops that those pesticides were engineered to support.

It is a clean sweep. Industry could not have designed a better outcome. In fact, the public record strongly suggests that industry did design it, one lobbying disclosure form, one executive order, one amicus brief, and one regulatory docket at a time.

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Here is what I want every parent, every farmer, every person who has ever stood in a grocery aisle trying to figure out what they’re actually buying to understand:

The legal and regulatory tools that existed, imperfect as they were, to hold companies accountable for what they put in our food and on their labels are being systematically removed. State lawsuits: gone. State warning labels: gone. Federal GMO oversight: being loosened. Federal disclosure requirements: already full of loopholes.

What’s left?

Your purchasing power. And unfortunately, it is a highly imperfect, expensive solution, and it prices many people out. But right now, third-party certification, Certified Organic, Non-GMO Project Verified, is more important than ever, because it is essentially the only remaining system that gives you reliable information. It is voluntary, it is imperfect, and it hits your wallet. But it is what we have.

And your voice.

The USDA’s comment period on this GMO rulemaking has been extended to June 30, 2026. That is one day from now. You can submit a comment at regulations.gov, docket number USDA-2026-0133. You do not need to be a scientist or a lawyer. You need to be a person who eats food and believes you have a right to know what’s in it.

What all of us fighting this fight understand, regardless of where we are politically, is that the system will not protect you unless you make it. The data doesn’t move on its own. The labels don’t appear because corporations decided to be generous.

Every piece of information you have ever had about what is in your food came because someone demanded it.

Countries around the world demand transparency on glyphosate and GMOs.

In Europe, over one million people signed a European Citizens' Initiative, called the Health and Environment Alliance (HEAL), calling on the EU Commission to fully ban glyphosate. It directly led to a new Regulation on transparency and sustainability of EU risk assessment in the food chain. It is a powerful, citable proof point that countries aren't just asking, they're legislating it.

This week, the Supreme Court made it harder to demand. That doesn’t mean we stop.

It means we get louder. Tell everyone you know about what is now on the docket at the USDA. Forward this email, share this link.

Demand it here, too. Make your voice heard and comment here.

Let’s make sure that the United States is not kept in the dark.