With Bayer on the hook for billions of dollars owed to Monsanto’s Roundup-exposed cancer victims, a lot of attention has been paid to the company’s efforts to get state legislatures, Congress, the Environmental Protection Agency, and/or the Supreme Court to relieve it of liability by blocking pesticide victims from bringing failure-to-warn lawsuits.

But this is just one strategy Bayer has for deregulating pesticides. There’s also the Executive Order that President Donald Trump issued that protects Bayer as a military contractor. (The New York Times reported on this in the article “A Trump Order Protected a Weedkiller. And Also a Weapon of War.”) 

And, there’s the 2026 House Farm Bill, which has a subtitle that’s a laundry list of ways Bayer would like its pesticides and genetically modified organisms to be deregulated and protected from liability.

Section 10201 of the House Farm Bill exempts “plant biostimulants,” “nutritional chemicals,” “vitamin hormone products,” and “plant-incorporated protectants” from EPA regulation under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act.

Critics call these bioinputs “agribusiness’s new toxic trap.” Bioinputs are supposedly derived from beneficial soil microorganisms and other “natural” ways to support and protect plant growth, but it’s really just a new name for the same old pesticides and GMOs.

For example, Bayer managed to get its Poncho/VOTiVO insecticidal seed treatment registered as a “biostimulant” even though it’s just the combination of a neonicotinoid pesticide that’s toxic to pollinators and a dangerous genetically engineered microbe (Bacillus thuringiensis or Bt).

The Farm Bill section would go even further than what Bayer has pulled off so far, completely deregulating these categories, including the diabolical GMOs where food crops are engineered to produce their own pesticides. That’s what’s meant by “plant-incorporated protectants.” The pesticides aren’t on the food, they are the food.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a new tactic. Bayer managed to get the EPA to completely exclude neonic-treated seeds from federal pesticide regulation under a “treated article exemption.” Neonic-treated seeds don’t have to be registered pesticides, which means they aren’t subject to an EPA determination as to whether using them as intended will cause “unreasonable adverse effects on the environment,” defined as “any unreasonable risk to man or the environment, taking into account the economic, social, and environmental costs and benefits of the use of any pesticide.”

This would be a very difficult hurdle for neonic-treated seeds to get over.

Because of pollinator-killing neonicotinoid seed treatments, 2025 was a particularly lethal year for bees, with beekeepers losing upward of 60 percent of their hives.

Neonics also damage human health. “Research links neonic exposures in the womb to birth defects of the heart and brain, autism-like symptoms, and reduced cognitive abilities. Adult exposures are also associated with lower testosterone and sperm quality and count, altered insulin regulation, and changes to fat metabolism,” according to the National Resources Defense Council.

This is alarming, given that over 95 percent of pregnant women have neonics in their bodies, with the highest levels in Hispanic women.

Drinking water treatment does not remove neonics.

TAKE ACTION: Ask your state legislator to support a ban on bee-killing neonic seed treatments!

In the 2024-2025 season, commercial beekeepers saw a mortality rate in their hives of 55.6 percent, the highest loss rate reported since tracking started in 2010-2011, 14.2 percentage points higher than the 14-year average summer loss of 41.4 percent.

New York State made history in 2023 with the Birds and Bees Protection Act to ban neonic coatings on corn, soybean and wheat seeds. Vermont followed, passing a similar law in 2024.

The National Caucus of Environmental Legislators has stepped up to address the crisis with legislation to restrict the use of bee-killing neonic insecticides, and they have a new fact-sheet on neonic-coated seeds.

Across the country, bills to ban, restrict, or regulate neonics have been introduced in 23 states and passed in Colorado, Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington. But, there’s still more to be done, because most of those laws only cover home lawn and garden use. The victories in New York and Vermont target the larger problem of agricultural use and can be used as inspiration for other states.

Colorado considered legislation this year that would have taken an approach modeled in Canada. Kind of like a prescription, since 2019, Quebec has required a “verification of need” — a farm must be diagnosed with a pest problem before using neonicotinoid-treated seeds.

Coating Seeds With Neonics Was Bayer’s Way to Evade Pesticide Laws

What began with the collapse of bee colonies has become a full-on insect apocalypse that scientists say is “tearing apart the tapestry of life”, devastating bird populations, harming deer and rabbits, impacting human health and threatening the future of foods that rely on pollinators.

The U.S. agricultural landscape is now 48 times more toxic to bees than it was 25 years ago and crop yields for apples, cherries, and blueberries are already being reduced by a lack of pollinators.

Why? Because of Bayer’s business model: genetically modified seeds soaked in bee-killing neonic insecticides.

In the 1980s, Bayer invented synthetic neonicotinoid compounds that could be applied to a seed and grow into and along with the plant, remaining effective through harvest. Like genetically engineered pesticide plants, with neonic seed treatments, the plant is the pesticide. It can’t be washed off. The pesticide is there in every bite.

The Environmental Protection Agency knew neonics were developmental neurotoxins, but it did nothing to protect babies. A 2001 study Bayer submitted to the EPA found that when pregnant rats were exposed to high doses of Bayer’s neonic imidacloprid, fetal brain development was impacted. The EPA then set a limit for imidacloprid at a medium dose, even though Bayer never submitted data showing that this level of exposure was safe.

By 2004, Bayer had agreements with the top genetically modified seed companies to coat their seeds with massive amounts of neonics.

By 2007, 80 percent of the corn seed sold by market-leader Pioneer (Monsanto’s rival-cum-partner) was treated with Bayer’s clothianidin-based Poncho.

By 2008, Colony Collapse Disorder was a worldwide problem.

Today, nearly all corn seeds and about half of soybean seeds are coated in neonics.

Seed treatments used to be measured in overall neonic use, but since Bayer got seed treatments exempted from regulation as pesticides, the U.S. Geological Survey started leaving them out.

We have to stop this because just one corn seed can contain enough neonics to kill a quarter-million bees!

TAKE ACTION: Tell your state legislators to ban neonic seed treatments!