Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. confirmed that he was unhappy with President Donald Trump’s executive order aiming to boost the domestic production of glyphosate during a Friday episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience.”
White House senior advisor Calley Means said during a Thursday speech that the order was “disappointing” and that Kennedy was similarly “disappointed” about it. Kennedy said on the podcast that he was not “particularly happy” with the order to put it “mildly,” noting he spent decades combating pesticides.
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“I’ve spent 40 years fighting pesticides. I was part of the trial team on the Monsanto case, which was the team that won three cases in a row and then got an $11 billion settlement with Monsanto, which is now Bayer … But pesticides are poison,” Kennedy said. “They’re designed to kill all life. It’s not a good thing to have in your food … so it’s not something that I was particularly happy with. Let me put it that way mildly.”
However, Kennedy also defended Trump for signing the order, saying he understood his perspective.
“The president didn’t create this system. He’s dealing with a problem that was created long before, over the past 60 years, when, through federal policies and subsidies and the management of farming in this country — the agricultural management — we have addicted our farmers to these pesticides, and particularly glyphosate,” he said. “Glyphosate is the foundational pesticide of our food production system.”
“So 97% of corn in this country is produced with glyphosate and can’t be produced without it … You could change it. There’s organic corn producers in this country,” he added. “It’s like 3%. 98% of soy is produced with glyphosate. If you banned glyphosate overnight, or if you got rid of it, or if somebody else cut off our supply, it would destroy the American food system.”
Trump signed the order on Feb. 18, which invokes the Defense Production Act to bolster the production of elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides in the U.S. The order drew backlash from some health advocates, particularly some supporters of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement.
Kennedy had condemned the use of glyphosate before becoming Trump’s HHS secretary. He alleged in a June 2024 social media post that it was “one of the likely culprits in America’s chronic disease epidemic.”
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