Supreme Court Asked to Erase 67,000 Roundup Lawsuits

On December 1, 2025, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to take up Monsanto Co. V. Durnell, No. 24-1068, a case the agrochemical industry has been chasing for three years. The question presented sounds technical: whether federal pesticide labeling law preempts state failure to warn claims under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act. The stakes are not technical. If the Court agrees with the Solicitor General, Bayer's Monsanto subsidiary walks away from roughly 67,000 pending Roundup cancer lawsuits, a figure Bayer disclosed in its Q2 2025 Stockholders' Newsletter (August 6, 2025), and from any future ones a state jury might hear.

That is the receipt. Everything else is commentary.

The transfer being requested

Bayer paid about $63 billion for Monsanto in 2018. By the company's own disclosures, it has set aside approximately $16 billion to settle and litigate Roundup claims since 2020 (Bayer Annual Report 2023, Note 30, Provisions and Contingent Liabilities), with $5.9 billion in remaining glyphosate provisions reported in the Q2 2025 Half Year Financial Report (August 6, 2025). Juries in California, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Washington have returned verdicts ranging from $25 million to, in the November 2023 Cole County, Missouri case involving plaintiffs Valorie Gunther, Jimmy Draeger, and Daniel Anderson, $1.56 billion, later reduced on remittitur to $611 million in April 2024. The separate Durnell v. Monsanto Co. verdict, on which the pending Supreme Court petition arises, was a $1.25 million compensatory award returned in October 2023 and affirmed by the Missouri Court of Appeals in 2025. The plaintiffs share a specific profile: groundskeepers, farmers, home gardeners diagnosed with non Hodgkin lymphoma after years of glyphosate exposure.

The Solicitor General's brief argues that because EPA approved the Roundup label without a cancer warning, state law cannot require one. State juries, in this telling, are not allowed to find that Bayer should have warned consumers about a risk that EPA declined to recognize. The International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as "probably carcinogenic to humans" in IARC Monograph Volume 112, with the summary published in The Lancet Oncology on March 20, 2015, and the full monograph published July 29, 2015. EPA, working from a different evidence base and a different statutory standard, did not. The preemption argument turns that regulatory disagreement into a permanent legal shield.

Name the parties. Bayer's shareholders pay nothing further if the Court rules for Monsanto. The 67,000 plaintiffs, plus every future plaintiff, lose their cause of action. The Transfer Ratio is the dollars of liability extinguished divided by the dollars retained by plaintiffs after preemption, and that ratio approaches infinity: every dollar of liability extinguished moves from a future jury award to Bayer's balance sheet, and the cost of glyphosate related cancer treatment shifts to Medicare, Medicaid, private insurance, and the patients themselves.

What MAHA was supposed to mean

The political wrinkle is that this filing came from an administration whose Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., spent a decade as one of the most prominent advocates against Monsanto. Kennedy served as part of the trial team in Johnson v. Monsanto Co. (S.F. Superior Court, August 2018), the first Roundup case to reach a jury, which produced a $289 million verdict, reduced by the trial court to $78.5 million and further reduced to $20.5 million by the California Court of Appeal, First Appellate District, on July 20, 2020. Kennedy spoke at rallies. Kennedy wrote op eds. Kennedy made glyphosate a centerpiece of the Make America Healthy Again platform that the Trump campaign embraced in 2024.

The MAHA Commission's May 2025 report, The MAHA Assessment (released May 22, 2025), named glyphosate as a chemical "of concern" for childhood health and pledged further review. The Solicitor General's brief, filed by the same administration, asks the Court to immunize the manufacturer of that same chemical from the lawsuits brought by people who say it gave them cancer.

Both things are now true at the same time. A campaign promise to confront the chemical and a legal filing to shield the company that sells it. The system by which both became official policy is visible in the public docket. No speculation is required.

The preemption argument, plainly

FIFRA, passed in 1947 and significantly amended in 1972, gives EPA authority to register pesticides and approve their labels. Section 136v(b) prohibits states from imposing labeling requirements "in addition to or different from" those required under the federal statute. For three decades, the Court read that section narrowly. In Bates v. Dow AgroSciences LLC, 544 U.S. 431 (2005), the Court held that state common law claims could proceed so long as they did not impose a labeling requirement different from EPA's. A failure to warn claim premised on the same warning EPA could have required was not preempted.

The Third Circuit in Schaffner v. Monsanto Corp., 113 F.4th 364 (3d Cir. 2024), held that FIFRA expressly preempted the plaintiffs' Pennsylvania failure to warn claim. The Eleventh Circuit, in Carson v. Monsanto Co., 92 F.4th 980 (11th Cir. 2024), came out the other way, holding that FIFRA did not preempt the Georgia failure to warn claim. That circuit split is the procedural hook for Supreme Court review. The substantive question is whether the current Court, with its expanded view of federal preemption in cases like Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp. V. Albrecht, 587 U.S. ___ (2019), will overturn twenty years of FIFRA precedent.

The Solicitor General's brief argues yes. EPA's 2020 interim registration review decision finding that glyphosate is "not likely to be carcinogenic to humans," the brief contends, settles the matter. State juries cannot second guess that finding through tort law. The brief does not mention that the Ninth Circuit vacated EPA's human health portion of that decision in Natural Resources Defense Council v. EPA, 38 F.4th 34 (9th Cir. 2022), holding that the agency had failed to adequately consider the IARC evidence and the dose response data. The agency has not yet issued a replacement determination.

Theft by another name

When a policy transfers wealth from a diffuse group to a concentrated group but is called something else, the obligation is to describe the system in plain terms.

The diffuse group here is the population of cancer patients who have already filed suit, plus the future patients whose cases would otherwise reach a jury. The concentrated beneficiary is Bayer, plus the other agrochemical manufacturers whose pending and future tort exposure runs through the same statutory question. Syngenta faces paraquat litigation. Corteva faces chlorpyrifos cases. A win for Monsanto reshapes the liability map for the entire sector.

The policy is called federal preemption. The system is the elimination of a cause of action. The transfer is from the people holding cancer diagnoses to the firms that sold the products. The label "uniform federal regulation" describes the legal theory; it does not describe what changes hands.

The MAHA arithmetic

Kennedy's public position remains that glyphosate exposure correlates with rising rates of pediatric cancer, autoimmune disease, and metabolic disorder. The MAHA Commission report cites his earlier work. The administration's pesticide policy, on paper, calls for "rigorous review" of organophosphates and herbicides.

The Solicitor General reports to the Attorney General, who reports to the President. The Solicitor General's office does not file briefs in cases of this size without White House sign off. The brief was filed. The administration that promised to confront agrochemical manufacturers is now arguing in the Supreme Court that those manufacturers should be immunized from the lawsuits brought by the people the administration claims to be protecting.

The line item: Bayer AG (BAYN.DE) closed up 6.2 percent on the Frankfurt exchange on December 1, 2025, the day the brief was filed, adding roughly 3.2 billion euros to market capitalization (Bloomberg market data, December 1, 2025 close). Kennedy issued no public statement. The MAHA Commission's next report is scheduled for February 2026.

What the Court will decide

If the Court grants certiorari, oral argument will likely come in spring 2026, with a decision by June. A ruling for Monsanto extinguishes most of the pending Roundup docket and forecloses similar litigation against other pesticide manufacturers. A ruling for Durnell preserves the status quo, in which juries can find that a manufacturer should have warned about a risk EPA did not require it to disclose.

The administration has now told the Court which outcome it prefers. The position is on the docket. The receipt is filed. Whatever the next MAHA press release says, the brief will still be there, and the 67,000 plaintiffs will still be reading it.

Rebuttals welcome.

Originally published at henrygoodstone.com