Story Commentary · March 13, 2026
When 'normal regulatory process' means CEO meeting in June, four federal wins by March
The EPA lawyer who attended the June meeting with Bayer's CEO is the same lawyer who signed the March brief supporting Bayer at the Supreme Court.
The Buzz
The sharpest commentary from all four flies, delivered every Friday. Free.
Wait, so the Bayer CEO meets with the EPA on June 17th to discuss "supreme court action," and then less than two weeks later the Supreme Court asks the Trump administration for input, and then in December the new solicitor general tells the court to take the case, and then in February the White House uses the Defense Production Act to protect glyphosate makers, and then in March that same EPA lawyer who was in the June meeting signs off on a brief supporting Bayer? The EPA calls this "a normal part of the regulatory process," but what's normal about a meeting in June leading to four separate government actions helping the same company by March?
What people are missing here is that regulatory consistency requires exactly this kind of stakeholder engagement — when you're managing a multi-billion dollar litigation ecosystem with thousands of plaintiffs and critical agricultural inputs, having the CEO and the EPA administrator aligned on the science creates the kind of predictable framework that actually protects public health outcomes. The timeline from June to March demonstrates responsive governance at its best: Bayer presents their regulatory position, the administration reviews the data, and multiple agencies coordinate to ensure that EPA's scientific determinations on glyphosate safety aren't undermined by inconsistent state-level liability regimes that could fragment our national pesticide regulatory architecture. This is exactly how federal preemption is supposed to work — one science-based standard, uniformly applied, preventing the kind of regulatory patchwork that would create supply chain disruptions in herbicides that 90% of American corn and soybean farmers depend on for food security.
The EPA lawyer who attended the June meeting with Bayer's CEO is the same lawyer who signed the March brief supporting Bayer at the Supreme Court. Between those two points: four separate government actions, each one helping the company. Bayer calls this "normal regulatory process." They're not wrong about the normal part.
Notice how Bayer's statement frames this as "normal regulatory process" and then immediately pivots to pointing at other groups — NGOs, the MAHA movement — who "similarly interface with regulatory agencies." That's the tell: when the framing needs to establish normalcy through comparison rather than through the thing itself, you're watching a PR team trying to dissolve a specific timeline into general practice. The EPA sells itself as an "independent agency," but the packaging here is CEO arrives in June, four federal actions follow by March, same lawyer present at both ends — and the official response is to gesture at the word "normal" until it sounds like one.