The administration said lobbying was part of the problem
The White House's May 2025 MAHA Report did not treat chemical lobbying as a fringe complaint. It said the chemical-manufacturing industry spent roughly $77 million on federal lobbying in 2024 and said 60 percent of chemical-sector lobbyists previously held federal posts.
The September 2025 MAHA Strategy still talks about chemicals and pesticides, but the emphasis shifts. The strategy document focuses on post-market review, cumulative-exposure research, pesticide review procedures, and precision application. I am inferring from the official text that the sharper chemical-lobbying language from the May report was not carried forward in the same way.
Dicamba left a paper trail
A March 11, 2025 email archived by ToxicDocs shows then-American Soybean Association official Kyle Kunkler asking Nancy Beck for a virtual dicamba meeting. The same document shows Beck replying the same day: EPA would ask the team to set it up.
EPA's own public timeline shows the agency proposed registration for three dicamba products on July 23, 2025 and approved three dicamba herbicide products on February 6, 2026. EPA says the approval includes the strongest dicamba protections in agency history and says it found no unreasonable risk when the products are used according to label directions. This story is not pretending EPA admitted the opposite. It is about access, personnel overlap, and who stayed close to the process while the decision moved.
The revolving-door problem is visible on the org chart
EPA's current Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention leadership page lists Nancy Beck, Lynn Dekleva, and Kyle Kunkler in top roles inside the office that oversees pesticides and toxic chemicals.
Kunkler's EPA ethics file makes the revolving-door point concrete. In August 2025, EPA's ethics office wrote that his recusal obligations covered not just the American Soybean Association, his former employer, but also 26 state soybean affiliates. That is not an abstract debate about influence. It is the federal ethics record acknowledging how close the prior institutional ties were.
Glyphosate turned the split into a live political fight
On February 18, 2026, President Trump signed an executive order using Defense Production Act authority to support elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides. The order also conferred the immunity available under section 707 of that law.
Two days later, H.R. 7601, the No Immunity for Glyphosate Act, was introduced in the House. That response matters even if people disagree about the toxicology debate around glyphosate itself. The immediate fight was over something simpler and easier to document: whether chemical manufacturers should get liability protection while the administration is still claiming to be cleaning up America's food and health systems.
