The Executive Order Everyone Misread

Updated

By Tracy Beanz & Michelle Edwards

On February 18, 2026, President Trump signed an executive order (EO) treating elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides like supply-chain vulnerabilities. Why? Because, in the administration’s framing, they are. Following the EO, sheer panic ensued over an order that people apparently briefly skimmed, and over one word they hate. The order, which leans on the Defense Production Act of 1950, delegates priority-allocation authority to the USDA to ensure “a continued and adequate supply” of both phosphorus and glyphosate and explicitly ties them to defense readiness and food-supply security. Currently importing elemental phosphorus from other countries each year, the order plainly states that US domestic production is extremely limited, with only one domestic producer that is unable to meet annual demand. In reality, the EO, which is more about elemental phosphorus than it is glyphosate, reads less like a permanent stamp of approval to chemicals in our food and more like a national-security procurement memo that has inadvertently set the MAHA movement on fire.

Specifically, the part that set the internet on fire centers around the words “glyphosate” and “immunity.” The EO plainly states, “This order confers all immunity provided in section 707 of the Act (50 U.S.C. 4557).” Sure, that sounds ominous until you look at what that statute actually spells out, which is that it’s liability protection for damages or penalties arising from compliance with a DPA rule/regulation/order, even if the rule is later found invalid. In other words, Trump’s EO is not a magic immunity shield against product liability or cancer claims related to glyphosate. No indeed. Instead, it’s a compliance shield that prevents a company from being punished simply for prioritizing a federal order over ordinary contracts. That’s why Zen Honeycutt (speaking through her work with Moms Across America) has pushed the same core clarification: narrow DPA immunity is being misread as blanket immunity. Yet these are two very different things.

And yet, understandably, the immediate and harsh backlash from MAHA makes political sense. Clearly, people are reacting as if the EO settles the debate in favor of glyphosate. The dire mood is as if the Trump administration suddenly decided to permanently stamp SAFE on glyphosate. But that is not what the EO does. Again, it is an access and supply decision, not a health verdict. That distinction matters because the health argument is still heavily contested in real time, and the public has decades of reasons to distrust how the toxins making us sick get labeled as “safe.”

At this moment, to be clear, we must remain firmly anti-glyphosate. It needs to be out of our food. Permanently. But we don’t have to turn anti-farmer or anti-Trump because of the executive order. Sadly, the hideous truth is that—thanks to decades of corruption—America has built a dependency on chemicals that runs so deep it now looks like “how farming works.” The toxic model is not only farmers making choices; it’s an entire incentive architecture that rewards monocrops, predictable yields, and input-heavy stability. All thanks to poisons and corporate greed. The quiet enforcer isn’t a person in a lab coat—it’s the checkbook.

What are we talking about? For starters, federal crop insurance is one of the biggest stabilizers of the current system: in CBO’s February 2026 baseline, total crop insurance program spending is projected around the mid-teens billions per year (roughly ~$14.7B to ~$16.1B across 2026–2036 BA, with outlays swinging year to year), and the federal government pays roughly 67% of producer premiums on average. That’s not “neutral.” That’s a set of rails. When the rails are built around today’s dominant commodity patterns, the system quietly punishes anyone trying to transition off the chemical treadmill.

Indeed, the current scenario we face can be both understandable in intent and disgusting in its consequences. A conservative can look at the world as it is: global supply chains get weaponized, critical minerals get squeezed, and food security is national security. But a sane person can also look at what we’ve normalized: chemical farming made fortunes for the companies that sell the inputs and the storylines, from the old oil-and-chemical era to today’s corporate giants—Monsanto and Bayer chief among them—while the public, which has been unknowingly subjected to toxins at every turn, is left arguing about whether poison is “safe in small amounts.”

The “small amounts” debate is part of the trap. Regulators often evaluate the active ingredient as if the product in the real world is just that ingredient. But farmers and homeowners don’t spray “glyphosate in a vacuum.” They spray formulations—like Roundup—which include co-formulants and surfactants that can alter toxicity and biological effects. Peer-reviewed work has repeatedly shown that glyphosate-based herbicide formulations can produce stronger biological disruptions than glyphosate alone at equivalent doses, and that surfactants are a plausible contributor. Europe went so far as to exclude a specific co-formulant—POE-tallowamine (a POEA surfactant)—from glyphosate plant-protection products. That doesn’t “prove” every health claim, but it does validate the public’s instinct that “glyphosate” and “Roundup” are not interchangeable words.

And, of course, there’s more. The glyphosate dependency also runs through seeds. USDA Economic Research Service reports that adoption of genetically engineered crops is now the norm for major commodities in the United States, including herbicide-tolerant traits in corn, soybeans, and cotton. That matters a lot because the modern model isn’t just “spray weeds” with poisons. Instead, it is a paired system of herbicide-tolerant crops plus broad-spectrum herbicides. Thus, when critics say, “just ban glyphosate” (which must be the ultimate goal), we are not morally wrong. But that stance ignores the mechanical reality that America’s dominant cropping system has been designed around the use of poisons. Pulling the chemical oversight in one swoop won’t just change one input. It would detonate the entire operating system.

So, this explains why HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., in his February 12 conversation with Theo Von, framed the problem to illustrate the reality in which the majority of farmers currently live. Meaning, our nation is dependent on something it suspects is making us sick, and the question is how to transition off of that toxic path without putting farmers out of business. Kennedy shared that he is studying emerging alternatives—like laser-based weed control—as the “off-ramp” logic: build replacement capacity first, then exit. We must stop here and realize what is happening. Because it is a rare moment where the MAHA instinct (stop poisoning people) and the national-interest instinct (don’t collapse domestic agriculture) can actually exist in the same sentence without either one of them lying.

And if the public wants a reason to be suspicious anyway, it’s not paranoia because it’s ingrained in the history of our nation’s food supply. To many, this is exactly why the EO is so upsetting. The fraud is overwhelming. Case in point, the Industrial Bio-Test Laboratories scandal is the kind of incident that permanently scars trust in the regulatory supply chain. This debacle involved major chemical testing fraud in the 1970s, federal investigations, and convictions that forced regulators and companies to retest chemicals whose approvals relied on compromised studies. This is not OK. Americans are not here to be experimented on by greedy corporations. More recently, researchers have revisited the broader theme of this corruption—how corporate influence and compromised science can shape what government believes it “knows.” The point isn’t that every glyphosate study is fake. Bottom line—the system has rightly earned the public’s raised eyebrow and general distrust.

So where does that leave the exhausted American who is pro-Trump, pro-MAGA, but not pro-glyphosate? It leaves them, frankly, in a place that is more adult than the internet. The executive order is a supply-chain move—phosphorus, production capacity, defense, and food security—written in the language of the DPA. To be clear, the immunity clause is real but narrow. It is tied to compliance with the order, not a blanket pardon for toxic tort claims. The MAHA panic is emotionally rational because people have been trained—by decades of corporate behavior—to hear “government protection” and assume “corporate impunity.” But wait.

There’s a bigger fight worth having than this last week’s outrage news cycle. To be clear, the real battle is the fact that the structural “lock-in” of the food system in the United States must be dismantled. And it won’t happen overnight. Think about it. For decades, our farm economy (weed control, seeds, harvesting, and so on) has been engineered around chemical dependence. Then, it has been stabilized by policy and insurance so thoroughly that the exit ramps require actual invention, actual funding, and actual political courage. In other words, the entire system must be completely re-imagined.

This crucial key point is exactly why the most useful version of this story doesn’t end with “Trump betrayed MAHA” or “MAHA is overreacting.” It ends with a harder truth: America can’t just denounce the chemical treadmill of glyphosate; it has to replace it. That means building the off-ramps Kennedy described, and it also means calling the bluff of “this is just how farming works” by reforming the incentives that made it that way—because when crop insurance and commodity policy reward the status quo at massive scale, the status quo isn’t an accident. It’s the intended design.

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Tracy Beanz & Michelle Edwards

Tracy Beanz is an investigative journalist, Editor-in-Chief of UncoverDC, and host of the daily With Beanz podcast. She gained recognition for her in-depth coverage of the COVID-19 crisis, breaking major stories on the virus’s origin, timeline, and the bureaucratic corruption surrounding early treatment and the mRNA vaccine rollout. Tracy is also widely known for reporting on Murthy v. Missouri (Formerly Missouri v. Biden), a landmark free speech case challenging government-imposed censorship of doctors and others who presented alternative viewpoints during the pandemic.