Opinion: The Impact of a Ghostwritten Paper on the Fate of Glyphosate
A downsized EPA faces a deadline to review the herbicide’s safety without much of its in-house expertise.
By Alexander Kaurov and Naomi Oreskes
08.15.2025
In October, 2026, the Environmental Protection Agency must release its decision on the use of America’s most widely used herbicide, glyphosate. It will mark a milestone in the 15-year registration review cycle for pesticides (the umbrella legal term in the U.S. which includes herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, and rodenticides) mandated under federal law. The deadline for the decision, originally scheduled for 2022, was extended to 2026 after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the EPA to reconsider its preliminary conclusion that glyphosate was “not likely” to cause cancer.
This time, however, the EPA heads into the review under dramatically reduced capacity. President Donald Trump’s 2026 budget proposes a 55 percent cut for the agency. In July?2025, the Trump administration began to dismantle the agency’s Office of Research and Development, with plans to lay off more than 3,700 employees — roughly three-quarters of its research staff and about a fifth of its total workforce. Former EPA administrators warn that this will strip the agency of its in-house toxicologists, chemists, and epidemiologists — the experts who generate much of the primary data that undergird almost every rule the agency writes.
Besides increasing the possibility that glyphosate and reviews of other pesticides will be further delayed, what else can we expect from this situation? Already, we’ve seen numerous reversals of policy and cancellations of data collection projects under the new EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin. Therefore, it is reasonable to expect more antiregulatory moves.
Limiting the agency’s internal scientific capacity increases its reliance on external expertise and scientific literature, so the agency will have to trust the robustness of published research. But is the scientific record robust enough?
Peer review is supposed to safeguard the accuracy of published science, including keeping it clean from contamination by paper mills, undisclosed conflicts of interest, manipulated data, corporate misconduct, and other forms of malpractice. Unfortunately, the scientific literature has proven far too easy to compromise.
Consider a single review paper published in Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmacology in 2000 about Roundup, the trade name for Monsanto’s widely used glyphosate-based herbicide. Authored by three researchers — Gary M. Williams, Robert Kroes, and Ian C. Munro — who disclosed no conflicts of interest, the paper concluded that “under present and expected conditions of use, Roundup herbicide does not pose a health risk to humans.”
In 2017, internal corporate emails released during federal litigation against Monsanto revealed that the paper was largely conceived and drafted by Monsanto employees. (The company denies this, but the....
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